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< Back Revelation David Cowles “This is possibly the shortest ‘play’ in all of literature…and yet it is arguably more important than anything Shakespeare (or even Andrew Lloyd Weber) ever wrote! In its introduction to the Book of Revelation, the New American Bible (Revised Edition), the translation currently in use in the Roman Catholic Church, states: “The Apocalypse, or Revelation to John, the last book of the Bible, is one of the most difficult to understand…” An understatement, if ever there was one! Its layers of symbolism confound Biblical scholars, not to mention the casual reader. But this essay will not concern itself with any of that! You will not learn the exact date of the end of the world here. Sorry about that! But don’t go away mad! Can I tempt you with a totally transparent, 45-second synopsis of the entire book? Beats Cliffs Notes …and it’s free! Many things are going on in Revelation, but all of them occur in the context of an ongoing, cosmic dialog between the Lord (YHWH, the Father) and his Christ (Jesus, the Son). It’s short and sweet. Here’s the full script: Lord : “I am the Alpha and the Omega…the one who is and was and is to come, the almighty.” (1: 8) Christ : “I am the first and the last…the one who lives.” (1: 17b – 18a) Lord : “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” (21: 6) Christ : “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (22: 13) This is possibly the shortest ‘play’ in all of literature…and yet it is arguably more important than anything Shakespeare (or even Andrew Lloyd Weber) ever wrote! The entire dialog consists of just four divine epithets, cited by multiple actors in multiple contexts. Wait! Did you just say, “So what? What’s the difference? Aren’t these all just different ways of saying the same thing?” Don’t be shy. It’s a good question, and the answer is, “Yes and No.” We’ll spend some time on this later on. But first, R U satisfied with my synopsis ? Did you get your money’s worth ($0)? Will you come again? Tell your friends? Now back to your question: The author begins with a greeting: “…Grace to you and peace from him who is and was and is to come (the Lord )…and from Jesus Christ , the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead and ruler of the kings of the earth.” This greeting introduces us to the two main characters in this drama, the Lord and his Christ , Jesus. As we shall see, the nature of God and his role for the world will be revealed through their dialog. He is ‘the firstborn of the dead.’ John, of course, is not speaking of Jesus’ historical birth c. 6 BCE; John is referring to Jesus’ eternal rebirth, his resurrection. He is ‘ruler of the kings of the earth’…curious considering that Jesus was hunted and persecuted by ‘kings’ for most of his 30-odd-year history. Once again, John is not commenting on first century politics. John is identifying Christ as the ultimate source of order ( Logos in the Gospel of John ) and therefore the arbiter of justice. There could be no civil power without the fundamental order established through Christ . Legitimate power exists solely to serve the interests of justice, and it is legitimate only so long as it is serving those interests. Ultimately, all political power, legitimate or otherwise, must bend to the demands of justice. On a quick read, one is reminded of an elementary school playground: “I’m the man…No I’m the man…” Both the Lord and the Christ seem to claim to be ‘the man,’ i.e. the Alpha and the Omega. But that’s not what’s going on here at all! We’re not hearing competing claims of divinity; we’re hearing complementary claims. This is not a rumble! This is a pep rally! Let’s focus on the epithets themselves: The Alpha and the Omega. The one who is and was and is to come, the almighty. The first and the last, the one who lives. The beginning and the end. The first two epithets are initially applied only to the Lord . Alpha and Omega are, of course, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, but combined this way, in the idiom of the day, they express the concept of ‘entirety,’ a fitting epithet for YHWH. And what of ‘the almighty?’ Often, that stands by itself as a divine epithet. Not here. Here, it is part of the Lord’s introductory ‘profile’ and it is meant to emphasize the Lord’s role as the source of pure potentiality. The third epithet is applied only to the Christ : “the first and the last, the one who lives.” The final epithet, “the beginning and the end,” is initially applied to the Lord . The boasts of an eight-year-old (“I’m stronger than you…faster than you…smarter than you”) pale in comparison. Our protagonists have upped the ante: “I am everything, so if you are not me (or part of me), you are nothing…quite literally!” Heady stuff for a schoolyard! But of course, this is a misreading of Revelation. The Lord and his Christ are not arguing at all; they are mutually affirming a basic metaphysical fact: both are the entirety, but in somewhat different ways. In the Trinitarian logic of Christianity, if A, ~ B; then A, so ~ B does not hold! Even though the Lord and the Christ are independent persons, each can claim ‘entirety’ without annihilating, diminishing or even contradicting the other. Alfred North Whitehead offered a similar model. His Primordial & Consequent Natures of God , distinct in themselves, both represent the ‘entirety,’ albeit in radically different ways. There are epithets that are applied strictly to one and never to the other. For example, ‘the one who is and was and is coming’ is reserved for the Lord alone. The Lord , ‘the one who is,’ is Being itself, the pure, infinite potentiality that underlies all existence. This is the Lord who said, “ I am who am ” in Exodus and “ Let there be light ” in Genesis. Therefore, the Lord , the one who is, is also the one who was. One and the same Lord is present - yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The world consists of nothing but ‘Actual Entities’ ( aka events). No two actual entities are the same and yet every one of them, past, present or future, rises in the same way from the same ground as God’s Consequent Nature. According to the logic of Christianity, A ≠ B but A = C and B = C. God is Being itself. Being is just Being. It is one, it is simple: it has no parts. God is not just Being. God is Good. As Good, God is also Beauty, Truth and Justice, the spatio-temporal manifestations of Good. These characterizations are denotatively synonymous but connotatively distinct. As the Good Ground of all that is, God must embody all the qualities that they adopt. In fact, God is those qualities or, even more to the point, God is Quality per se, i.e. the Good. Things that exist exhibit qualities in various combinations and with varying degrees of intensity. Like the mythical snowflake, their patterns are infinitely varied. But God is Quality and Quality, the Good, albeit variously manifested, never varies. To rephrase, the essence of Good is immutable while the manifestations of Good are, at least potentially, infinitely varied and always unique. Jesus of Nazareth was born sometime around 6 BCE and died roughly 30 years later. How then can the Christ possibly be called ‘the first’ or ‘the last’ or ‘the one who lives’? Christ is first because he precedes ontologically, not historically, every other actual entity. Later in this essay we’ll discover how this can be true. For now, it is sufficient to note that in Christian cosmology, space and time are not primary categories; they are subservient to the more important, more fundamental ordering of ontology. Christ is last because through him and in him every actual entity will ultimately participate in a harmonious synthesis of actual entities ( Parousia ). Literally, Eschaton means to hold all things together. That is Christ’s role as Prince of Peace. Finally, Christ is the one who lives because all life comes to be through him, runs its course with him, and ultimately resolves itself in him. We will return to this important epithet later in this essay. But there is still one final epithet for us to address: “the beginning ( arche ) and the end ( telos ).” Initially, this phrase is applied only to the Lord , seemingly in contrast to Christ being ‘the first and the last’; but in the final couplet, the dénouement of our great drama, the Christ brings both epithets together in a single statement of identity: “I am the Alpha and the Omega (of course), the first and the last (expectedly), the beginning and the end (surprisingly).” The migration of this last epithet from the Lord to the Christ is what this play is all about. It’s the plot…and a spine tingling one at that! Now at last we are ready to unpack the cosmic sea change that is Revelation. In his function as ‘the one who is and was and is coming,’ the Lord appears to be passive, even inert. Now, as ‘the beginning and the end,’ the Lord reveals himself to be the source of creative unrest in the world. The Lord is not only the ontological foundation ( arche ) on which all things depend for their existence, but he is the lure ( telos ) that calls these things to be. Nothing could come to be, were it not for the potentiality of Being which is its foundation ( arche ), but nothing would emerge from that potentiality into actuality without an end ( telos ). There can only be one ultimate end and that end can be nothing other than the Good which is God. The accidental details of that end are entirely unconditioned. This is the freedom, the ‘life,’ that is Christ . But the essence of that end, the Good, is totally determined. No entity would emerge from potentiality into actuality other than to answer the call of the Good. Obviously, entities lose their way, but the initial impulse to become is always an impulse toward the Good. Since Good is the essence of God, the initial impulse to become is always the lure of God’s goodness. Without foundation, no potentiality; without lure, no actuality! Initially, Revelation contrasts the Lord (foundation and lure) with the Christ (first and last). Christ , the Incarnation of God, exists within the world, both historically in the person of Jesus and cosmologically as the ‘first ( protos ) and last ( eschatos )’. As ‘first and last,’ Christ is essentially ‘foundation and lure’ turned inside out. Foundation and lure are eternal concepts, standing outside the universal flow of actual entities; so is ‘beginning and end’. First and last is a temporal concept, participating essentially in the flow of events. The eternal foundation becomes effective in the temporal world when it enters that world (ontologically, not historically) as its ‘first’ entity. Likewise, the eternal lure becomes effective in the world when it enters that world (ontologically, not historically) as its ‘last entity’. Incarnation is the phenomenon that inverts the cosmic order, that makes the eternal relevant to the temporal and the temporal relevant to the eternal. Incarnation is precisely the concept Parmenides was missing when, in his great ontological poem, On Nature , he contrasted the immutable ‘way of truth’ ( aletheia ) with the ever-changing ‘way of appearance’ ( doxa ). Parmenides left us no clue how to connect these two equally valid, but apparently contradictory, realities. 