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< Back How It Works! David Cowles Jan 28, 2025 “Events constitute the response of the cosmos to entropy. Like an army in retreat, order regroups… before it resumes its inevitable flight.” From any point on the slope of a mountain, there is only one straight line to the summit but there are an infinite number of straight lines to the base.” There is only one Universe, but the unity inherent in ‘Universe’ can be superficially shattered, perhaps in one way only, perhaps in many ways, perhaps in an infinite number of ways. What we call cosmos is the product of one such shattering. 20th century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, applied the phrase ‘ cosmic epoch’ to describe the shatter pattern. To what can we liken this cosmos ? Perhaps to the I Ching , where yarrow stalks are thrown, forming a pattern that signifies the future. Or perhaps it’s like a snowflake, so many yet no two the same. Perhaps the Universe is sampling Parmenides who imagined a spaceless timeless featureless Ground of Being ( Aletheia ) refracted into various colors, sizes and shapes ( Doxa ). Or perhaps Universe is captured in Hasidic Judaism: it has shattered into shards, each one containing a spark of divinity. It is ‘our job’ to liberate those sparks and reunite them with their Source. Christians have a similar concept: Opus Dei (the ‘work of God’). Bottom line, everything we think we know concerns just one shatter pattern…ours. Here’s what we can say about Universe experienced as cosmos : It exists, it’s real. It’s a pattern made up of innumerable mini-patterns (Whitehead called those mini-patterns actual entities or events ). Each event is connected to every other event. It has to be! The shattering of Universe cannot destroy its fundamental, substructural unity. That fundamental unity is what allows us to find (or impose) structure among the actual entities in a shatter pattern. That same unity also allows us to find structure within those entities . Ultimately, the events in our cosmic epoch form a ‘fractal pattern’. In our cosmic epoch, events are structured according to an ordering principle we know interchangeably as entropy or time . It is possible, but not certain, that relations among these same events could have been or could still be structured differently; but so long as this cosmic epoch is our cosmic epoch, it’s characterized by entropy ( aka ‘time’). The events of our cosmic epoch can be conceived as a multidimensional lattice with the spacetime position of each entity in the lattice determined by entropy relations. In such a structure the Alpha Point (Big Bang) would be the region of minimal entropy and the Omega Point (Heat Death or Big Crunch) would be the region of maximal entropy. According to mathematician and cosmologist, Roger Penrose, Alpha and Omega can be shown to be mathematically equivalent, i.e., the same event! Stephen Hawking theorized that we experience Universe as an entropic cosmos because ‘experience’ is ‘entropy’. It is possible, but not certain, that Universe can only experience itself in an entropic environment. If so, this would be an expression of the so-called Anthropic Principle : we see the world the way we do because that is the only way a world can be seen. The spacetime relationship between two events in time is a function of an entropy differential. This progressive reduction of order (entropy) creates an opening for choice and intentionality, aka freewill. It is a given that order will decay but the forms it will take as it decays are not determined. If the products of decay were determined, there would never be any reduction in the quantity of order; order would be conserved...and it is not! Simply put, from any point on the slope of a mountain, you can draw at most one ‘straight’ line back to the summit (maximal order) but you can draw an infinite number of straight lines to the base (minimal order). Ergo entropy! That said, there are no actual straight lines in our cosmic epoch. Order does not decay evenly but in fits and starts that correspond to what we experience as events . Freewill in turn imposes its own set of requirements. Freedom is the antithesis of randomness or chaos. There must be values in terms of which freewill can meaningfully be exercised. Freedom from and freedom to are both value driven. Those values must originate at the level of Universe. In fact, they must be Universe! The same values must be operative in every cosmic epoch. Values are ‘values’ if and only if they are objective, transcendent, universal, and eternal (Nietzsche). Otherwise they are just habits (Hume)…or tastes. Freewill operates at the level of entities (or events). Entities are eddies of order. How the cosmos forms such eddies is determined by events themselves, powered by free will and guided by values. Events constitute the response of the cosmos to entropy. Like an army in retreat, order regroups, takes a stand, reasserts itself, and makes itself felt… before it resumes its inevitable flight. Mortality is the apparent triumph of decay over order. H. Dumpty, sitting proudly atop the wall that protects his bourgeois estate from the chaos beyond, was a poster boy for cosmic resistance…until he had a great fall. Finally, events must include an element of awareness – awareness of the world, awareness of self-in-world, awareness of self as other-than-world. What we call consciousness is a particular flavor of awareness, but awareness is in no way limited to entities that are conscious. It is an integral component of every actual entity . So that’s how it works! What do you think? Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. 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< Back LEIBNIZ “In this model, God is a giant switching station, sharing qualities among myriad monads.” David Cowles Gottfried Leibniz (GL): When several predicates are attributed to a single subject and this subject is attributed to no other, it is called an individual substance (monad). Monads must have…qualities; otherwise they would not even be beings…there would be no way of perceiving any change in things…and they would be indiscernible from one another. Aletheia Today (AT): To be is to be unique, and it is the unique constellation of qualities that constitutes the identity of every novel entity. GL: There must be a plurality of properties and relations in the simple substance, although it has no parts…It is also necessary that each monad be different from each other. Change is continual in each thing…the monad’s natural changes come from an internal principle, since no external cause can influence it internally. AT: Every event is causa sui . It is what it makes itself be, but