500 years later, the early Christians filled in the missing piece. Christ is ‘first’ because all entities emerging from the foundation of potentiality initially relate to the Christ. It is through Christ that the Good that is God enters the world as a specific actual entity. It is through Christ that these qualities are made available to emerging entities. The Lord is pure potential and pure appetition. Christ is an actual entity among actual entities. Responding to the lure of the Lord , entities emerge out of pure potentiality into actuality by appropriating for themselves various qualities made available to them through the Christ . The organic process of selecting and rejecting qualities, incorporating those qualities with various degrees of intensity, and harmonizing those qualities into a whole - this is what makes an entity actual ( Dasein ) and it is what constitutes each actual entity as what it is ( Wassein ). Just as actual entities incorporate qualities and harmonize them into a whole, so Christ incorporates all actual entities and harmonizes them in himself. The primal quest of every actual entity for God’s Goodness is ultimately satisfied by its inclusion in the harmonious community of actual entities that constitutes Christ . The fact that there is a universe of existing things at all requires even more than just the foundation and lure of the Lord. Standing outside of spacetime, arche and telos are necessary, but not sufficient by themselves, to give rise to an existentially free universe of existing things. Something else is required, and that something is “relatedness.” Philosophers from Anaximander to Martin Buber have agreed on this point: without relation, nothing! For what is an actual entity but a network of relationships? Scratch any entity, and you will find a web of relations that make it up. Actual entities derive their existence from arche and telos , the Lord, but they derive their essence from their network of relations with other entities, including God, and these relations manifest as qualities. From foundation and lure comes existence, what Martin Heidegger called ‘Dasein,’ that-it-is . From relatedness comes essence, which he called ‘Wassein,’ what-it-is. Dasein springs from the Lord , Wassein from the Christ . While the Lord , Being and Good, supplies the potentiality for existence, Christ , the Incarnation, supplies the potentiality for relatedness, essential for the emergence of an actual world like ours. The Lord , ‘the Alpha and the Omega,’ is the entirety. The Christ , Jesus, is a ‘quantum of being’ within that entirety. But that quantum is also the entirety , also ‘the Alpha and the Omega’…just inside out! Being , then, is the superposition of ‘inside out’ and ‘outside in’. Christ is the potentiality for all relation, and therefore ontologically prior to all relations. Every entity that comes to be, comes to be in primal relation with Christ. Christ is the destination of all relation, and therefore ontologically subsequent to all other entities. But every entity that comes to be gains its ultimate identity in Christ . Ultimately, all actual entities form a single harmonious web of relations, and that web is the Christ …the Logos . Logically speaking, Christ is the initial term in the series known as universe and also the one common element of each other term in the series. Likewise , Christ is the final term in the series known as universe and also the sum of all its other terms. This is the full meaning of the term ‘Eschaton’: all things hold together in Christ . Finally, Christ is ‘the one who lives’. Life is the process through which relations emerge and mutually modify one another until a coherent entity appears. Because all evolving (living) entities evolve (live) in Christ , Christ is the source of all life (John 1: 2) and therefore ‘the one who lives’. Fast-forward now to the final chapter, the so-called Epilogue! Jesus Christ speaks again (through John, of course) but now the vocabulary has shifted, “Behold I am coming soon…I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” But what exactly is it that is coming? Beginning at the end of Chapter 20, Revelation tells us: “Next I saw a large white throne and one who was sitting on it (the Lord). The earth and the sky fled from his presence and there was no place for them… Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The former heaven and earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. I also saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God…I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people…the old order has passed away.’ The one who sat on the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’” The two realms, one of eternal being, the Lord , one of existing things, the world, are now one. The earth and the sky (spacetime) have fled; there is no place for them. The old order has passed away. The former heaven and earth have passed away, and even the sea ( kaos in Genesis ) is no more. Instead, a holy city, a new Jerusalem ( aka Kingdom of God) where God dwells with us ( Emmanuel )! What is coming? It is Jesus, the Christ, the Eschaton in which all things hold together. All things are saved in Jesus. All conflicts have been resolved into harmonies. Arche & telos = proton & Eschaton ! The Lord , who stands outside the world, and the Christ , who stands inside the world, act together “…so that God may be all in all.” (I Cor 15:28). 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 Summer 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Moore's Nativity David Cowles “No need to study theology at university… (or) go to Sunday school. It’s all right there in front of us…and Henry Moore helps us see it: Christianity!” If you want to understand what’s special about the Christian world view, jet to London and visit St. Paul’s Cathedral. Just to the left of the high altar stands one of Henry Moore’s final works, Mother and Child . One of the 20th century’s greatest sculptors and a self-professed non-believer , Moore has nonetheless delivered a statement of Christian theology every bit as powerful and unambiguous as the foundational Nicene Creed . In Moore’s work, mother and child emerge together from an undifferentiated block of marble. It is the emergence of the child who reveals the mother, and it is the emergence of the mother who reveals the child. Neither emerges from the block untethered, solo, without the other. No mother, no child, no child, no mother. The Incarnation is a ‘joint effort’ involving both the human and the divine. Mary’s famous Magnificat (Luke 1: 46 - 55) assumes a critical role in Moore’s concept of Nativity. Mother and Child is not your everyday ‘Madonna of the Oxen and the Sheep’. Moore’s marble presents the virgin birth of the Son of God as a violent process in which the pure potentiality of the undifferentiated mass unwinds, albeit stubbornly, to reveal the form hidden within. Implicit in Moore’s version of the Nativity celebrates the interdependence of the celestial and the terrestrial, the divine and the human, the transcendent and the immanent. Only God, who is Courage per se , would dare to create a truly independent universe, guided by its own ‘free will’ - a universe with a ‘mind of its own’. With the Incarnation, God puts himself in play to an extent not seen before, even in the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament, traditionally ascribed to Moses). The parents among us know how difficult it can be to give our children the autonomy they need to grow. Not so God: Fiat lux! There…it’s done! We’re emancipated…and we didn’t even have to go to court, much less fight a civil war, to get there. Nor did God have any second thoughts about what he’d done: “He saw that it was good.” The Book of Job makes it clear that God regretted nothing in his creation, not even Behemoth and Leviathan, the mythical monsters of the Old Testament. Nor did it take long for God to reap the harvest of his ‘naïve’ generosity. Lucifer rebelled against him ‘right out of the chute’ and ‘six days later,’ Adam followed suit. God made the world, but we make our own beds in that world, and for the most part at least, God lets us lie in those beds, undisturbed. God’s game plan lets us suffer the consequences of our actions (or inaction). That’s the price we pay for freedom. In physics, we speak of efficient causation : one billiard ball strikes another, causing the second ball to move in a particular direction with a particular velocity. In metaphysics, we speak of final causation : Amy studied hard so that she would pass the test. In theology, we speak of another type of causation, causa sui (self-causation): God is presumed to be the cause of his own being. But in ontology, on the other hand, we speak of mutual causation , aka ‘bootstrapping’, so evident in Moore’s sculpture. But our modern, Indo-European languages lack the vocabulary and, especially, the syntax needed to facilitate such a conversation. Triune God functions like the three legs of a tripod, working together to ensure the stability of the platform. Vertical ‘transcendence’ supports horizontal ‘immanence’ and vice versa. This is precisely the bee that got into Nietzsche’s bonnet: for him, there is nothing other than the whole (the so-called ‘platform’): nothing outside the whole, nothing beyond the whole and no hierarchy within the whole. Nietzsche was a true ‘ontological democrat’. His world was really and truly flat. This tripod model supports earlier ontological formulations as well: Aletheia supports Doxa (Parmenides), Noumena supports Phenomena (Kant), etc. Earlier versions of today’s Indo-European languages often included a true ‘second person’ (pronouns) and a true ‘middle voice’ (verbs). A true second-person pronoun, Martin Buber’s “Du” for example, suggests intimate mutuality. This is the syntax of love. There is no subjectivity or objectivity, only reciprocity. This is the relationship between mother and child that Moore captures. Diagramming a sentence that includes true second-person pronouns and a middle voice verb is challenging. Second person, middle voice relationships cannot be represented using two arrows pointing in opposite directions. A proper diagram in the context of Christian syntax would consist of a single arrow with two heads, pointing in opposite directions, suggesting that the relationship itself that has ontological priority over the related entities. “At the foundation is relationship” – Martin Buber, I and Thou . The middle voice expresses this same reality on the predicate side. A middle voice verb suggests two “subjects” (or you might just as well say two objects) engaged in a continuous process of mutual modification. There is no modifier, no modified, just mutual modification. Lovers are always ‘second persons’, and the process of love itself is ‘middle voice’. Christianity, as I understand it, is entirely concerned with middle voice relationships: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love is the two-headed arrow pointing simultaneously toward self (you) and other (your neighbor). The second person and the middle voice need to be at the foundation of any language capable of carrying the Christian message. In the context of Christian theology, the first and third persons and the active/passive voices are ‘degenerate’ cases. The lover and the loved are one. The lover sees himself in his neighbor. Lover and neighbor form an insoluble dyad. There is no lover without neighbor; there is no neighbor without lover. Lover and neighbor are second-person subjects (co-subjects: du-du ) of middle voice, verbs. In the words of the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander “they give each other reck,” and, therefore, have ‘being’, just like the mother and child in Moore’s masterpiece. Perhaps the reason that Christianity has fallen out of favor in our era is that Christianity’s second person/middle voice ontology cannot be adequately expressed in any contemporary Indo-European language. It’s easy to see the world in subject/object, active/passive terms. This is the syntax of production, construction, manufacture, etc. We have turned our wise and expressive ancient languages into tools to help us organize collective action, develop and deploy technology, and erect structures (“Tower of Babel”). Our language has lost its ability to talk about ultimate things in a way that resonates with our deepest experiences. We have surrendered the ‘love franchise’ to Hallmark, and so, we turn now to painting, sculpture, and musical composition to express our spiritual intuitions. Henry Moore’s Mother and Child does just that! Moore represents Mary in her “Mother of God” avatar. We have heard this epithet so often that we may fail to grasp the incredible import of these simple words: Mother of God! ( Mater Dei in Latin.) If God is the “maker of…all things visible and invisible” ( Nicene Creed ), then how could God have a mother? Clearly Mary, the mother of Jesus, is a product of God’s created world (and a rather recent product at that); how could she also be God’s mother? In the language of first and third-person pronouns, subjective and objective cases, active and passive voices, efficient and final causes, she could not! But that is not the syntax of Christianity and, in my opinion at least, it is not how the world works. In the Christian-world view, God encompasses spacetime. Eternal, God is both the origin of all that will ever be (“Alpha”) and the summation of all that will ever have been (“Omega”). But even more astoundingly, God is also an element, a quantum, in the world itself: W ɛ G ɛ W. God, who made the world, is also ‘made’ by the world via Mary. By the power of the Holy Spirit, God is incarnate in spacetime, the historical universe. He enters the world between the Alpha and the Omega…even though he already includes both the Alpha and the Omega. In Christian topology, it is just as true to say that the part (Christ) contains the whole as it is to say that the whole contains the part (Jesus). Metaphorically, Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed (the smallest of all seeds known at that time); historically, Jesus enters the world as a fertilized cell, an embryo, a fetus, a baby, the poor child of dispossessed parents. At the time of his birth, Jesus was literally homeless, a refugee, a most unlikely candidate for secular kingship, much less cosmic sovereignty. But just as the mustard seed grows into a tree that shelters all birds, so the baby Jesus “grows” into the parousia which is the ultimate unification of everything that is. Mary’s ‘Mother of God’ epithet beautifully exemplifies the cosmic process of mutual reck. It is nothing less than this that Henry Moore captures. One good glacé, and you’ve got it! No need to study theology at university; no need to go to Sunday school. It’s all right there in front of us…and Henry Moore helps us see it: Christianity! Image: Sculpture by Henry Moore (LH 851, St. Paul's Cathedral, London) David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Share Previous Next

“John’s Utopia is a 20th century version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s flat universe.” < Back Imagine! David Cowles Sep 1, 2022 “John’s Utopia is a 20th century version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s flat universe.” In 1971 John Lennon, and his co-writer and life partner, Yoko Ono, exhorted us to ‘imagine there’s no heaven’; they assured us that ‘it’s easy if you try’. Ok, I’m imagining, or at least I’m trying to, but…it’s not all that easy. John’s Utopia is a 20 th century version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s flat universe . Listen to what Nietzsche had to say in 1888: “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 . Note that Nietzsche’s World explicitly lacks values : “There exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being.” In John’s words, there’s “nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” One thing you could say both of Nietzsche and of Lennon: They paved paradise and put up a parking lot . Their flat universe represents the hierarchical cosmos of Judeo-Christian tradition, squashed. Of all Western philosophers, Nietzsche’s vision is the most penetrating. He knew only too well that his flat universe would make any Halloween House of Horrors seem like a kiddie ride at Disney World, but that didn’t stop him. Whatever else you might say about Nietzsche, he had the courage of his convictions; he always philosophized in good faith. When Nietzsche pronounced his death sentence on Value (he had already done so on God), he did it with a heavy heart and a twinge of regret. He knew he was destroying a magnificent edifice…and he got no pleasure from it. When John Lennon did the same, he celebrated! Let’s unpack John’s lyrics: Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too. Ok, nobody likes to think about killing or dying . Either way, it’s the ultimate sacrifice. But it may be that there are things you would kill or die for (at least you’d like to think you would), things you value more than you value your own life. By denying that possibility, John turns the world in on itself; it becomes Nietzsche’s ‘whole’. And religion? The function of religion is to identify things that someone might be willing to kill or die for, i.e., to identify values…and then to curate those values. We can’t have any of that, can we? So , no religion too . John’s message in Imagine is the same as Nietzsche’s. Live now, die later. We are our own highest value. This sounds benign enough, but it isn’t: If we have no values beyond ourselves, there is no reason for any of us not to head straight for those tempting Deadly Sins: Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath and Sloth. There’s even a combo pack, one of each vice; it’s what all the kids are asking for this year for The Holiday that Used to be Called Xmas , and it’s even on sale this month at Costco. Pick up a pack for me while you’re there. We’re often told that death is one of only two certainties in life. We will all die someday and if we are our own highest value, then our highest value (ourselves) will also cease to exist. But how can a value cease to exist? How can a value cease to be a value? By definition, values are universal, eternal and immutable. They apply, period, even in a Multiverse. Suppose we value Honesty. Ok, not everyone is honest; someone can be honest today and dishonest tomorrow. But even if everyone was dishonest all the time, it would not diminish the Value of Honesty. John & Yoko are taking us down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death (i.e., Nihilism) and at the same time they are depriving us of the Good Shepherd who was supposed to meet us there. How cocky we once were, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are by my side.” In other words, the Good Shepherd and I can handle anything life throws at us. Afraid of the valley? Heck no, I rule that valley! As long as I have my wingman with me, I’m good. The problem is that if there is nothing to kill or die for, then there can’t be anything to live for either. In Lennon’s universe, killing and/or dying can’t be the ultimate expression of value because per se they have no value. We are all going to die someday. In that sense, we are all the same; and we all come to the same end. We are all conceived ex minimis , and our future is a common, unmarked grave. And all that comes in between? According to Shakespeare, it will be “melted into air, into thin air… the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself…shall dissolve.” ( The Tempest , Act IV, Scene 1) We live “now (and) at the hour of our death.” We should all be prepared to give that a great Amen at any time. So ‘to be or not to be’ is not on the table. Our common fate is ‘to be and not to be’, and, as Hamlet realized, there’s nothing we can do to escape it. I am because I am writing this article and I am not because I will soon perish. Only values can give our fleeting lives meaning. The sense of purpose, anathema to Nietzsche, was celebrated by Victor Frankl, psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor. He replaced personal happiness as the goal of life with ‘purpose’, dedication to something outside oneself, i.e., dedication to Values. Not John Lennon’s favorite philosopher, I’m guessing. D avid Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back The Structure of Consciousness David Cowles Jun 5, 2025 “Surprisingly, the reputedly esoteric experience of consciousness can be easily and simply modeled using just the lowly triangle…” In the simplest possible terms, what do we mean when we say that someone, or something, is conscious? It is generally agreed that merely reacting to sensory input originating in the ‘external world’ is not enough. According to Newton, every action entails an equal and opposite reaction, but we don’t necessarily want to view every action as conscious. A rock reacts to the force of gravity but it may not be conscious. It ‘feels’ the tug but it is probably not aware that it feels the tug or even that there is a tug. A rock is not Descartes after all…is it? Likewise, when we dream, we process sensory input, but we are not always consciously aware of the sensations we’re processing. And the last time you were in a coma, you heard everything I said to you and now you even remember some of it, but you weren’t conscious of it, or of yourself, at the time. Most often, however, when we are aware of a sensation, we are also aware of ‘ourselves being aware’ of that sensation. We’re not just cold, we also know that we’re cold. There is a difference between being cold and thinking, “I’m cold.” Ice is cold but there is no reason to think that it feels itself being cold or that it’s aware of itself being cold. On the other hand, when I’m cold, I’m aware that I’m cold, and I’m aware that I’m aware that I’m cold. (I complain, therefore I am.) While any ‘it’ I experience is always only and ever it, there is an infinitesimal difference between my direct sensory experience of it and the indirect experience of it that I have whenever I’m aware of myself being aware of it. Alfred North Whitehead was on to this when he distinguished our direct conceptual prehension of an ‘eternal object’ (value) from our indirect physical prehension of that same value as it is realized in another actual entity. That difference, similar to what Jacques Derrida called la differance, is a precursor of all conscious experience, be it human…or otherwise (dolphin or bonobo, octopus or parrot, AI or Alien). I experience the same input, but via two different media of transmission: (1) directly via my senses and (2) indirectly via my awareness of myself experiencing the input. And, per Marshall McLuhan, “the medium (of transmission) is the message,” and the message is la differance, the message is ‘I am’. La differance may be understood as a quantum of information, a bit, or at least a quantum of consciousness. It is irreducible. The ‘cold’ that I experience directly and the ‘cold’ that I experience through my being aware that I am cold are both the same and different. Whenever A = -A (same = different) we know we’re not in ‘Kansas’ (aka the Set of Real Numbers) anymore. It is the same ‘cold’ but the different media of transmission mean that my experiences of that same cold differ slightly. La differance is short for ‘infinitesimal difference’. Marcel Proust shares a similar insight in his Remembrance of Things Past (RTP): “The sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon two uneven stones in the Baptistry of St. Mark’s had, recurring a moment ago, been restored to me, complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation… “…the past was made to encroach upon the present, and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other… The moment to which I was transported seemed to me to be the present moment…” And so it was! The Proust you know from the cafes was once the Proust of Italy and then the Proust of France but the Proust you know from RTP is the Proust of both Italy and France. Every then is now and every now is eternal. Proust does not remember Italy, he relives Italy, which is perhaps to say, he really lives it for the first time…but in France. When Proust was in Italy, his attention was divided between his experiences of Venice and his experience of himself experiencing Venice. But when Proust relives Italy from France, his intermediary physical body disappears and now, for the first time, he can fully experience Venice. When Proust relives an event, he does not recall selected, superficial qualia associated with that event, like a tourist with a smart phone; he recreates the event entire, and, like an Ephesian , Kierkegaard, he steps into it, re-experiencing all its qualia at once…not from outside-in, as perception and/or memory, but from inside-out, as something unknown to Kant, noumenal experience. When Proust was in Venice, he was aware of Venice, but he was also aware of himself (as above). Likewise, when Proust is in France. But when Proust relives Italy-in-France, he is no longer aware of himself per se. Finally, he can be directly aware of experience itself and yet he remains conscious of that experience because the infinitesimal separation between Italy and France now functions for him as la difference. The phenomenon of differánce enters into Proust’s experience twice, once as the infinitesimal unevenness of the titles, again as the infinitesimal separation between France-now and Italy-then. Separated by the spacetime continuum, the two venues are reunited by something even more substructural, i.e. experience. Effectively, consciousness effects/reflects a ‘fold’ in spacetime that invalidates the familiar Euclidean metric. A tiny difference in the pitch of the tiles, the tinier the better, ideally the tiniest perceptible difference possible, becomes a worm hole for Proust, bending spacetime to make proximate points ordinarily far distant from one another. I am reminded of p-adic numbers: the closer they are to zero, the larger the quantity they represent. I am also reminded of Bell’s non-locality (entanglement): two events indefinitely separated in space and time can nonetheless behave as one event. Is this a manifestation of the non-Archimedean structure of the real world? Check it out: If A is the combined experience of France-now and Italy-then, and B is the experience of ‘France-now’, and C is the experience of ‘Italy-then’, then both B and C are subsets of A but, counter intuitively, (B + C), France-and-Italy-now-and-then, has more value/weight/intensity for Proust than A itself. Or, for you fans of Doctor Who, Hot Link the Universe is simply a collection of ‘phone boxes’…phone boxes that house vast, hexagonal interior spaces, like the TARDIS. Either way, this potentiality for intensity is a product of living in a non-Archimedean universe and/or of being conscious. Revel in it! The competing cosmology is summarized by T.S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday: “Because I know that time is always time, and place is always and only place, and what is actual is actual only for one time, and only for one place, I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed face…” I’d rather live in Proust’s world than Eliot’s; how about you? Fortunately, we do; and for that may I say, “Thank God!” For Proust, space and time are folded so that any two points may be arbitrarily close to one another. Events, no matter how far apart, may abut. While Proust’s epiphanies are dramatic, we all experience something similar most every waking moment of every day. Consciousness is the superposition of two images, slightly askew - differánce as described above. Surprisingly, the reputedly esoteric experience of consciousness can be easily and simply modeled using just the lowly triangle, the fundamental building block of the material world according to Plato, The Timaeus. Consciousness can be modeled simply by treating the ordinarily static triangle as a dynamic process: A ↙ ↘ B → C In this diagram, X is directly aware of Z and of itself being aware (Y) of Z. We could say that ‘X’s experience of Z’ proceeds from X’s awareness of Z and from A’s awareness of being aware (Y) of Z. In which case we would be characterizing ‘consciousness’ using the language adopted by the Council of Nicaea (c. 325 CE) to describe ‘God’, i.e. Trinity. Does that mean that you are God? Far from it! But it does mean that you, and perhaps every conscious being, is ‘made in the image and likeness of God’…and that’s not half bad. Image: Number 1, 1948 by Jackson Pollock 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 Turing, Searle, & Penrose David Cowles Feb 10, 2022 According to Alan Turing of ‘Turing Test’ fame (1950), we can have no privileged insight into the state of another entity’s consciousness. Turing taught that we can only evaluate the consciousness of another entity by experiencing the behavior of that entity. If a machine interacts with you in a way that is indistinguishable from the way another human being would interact with you, then you have no logical grounds for regarding the machine’s thinking process as different in any meaningful way from your own. Who knows, as we subject a machine to the Turing Test, that same machine may very well be conducting a Turing Test on us! According to Alan Turing of ‘Turing Test’ fame (1950), we can have no privileged insight into the state of another entity’s consciousness. Turing taught that we can only evaluate the consciousness of another entity by experiencing the behavior of that entity. If a machine interacts with you in a way that is indistinguishable from the way another human being would interact with you, then you have no logical grounds for regarding the machine’s thinking process as different in any meaningful way from your own. Who knows, as we subject a machine to the Turing Test, that same machine may very well be conducting a Turing Test on us! John Searle (1980) granted that a machine could conceivably pass a Turing Test, but he argued that that would not prove that the machine had a ‘mind’ in the same sense that we have minds. Searle believed that ‘mind’ requires a recursive loop of the sort that we call ‘intentionality’ or ‘understanding’ – the ability of an entity to reflect on itself as well as on its environment. Searle argued that no machine could be self-aware in this sense. Roger Penrose (1989) went even further. Essentially, he questioned whether any machine could ever pass a Turing Test (provided the tester knew the right questions to ask). According to Penrose, the human mind is capable of certain mental feats that cannot be duplicated by any ‘program’. He cites Kurt Gödel’s ‘Incompleteness Theorem’ as a prime example. According to Gödel’s theorem, which is proven, mathematics contains certain self-evidently true statements which can never be proved. 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.

“The simplest unicellular species display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature.” < Back A ‘New’ Old Theory of Consciousness David Cowles Jan 15, 2024 “The simplest unicellular species display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature.” Imagine living long enough to see one of your craziest ideas enter the philosophical mainstream! When we published Panpsychism just last month, the idea of universal consciousness was still considered ‘far out’. Far out, even though the idea itself goes back at least 2500 years, to Parmenides , the father of Western philosophy and science; far out, even though it’s a core tenet of Hasidic Judaism and Kabbalah; far out, even though it played a major role in the thinking of Alfred North Whitehead, the 20 th century’s premier systematic philosopher. Once upon a time, it was widely assumed that consciousness was the exclusive province of homo sapiens . Signs of intelligence in non-human species were unnoticed or underappreciated, then explained away as ‘instinct’. However, beginning in the late ‘60s, that great crucible, folks began speculating that certain sea mammals (e.g., dolphins) and/or certain non-human primates (e.g., chimpanzees) might be conscious. In this century, the franchise has been extended to parrots, corvids, et al. Meanwhile, Aletheia Today has been sitting on the sidelines, jumping up and down, waiving our hands in the air and shouting, “It’s not just birds…it’s every living thing!” That said, I did not expect panpsychism to enter the intellectual mainstream before 2100…until I encountered a peer-reviewed article proclaiming the identity of life and consciousness! Below, I quote liberally from this paper ( Arthur S Reber , William B Miller, Jr ., Predrag Slijepcevic , and František Baluška ) - italics are mine : “Our Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) theory…is based on the assumption that life and sentience are coterminous. All, but only , living organisms are conscious... Prokaryotes (single-celled organisms without a nucleus), the simplest form of life, display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature, including associative learning, stable memory formation, route navigation and decision-making.” There is an important distinction. Panpsychism of the sort ascribed to Parmenides, the Hasidim, and Whitehead (above) applies to all ‘actual entities’; unlike CBC, it is not strictly limited to living organisms. “They anticipate upcoming events and readily create functional social collectives, within which they display both cooperation and competition and, fascinatingly, a primitive form of altruism where some cells in a colony put themselves at risk to support the life functions of other cells in distress… It is important to recognize that assembling and surviving as functioning collectives requires directed, communal action as a form of cellular problem-solving. “One of the entailments of the CBC is that plants, which are eukaryotes (cells with nuclei) and emerged relatively late in evolutionary terms, are conscious, sentient beings…there is considerable evidence for valanced sensation, decision-making, learning, and communication in flora…” Trees in particular demonstrate familial connection, community consciousness, and self-sacrifice. ‘Prosperous’ trees readily share water and other essential nutrients with their less fortunate neighbors, especially, but not exclusively, when the recipient trees are genetically related to the donors. Trees will keep their parents’ stumps alive, sometimes for decades. Mature, healthy trees are the original ‘sandwich’ generation: they are charged with feeding and protecting both their offspring and their parents. “…This cellular communal action provided the basis for various forms of social intelligence… It is simply inconceivable that this wide range of cognitive functions could be the result of a cluster of ‘dumb’ gene-driven mechanisms…” “Entomologists have presented compelling evidence that many insects are conscious and self-aware; avian specialists are comfortable using “consciousness” when referring to the behaviors displayed by many bird species, especially corvids; those who study cephalopods have determined that octopuses and cuttlefish have palpable minds… “We have examined a variety of biomolecular functions and mechanisms in an effort to identify those that are responsible for creating sentience in cells. Briefly, they are almost certainly holistic in the sense that there are various tightly linked functions involving the cytoskeleton, the cell membrane, including specific sensors and receptors, and the mechanisms that permit molecular exchanges between the interior of the cell and the external environment. All of these and others combine to allow the cell to detect, evaluate and mentally represent events and objects and make appropriate decisions about how to respond to them…” “One of the primary reasons for the reluctance of those who work within the SMC (standard) framework to include flora is their conviction that a nervous system is a requirement for a genuine consciousness. However, much of the research into plant cognition supports the conclusion that plant root systems function in ways that are analogous of neural systems.” “…It is virtually certain that cells change the manner of gene expression by the decisions and choices they make. These epigenetic modifications are the driving force behind collaborative cellular problem-solving involved in dealing with environmental stresses...All cells are sentient, exhibit self-referential awareness, and are fully capable of decision-making and problem-solving … “Accordingly, each cell is a conscious “self”, combining three essential elements necessary for cogently explaining multicellularity. In order to collaborate in their trillions , each self-referential cell must ‘know that it knows’, ‘know that others know…(and know) in self-similar patterns’.” “Crucially, CBC imposes three essential requirements to specifically enable cell-wide integrated information as consciousness. Cellular consciousness requires boundaries (a plasma membrane), a cell-wide integrative apparatus for the reception and internal assessment of environmental information…and linked retrievable and deployable memory… “Minds (brains?) do not create conscious self-awareness. Minds, such as our own, are an aggregation of individual cellular consciousnesses.” Wow! Talk about burying the lead! This last ‘throw away’ line opens an entire new field of inquiry. Just how is it that cellular consciousness ‘becomes’ or ‘supports’ the consciousness of integrated organisms? How do 30 trillion cells (or 85 billion neurons) ‘roll-up’ to… you? Reber’s glib aside doesn’t get it done! It doesn’t make sense (to me) to think that my integrated thought could be the simple product of the thoughts of 85 billion independent neurons. Fortuitously, though, the solution to this problem also solves another problem. (Things often work like that in science and philosophy.) Determinists and other materialists are fond of citing studies that show that the brain’s decision-making cells fire a ‘nanosecond’ before the subject thinks she’s made her decision (e.g., vanilla or chocolate). Sometimes, when evidence contradicts your thinking in a certain area, the honorable thing to do is to modify your ideas; other times, the right thing to do is to hold one’s ground, assuming that a future discovery will bridge the apparent gap between theory and observation. But oh, for the wisdom to know the difference! To many ‘philosophers of organism’, these decision studies were unconvincing, albeit irrefutable: “We’re missing something even though we’re not sure what.” Now CBC comes along and potentially gives us the tool we need to bridge this divide: Decisions take place at the level of the organism. Reber et al. (above) are happy to describe the response of a single cell to its environment as holistic, even though the cell has nothing resembling a nervous system or any other Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) . Why then not apply the same standard to multicellular organisms? All ‘organisms’ (single or multicellular), regardless of their internal structures, respond holistically when interacting with their external worlds. Thanks to evolution, organism-level ‘decision’ triggers a coordinated wave of synaptic firings and biochemical events, enabling us to experience consciously that decision and its immediate consequences. So to recap, the decision itself is free, undetermined, and holistic; it triggers a neuronal response that in turn gives us the conscious experience of making and effecting a decision. Fantastic! Or is it? Haven’t we just kicked the can down the road? We’ve pushed conscious experience back onto our cellular substructure, but then we’ve pushed the coordinated action of those cells back onto something ill-defined and potentially non-physical – the ‘holistic response’ of our entire organism to its situation. Humbly acknowledged! But let’s search philosophical literature to see if we can find something that answers to the phrase, ‘holistic response’. Oh yeah, here it is! It’s something called a ‘soul’; remember that from 3 rd grade CCD? Were you expecting Casper? Sorry, no white sheets, thank you. Soul is simply another name for ‘holistic response of the organism’. But, of course, that doesn’t explain how that holistic response occurs. We need to remember that the ‘world’ is a loom, perpetually shuttling between the one and the many. Like Penelope’s weaving, what is many becomes one, and what is one becomes many… again. “Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister Finnagain!” (Joyce) Start anywhere in the cycle. The universe is plural (Buckminster Fuller), but novelty, intensity, and action itself require us to reconstitute that multiplicity as a unity, a so-called ‘Actual World’ (Whitehead). According to this model, we designate and react to our world before, logically if not temporally, we trigger the physical processes that enable us to interact with that world. We are not the accidental overflow of unconscious physical processes. We are the authors of those processes. Being consists of free, unconditioned, holistic responses to an Actual World and the Actual Entity (primary being) responsible for that response is what we call an organism, and as CBC demonstrates (above), organism = 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 . Click above to return to Winter 2024. Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. 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“So what is it that makes children so much better than us? First…a child is not a ‘mini-you’… Is an Octopus a mini-you? Then neither is a child.” < Back Christ and the Kids David Cowles Dec 1, 2023 “So what is it that makes children so much better than us? First…a child is not a ‘mini-you’… Is an Octopus a mini-you? Then neither is a child.” Jesus did not have a lot to say about childhood…but when he did speak, his words were blockbusters. In all three synoptic gospels, his rare, reported interactions with children all broadcast a single message: ‘ They are better than you !’ “Let the little children come to me; do not prevent them, for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” (Mark 10:14) As I said (paraphrasing Jesus), children are better than you; theirs is the Kingdom of God, and “…unless you turn and become like children, you shall not enter.” (Matthew 18:3) Israel at that time was a ‘caste-conscious’ society: ‘Pharisees talked only to Levites, and Levites talked only to God’. Among the lower castes were slaves, oxen, women, Samaritans, and children – a proper proletarian stew if ever there was one! Dry kindling, one spark short of a conflagration: “I have come to set the world on fire, and oh how I wish it were already ablaze.” (Luke 12:49) Today, if someone says you’re 'childlike', that might be meant as a compliment, but not in ancient Israel. There, to be compared to a child, would have been a great insult. And so, as always, Jesus’ message is revolutionary: “Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven…” (Matthew 18:4) and “…Whoever does not accept the Kingdom of God like a child will not enter it.” (Mark 10:15) Karl Marx was ‘Jesus-light’. Marx advocated a specific revolution focused on access to the means of production. Jesus understood that no such ‘specific revolution’ could be successful. It’s pointless to put lipstick on a pig. And the proof is in the pudding. All of history’s specific revolutions have ended the same way: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” ( The Who ) Jesus, and the Christian movement around and after him, understood that only a ‘global’ revolution could succeed. Even before Jesus' birth, his mother is quoted as saying, “He (YHWH) has scattered the proud…put down the mighty…exalted the humble and meek. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” (Luke 1:46–55) Society must be turned upside down. The stone which the builders rejected must become the cornerstone. To cement the point, Jesus, regarded by many, then and now, as the Messiah, the Lord of the Universe, self-identifies as a child: “…Whoever receives one child such as this receives me.” (Matthew 18:5) So what is it that makes children so much better than us? First, they are not proto-adults; a child is not a ‘mini-you’. They are an entirely different phenomenon. Is an Octopus a mini-you? Then neither is a child. Your brain is wired for action and production. You raise a family, earn a living, tend livestock, grow crops, build houses or work in a cube. Children can do none of these things. Their brains are wired for discovery and contemplation. They can rarely even impact the world, much less change it, but they can study it (and themselves in the process) and come to understand it, at least provisionally. Prior to about the age of 12, children’s brains are still ‘plastic’; they are in the process of wiring themselves based on the child’s experiences. During this developmental phase, children can juggle multiple, conflicting maps of the world at the same time; they are oblivious to the apparent inconsistencies. If some kind adult points one out, that adult is likely to be met with a shrug of the shoulder, meaning, “So what! Who cares?” (The child is being honest, not rude). Many years ago, I was playing with Play-Doh with a three-year-old grandchild; we made a car. But he startled me when he asked in all sincerity, “Why doesn’t it start?” At that moment, I realized for the first time the magnitude of the cognitive gulf that exists between adults and children. No wonder we can’t communicate; we don’t even share a common universe of discourse. Reading this, you might be tempted to say, “You just needed to teach him the principles of auto mechanics.” Sorry, but that is precisely the wrong response. Instead, you need to savor this rare window onto a radically different conceptual landscape. Soak it in; don’t stifle it! Children’s minds are more magical than they are scientific. Initially, children take events at face value. Very gradually, they come to realize that events can form patterns that allow us to make predictions and divert the flow of Heraclitus’ famous river. By the time we reach adulthood, we no longer see ‘one-off’ events at all; we see only patterns. We cannot see the elephant in a room if it is not part of our logos , our pattern of expectations. But put any child in a room with an elephant and I guarantee you, it will be seen, smelled, felt, and, God forbid, licked. Are you with me so far? Great, but that may soon change! Consider yourself warned. Events occur, patterns emerge, and we exploit those patterns to manipulate our world and optimize our experience in that world. What could possibly be wrong with that? Nothing…except those patterns are not of your own making. Once you realize that experience discloses order, you’re ready for what society calls ‘education’. Just as the invention of the calculator made arithmetic easier for generations of hapless youngsters, so ‘education’ in general has made it easier for adults to live productive lives. The message: “You don’t need to find patterns on your own. You stand on the shoulders of giants, and they have already found all the patterns you need to live a successful life. So, just learn them.” And so you do. You listen to the adults around you. You imitate what they do. Eventually, you go to school and learn to read, so you can inhale the welter of patterns others purport to have discovered. As you do, you lose even the ability to form patterns on your own. Use it or lose it; your native intelligence atrophies. Ultimately, you find that you have voluntarily exchanged your individual consciousness for a spot in the collective consciousness of the Borg. ( Star Trek – The Next Generation ) We are the Borg! (Sorry, Captain Picard.) How do we know? 97% of the things we think are actually the thoughts of others. We imagine that we are swapping information back and forth with our fellow adults, but in reality, we are just reading from a dogeared script. Unlike children, who see the world naked and as it is, we see the world masked by language. If you can’t say it, it doesn’t exist. We only see what our language allows us to see, and unfortunately, that is a highly distorted version of reality. Modern Indo-European allows us to see the world only in terms of subjects and objects, mediated by active or passive verbs. Worse, the ‘language mask’ creates ‘blind spots’, massive holes in the panorama of the world that our brains do not see. We think we’re looking at the whole picture when, in fact, we are only seeing a culturally curated version of the world. Children, of course, experience the world unfiltered. They recognize ‘truth’ that we don’t even notice. “When the chief priests and the scribes saw the wondrous things he (Jesus) was doing, and the children crying out in the temple area, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’, they were indignant and said to him, ‘Do you hear what they are saying?’ Jesus replied, ‘Yes, and have you never read the text, ‘Out of the mouths of infants and nurslings, you have brought forth praise’?” (Matthew 21:15–16) So where does that leave us? First, we will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless we ‘convert’ and become childlike again. That’s bad enough, but it gets way worse. When we interact with children (not babies), we are almost always wearing the uniform of a drill sergeant. Well-meaning, we do precisely the wrong thing: we teach our children to ‘grow up’. Why? For what? So can they be as miserable and closed-off as we are? Apparently, misery does love company. “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys. Painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys.” ( Peter, Paul, and Mary ) Adult toys! (I’ll spare you the enumeration; you’ve already been through enough.) So where does this leave us? Hint: it’s not good! “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were put around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.” (Mark 9:42) We spare no effort encouraging our children to shed their ‘childish fantasies’, to stop ‘believing fairy tales’ and to begin living in ‘the real world’. When they do, inevitably but unwittingly, they ‘sin’. But they sin our sins – the sins we taught them – not their own sins; for their part, ‘ they know not what they do’. The sins of the parents are visited on them. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to Yuletide 2023 Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, Fall Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back AI and the Borg Collective David Cowles Sep 19, 2025 “AI treats Sally as the intersection of a bunch of sociological variables…(but) Startrek’s Borg Collective takes ‘post-modern Sally’ to a whole other level” A number of jurisdictions are using AI to identify people who may potentially be involved in criminal activity. Unlike the sleuths we follow faithfully on TV, Detective AI does not zero in on a potential suspect’s actions in order to detect hints of socially deviant behavior. Instead, it focuses almost exclusively on an individual’s sociological markers. An unemployed individual, Frank, who suddenly pays cash for a Beverly Hills estate, is behaving in a way that may, or may not , indicate criminal behavior, even if the crime, Mr. Capone, is nothing more than tax evasion. Of course, there’s no proof that any crime has been committed. Frank may have received a large inheritance from a long lost uncle. But on the surface, Frank’s behavior is suspicious, and so we are generally comfortable with Detective O’Malley (or AI) ‘looking into it’. Sally, on the other hand, is homeless. She has never in her life so much as shoplifted a pack of gum, but her demographics fit a profile that has been highly correlated in various studies with criminality. Did I mention she was ‘unhoused’ and without any ‘visible means of support’? She falls into a particular age group, has a particular level of education (or lack thereof), a certain work history, credit score, etc. And, of course, she happens to belong to a certain ethnic group (insert your favorite target here). While Det. O’Malley would have no reason even to interview Sally, AI has flagged her for ‘aggressive’ law enforcement follow-up. Justified? Or not? It is true that Sally’s demographic characteristics, when combined, have a higher than average correlation with criminal behavior. While that certainly doesn’t mean that Sally is a criminal, does it justify ‘keeping an eye on her’? Long before true AI, the IRS used such a model to pick out taxpayers (or non-payers) for audit. Supposedly, a certain number of taxpayers are randomly selected for audit each year and an additional number are targeted based on income level, lifestyle, occupation, audit history, etc. Is such a selection process justified? A truly randomized selection process would be fairer, but it would hardly ever catch serious tax cheats, and it would raise very little revenue for the taxing authorities. On the other hand, auditing only ‘high-fliers’ would encourage ‘low visibility’ individuals to consider themselves immune. So, the traditional audit selection criteria have a lot going for them: They catch a lot of cheats and raise a lot of revenue in the process. They discourage those who might be tempted to play in ‘the grey zone’. They even encourage folks to over-report income and under-deduct expenses so as not to attract the auditors’ attention. Finally, they make sure everyone knows that no one is exempt from oversight. It’s hard to imagine a more efficient algorithm…but does that make it fair? Back to Sally. AI treats Sally as the intersection of a bunch of sociological variables. The apparent assumption, stated primitively, is that if you add up all of the influences in Sally’s life, you should be able to predict her behavior with a tolerable degree of accuracy. Of course, much hinges on your definition of ‘tolerable’; what can you tolerate ? Do you require a level of conviction that puts the matter beyond any reasonable doubt (criminal standard)? Or will you settle for anything above a 50% probability (civil standard)? Or will any correlation over ‘merely random coincidence’ satisfy you? But regardless of your level of tolerance, there is a bigger problem: Sally’s sociological markers don’t include Sally . There is no allowance for Sally’s agency. We have ‘post-modernized’ Sally, reducing her to the sum of her influences. It is not Sally who acts, it is her poverty, ethnicity, etc. that act through her. And yet, it is Sally who will ‘do the time’ if convicted. Fair? At the other end of the spectrum, the model of community displayed by Startrek’s Borg Collective takes ‘post-modern Sally’ to a whole other level. While AI threatens to turn Sally into the sum of her sociological influences, the Borg model reduces Sally to a simple quantum in a complex meta-mind. Effectively, the Borg hijack Sally’s brain, her ‘compute power’, and deploy it in service of an agenda that has nothing to do with Sally and has no concern for her welfare other than, perhaps, keeping her alive long enough to maximize her return on the Borg’s investment. Sally’s fate is that of post 20 th century humans generally. She is caught between two lines of fire. On the one hand, her unique personality has been outsourced to a series of external influences: Freudian parenting, Jungian archetypes, Marxist class. On other hand, her personhood has been co-opted by a disinterested meta-mind for its own, possibly nefarious, purposes. Sally’s agency has effectively disappeared. She is doubly relieved of responsibility. First, her behavior has been accounted for solely as the intersection of influences: nothing uniquely ‘Sally’ required. She is de trop , redundant, white noise. She is a ghost in her own machine. (Ryle) On the other hand, her behavior is dictated by her compulsory service to the collective Borg identity. Sally is the prototypical Nazi commandant; she is ‘just following orders’. To what can I compare 21 st century Sally? Shall I compare her to a summer’s day? I don’t think so. How about a cell in an animal body? On the one hand, she is a product of her nuclear DNA, her mitochondria, and the proteins they produce; on the other hand, she is a cog in an organelle whose sole responsibility is the well-being of its meta-organism. Close, but still not quite. A cell in an animal body probably retains a smidge more agency than our hapless Sally. We may be witnessing Stage IV in the evolution of life on Earth: (1) RNA/DNA and the prokaryotic cell, (2) the eukaryotic (nucleated) cell, (3) the multicellular organism, (4) the collective. There is a contrarian view. There is a model in which there is only Sally. It is Sally who synthesizes her environmental influences into a single organism, and it is that organism, in voluntary association with others, that shapes the behavior of her society. Interestingly, this view achieved its most coherent expression c. 100 years ago as the apex of British Empiricism (Alfred North Whitehead) and the heart of Continental Existentialism (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre). Both schools celebrate the absolute sovereignty of the individual over her identity and destiny. According to Whitehead’s Process Philosophy , the individual designates her Actual World, sorts that World, judges it according to Transcendental Values, and adjusts it according to Subjective Aim, i.e. the individual’s vision of ‘herself in the World for others’. In its purest form (Sartre), the existential self is solely responsible for his own choices, his own actions. There are no influences, unless we lay claim to them, and there are no intended consequences, unless we identify with them. The Devil makes no one do anything and no one is ever ‘just following orders’. "We are the World", we make be what comes to be, we alone are responsible. Ironically, the sovereignty of the individual is probably best recognized today in Judeo-Christian spirituality. From Hasidic Judaism (and Kabbalah) to Evangelical (‘born again’) Christianity, the focus is first on our personal relationship with God and then, in the context of that relationship, on our liberating, peacemaking role in the World. In both traditions, we are commanded to love God unreservedly and to love others as ourselves. This is a powerful antidote to the fragmentation and collectivization of the self. Who’d a thunk it? ( Hairspray ) Judeo-Christianity has become the counter culture of the 21st century, our last line of defense against the Borg Collective. So buckle up! “There’s rough seas ahead.” ( Yellow Submarine ) *** Edward Hopper’s Night Windows (1928) captures a fleeting, voyeuristic view through an illuminated apartment window, where a woman bends over in a private domestic moment. The stark contrast of warm interior light against the dark night sky heightens the sense of quiet intrusion, evoking themes of solitude, secrecy, and the subtle tension of being watched. 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 Block Universe David Cowles Mar 26, 2024 “For you, being is a spectator sport. But in our model the Block Universe evolves over time via a hierarchy of binary choices, so free will and agency are baked in.” The Universe is best represented as a multi-dimensional Block. Every possible value of every potential variable is encoded in that Block. Space and time are not native to this Block, nor is any other ordering principle. The concept of order simply doesn’t apply…yet; think Genesis 1: 2-3: “…The earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters.” What we call ‘the World’ is a cross section of that Block Universe, i.e. a ‘slice’ or a ‘surface’. Every cross-section (measurement) orders the variables in the Block. There are innumerable (perhaps infinitely many) such surfaces. Each slice is a matrix of variables. Each variable has a well-defined relation (not necessarily spatiotemporal) to every other variable on that surface. This ordering logos has been variously defined as causality , magic, logic , providence , et al. Not every possible combination of states constitutes a proper cross section. Determining the minimal requirements that a collection of states must meet to be a proper slice is the province of science. The laws of physics constitute some of those minimal conditions. Think of it like English. 26 letters but not every combination of letters makes a word. Same with the values of variables on a slice of the Block Universe. According to Pierre-Simon Laplace (Classical Determinism), there exists one and only one proper cross section. Once any one variable takes on a defined value (position + momentum), all others take on defined values as well. Once a single variable assumes a specific value, it’s game over…one and done. Everything is hardwired to everything else, deterministically. (Laplace did not know about Heisenberg Uncertainty.) To overcome Heisenberd, Hugh Everett (1957) put Laplace on steroids. If there are many possible universes (slices), why should only one be real? Why shouldn’t every possible universe be real? According to his Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics each unique state (each ‘valued variable’) births a novel World, i.e., a unique cross section of the Block. Richard Feynman effectively modified Everett so that not every value of every variable is uniquely cosmogenic. Rather, all possible slices (value combinations) exist simultaneously but with graded relevance modeled on a probability function. While Everett’s universe is pathologically democratic (all values are created equal), Feynman’s is strictly hierarchical. In computer science, only two values are allowed: 0 and 1, sometimes represented as + or -; but the number of variables (bits) is enormous. According to Laplace, you may have a google of bits but you still have at most 2 possible Worlds (the World and, I suppose, its Anti-World). But according to Everett, ‘every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings’. Oops! Sorry, wrong story. I meant to say, “Every time a variable acquires a value, a new Cosmos is created.” Every data point, every bit, bifurcates the universe. With Feynman’s modification, there is only one World, but that world is the ‘sum of all histories’ i.e. the superposition of all possible worlds. Oddly, his ‘actual World’ is not the same as any of the slices. Even though neither Laplace nor Everett nor Feynman can be debunked mathematically, their models are not entirely satisfying. One is totally rigid and spare; another, wildly chaotic and extravagant; the third more virtual than real. None remotely resembles the World as we experience it. Our World is stable but not sclerotic, dynamic but not disordered, plastic but real. Fortunately, there is a model that accounts for order and novelty and does so economically: A +↙ ↘- x x +↙ ↘- +↙ ↘- x x x +↙ ↘- +↙ ↘- +↙ ↘- x x x x Assume, as above, that each variable has one, but only one, of two values (+ or -). Regardless of whether the value of Alpha is + or -, Beta may be either + or -. The Beta state is not conditioned by the Alpha state. Sounds like Many Worlds …but it isn’t. Assume also that the basic properties of arithmetic apply. Therefore, (+ , –) is equivalent to (– , +). Our first iteration leaves us with just two possible Worlds (Laplace); but our second iteration adds a third option (+, - or -. +). According to this model, as the Universe inflates, it creates additional space to accommodate novelty. Perhaps that is what inflation is, fundamentally. Now this is a World you can live in! A world remarkably like our own in fact. And all you needed was Grade 3 arithmetic to generate it. The ‘Block Universe’ is a favorite of ‘super-determinists’. They imagine that the Block nature of things precludes any role for chance , agency , or horror of horrors, free will . ‘Intellectual Hippies’ prefer ‘Many Worlds’: “Whatever, man!” Oddly, both pre-dispositions lead to the same conclusion: Nihilism . In fact, it turns out that ‘One World’ and ‘Many Worlds’ are functionally identical. In both cases, you live in a world over which you have no influence or control. Living is not something you do; it’s something that’s done to you. For you, being is a spectator sport. But in our model the Block Universe evolves over time via a hierarchy of binary choices, so free will and agency are baked in. Out of Everett’s Many Worlds, I get to choose one to be real for me. Ephesians 2:10: “For we are…created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.” Our absolute freedom comes with an assurance: All roads lead to Rome, or in this case, to the New Jerusalem ( Revelation ), aka the Kingdom of God. As Robert Frost brilliantly expressed, we are not responsible for the destination; our job is to optimize the journey, for ourselves and for our fellow travelers. You’re not a nameless face in the crowd after all; you’re the quarterback of Team You . Which means… I can’t avoid taking responsibility for my life after all. Bummer! 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.

“Mythology is common to all ages. There is no theology, philosophy, or science without it.” < Back Mythology Now! David Cowles Apr 15, 2023 “Mythology is common to all ages. There is no theology, philosophy, or science without it.” According to popular consensus, mythology is an artifact of prehistory. In this view, mythology was replaced, first by religion, then by philosophy, and now by science. Isn’t it marvelous how something so completely wrong can be so widely believed? Mythology is common to all ages. There is no theology, philosophy, or science without it. Each of these disciplines consists of a series of non-contradictory propositions. Each propositional edifice rests on a common set of normally unvoiced assumptions. That’s mythology – don’t leave home without it. This is hard to accept because from our over-intellectualized post-Enlightenment perch to say that something is a ‘myth’ or ‘mythical’ is to suggest that it is untrue or unreal or even silly. In fact, however, a myth is never either true or false, real or unreal… or silly. Myth is a way of understanding the world, a form of trans-verbal language. “Myth is a system of communication; it is a message…it is a mode of meaning.” (Roland Barthes) According to the Greek philosophical tradition, we understand the world in three ways: Gnosis , Logos and Mythos . Gnosis is knowledge. It is the first step back from raw experience. We organize what we think we know into large, internally consistent, but ultimately limited, bodies of knowledge ( gnoses ), e.g., science, philosophy, and theology. These intellectual disciplines are often thought to conflict with one another, but actually, they have a complementary relationship. We need multiple overlapping gnoses to begin to sew together a mappa mundi (a map of the world). The insatiably curious child is just building her map. Logos takes us a second step back from experience. Logos is the pattern formed by the elements of our various gnoses (above). It is because of logos that events can be defined, distinguished and ordered. Brute fact becomes useful knowledge ( praxis ). Genesis tells us about the world before logos : “…without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters –.” With mythos , we take yet a third step back from raw experience. Mythos is an expression of our habits of mind, the unexamined assumptions that underlie logos ; they allow us to do science, apply reason, and practice religion. In a logical or mathematical system, mythos represents the undefined terms . Science reflects the perspective of the seeker, philosophy of the thinker and theology of the believer. Mythos aims to deliver a vision of the entirety from the perspective of the entirety. Mythology is how the world understands itself, what the world has to say about itself, with no scientist, philosopher, or theologian required. Mythos is recursion! Logos gives us tools to translate experience into understanding. Mythos works in reverse. Mythos embodies certain trans-verbal and non-verbal assumptions about reality that enable us to have experience and to organize that experience first as gnoses , then as logos and ultimately as praxis , the application of logos . Far from being fairy tales, myths tell us what’s real (and what isn’t), what’s valuable (and what’s not). A myth is not falsifiable. In fact, it is the nature of myth generally that it is not susceptible to ‘mere evidence’. Rather, it is mythology that defines what constitutes ‘evidence’ for any particular culture. As in Alice’s Looking-glass world, with mythos the verdict precedes the trial. There are four dominant mythologies afoot in the world today. The first is Empiricism . It underpins the scientific world view. It embodies as articles of faith certain basic attitudes about the world that make science possible. What you see is what you get, and it’s all you get. It’s all you can get! It’s all there is to get. This model is compatible with everything from Newtonian physics to Quantum Field Theory…but that’s the whole idea. We’re not talking about any one physical theory or model here; we’re talking about an attitude of mind that lies behind all such models and makes them possible. The second myth is Humanism . Humanity collectively and each human being individually is the center of the universe, morally if not physically. The origin of the universe is unimportant. What matters is that it exists now and has sentient beings in it. Those sentient beings are what give it meaning. Human experience is truth. The wellbeing of humanity is justice. The third myth is Rationalism . It judges systems of axioms and theorems, based on their internal consistency. The world is fundamentally a rational place, so human beings can rely on reason to find answers to their deepest questions. The fourth myth is Transcendentalism . It situates the space-time universe in the context of non-spatial, non-temporal eternity. It is that eternal realm that gives events in the temporal realm their value and, ultimately, their meaning. Values have a transcendental origin and so per se are absolute, although their expressions, applications, and interpretations will vary from culture to culture…and from person to person. Values are sub-structural; essence precedes existence. Values are not relative nor merely normative; they are generative. Entities are not incidentally good; they are because and to the extent that they are good. Value is not an extrinsic measure of an entity; it is the intrinsic source of its being. We need to know what’s real and what’s valuable. This is our primal question, and no gnosis (knowledge) or logos (intellect) by itself can answer that. For better or worse, we are ultimately dependent on unverifiable mythos to guide us through life. Before we deduce a verdict from the evidence, we have to know what counts as ‘evidence’ and what doesn’t. That’s the function of mythology. We are swimming in uncharted (and unchartable) waters. Like Kierkegaard, we all make our own leap of faith, our own leap in the dark, however unwittingly and unwillingly; and as we do so, mythology is our only guide. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, 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 Erin Gruodis-Gimbel Contributor Erin Gruodis-Gimbel is a playwright, author, and fact-checker based in New York. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. You can find her writing at Beyond Belief, JAKE the Mag, COPY, and on post-it notes and legal pads scattered around her like a semi-intellectual aura. You can find her at eringruodisgimbel.com and erinxgg on Twitter. The Ease of Burden

< Back Jan Heckler Contributor Jan Heckler was called to Africa beginning in Zimbabwe before 911. She received doctoral training at U. of Fla.. Sharing effective teaching methods became a primary way she serves God in mission. Jan is a published author and has taught in Namibia and Malawi - twice, winning teaching awards. As a consultant for the Govt of Ethiopia, she helped attain a five-donor nation-World Bank funding package for $417 million. Forced into early retirement by injuries she writes and consults from her home in Berkeley. Mamisoa