it does so in the dual context of God and other monads. GL: There is no external cause acting on us other than God alone, and he alone communicates himself to us immediately… AT: Universe consists entirely of monads. God is a monad and everything that exists is Imago Dei , the image of God. It is through God that monads share qualities. In this model, God is a giant switching station sharing his qualities on demand, distributing them among myriad other monads. GL: God has power…knowledge…and finally will…and these correspond to what, in created monads, is the subject, …the perceptive faculty, and the appetitive faculty. The passing state which involves and represents multitude in unity…is nothing other than what one calls perception…the internal principle which brings about change…can be called appetition. AT: Every monad is its own subject. It is initially constituted by its perceptions, and it becomes what it becomes by virtue of its appetition (its ‘subjective aim’). GL: Souls act according to the laws of final causes, through appetitions. Bodies act according to the laws of efficient causes (through perceptions). And these two kingdoms, that of efficient causes and that of final causes, are in harmony with each other…According to this system, bodies act as if there were no souls…and souls act as if there were no bodies. AT: ‘Soul’ and ‘body’ are alternate ways of describing a single phenomenon. (Ryle) That phenomenon is ‘body’ in so far as it is causal , ‘soul’ in so far as it is teleological . GL: Since something rather than nothing exists, there is a certain urge for existence… in a word, essence in and of itself strives for existence. AT: Note that this is simply a version of Anselm’s ‘ontological proof’ for the existence of God. GL: We also see that every substance has a perfect spontaneity (which becomes freedom in intelligent substances). AT: Universe is characterized by what the 20th Century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, called “creativity”…a primal urge to existence, but Whitehead wisely distinguished ‘creativity’ from ‘essence’. GL: God is not only the source of existences but also of essences insofar as they are real…Without him there would be nothing real in possibles, and not only would nothing exist, but also nothing would be possible. AT: This is the sense in which we say, “God is Being!” God makes it possible to be. GL: For if there is reality in essences or possibles, or indeed, in eternal truths, this reality must be grounded in something existent and actual, and consequently, it must be grounded in the existence of a necessary being, in whom essence involves existence, that is, in whom possible being is sufficient for actual being… The ultimate reason for the reality of both essences and existences lies in one thing, which must of necessity be greater than the world… AT: Without God, subjects (monads) would not exist, and essences (predicates) would not be real. God is the source of both quantum coherence (potential)…and decoherence (actual), the collapse of the wave function. Essences by themselves are mere ideas; they do not become real potentiality until they participate in some actual entity. Therefore, if there is a world, and there seems to be, there must necessarily be a real entity (God), logically prior to that world, in whom all real essences participate. We are standing Descartes on his head here: “it is, therefore, He is.” By the same token, no entity (not even God) can exist unless there are real essences (values) according to which one entity can come to exist in preference to another entity. Otherwise, the existence of all theoretically possible entities would be equally probable…which means that the existence of any actual entity would be impossible. GL: Beyond the world, that is, beyond the collection of finite things, there is some One Being who rules…for we cannot find in any of the individual things, or even in the entire collection and series of things, a sufficient reason why they exist. We will never find…a complete explanation for why, indeed, there is any world at all, and why it is the way it is. The excellence of God’s works can be recognized by considering them in themselves…it is by considering his works that we discover the creator…Thus when we see some good effect or perfection occurring or ensuing from God’s works, we can say with certainty that God had proposed it. AT: God is the solution to the “ Problem of Good ”: How is it that anything good exists? Why aren’t all things morally or aesthetically neutral…or worse? The answer is God. When we see Good, we see God. What is Hell other than a world without God? GL: Every substance bears in some way the character of God’s infinite wisdom and omnipotence, and imitates him as much as it is capable. For it expresses, however confusedly, everything that happens in universe, whether past, present, or future… AT: According to Whitehead (above), Universe consists exclusively of events, but every event is in turn an expression of the entire universe. Every created monad reflects in part, but only in part, God’s essence. If a created monad imitated God perfectly, then it would be God and not a created monad. (This is a metaphysical version of the doctrine of ‘Original Sin’.) GL: He (God) views all the faces of the world in all ways possible…The result of each view of the universe, as seen from a certain position, is a substance (monad) which expresses the universe in conformity with this view… There are, as it were, just as many different universes, which are, nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one, corresponding to the different points of view of each monad. Every substance is like a complete world and like a mirror of God or of the whole universe, which each one expresses in its own way…Thus the universe is in some way multiplied as many times as there are substances… AT: Does Leibniz anticipate Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of QM (1966)? There is one Universe and one God who perceives (or reflects) that Universe, but Universe may be perceived internally from innumerable perspectives. Each such perspective corresponds to a unique monad, a unique version of Universe. According to Everett, everything that can happen does happen…in its own universe. GL: Our soul expresses God, the universe, and all essences as well as all existences… The notion of an individual substance includes once and for all everything that can ever happen to it…If I were capable of considering distinctly everything that happens or appears to me at this time, I could see in it everything that ever will happen or appear to me. This would never fail…provided there remained only God and me. AT: God exists outside of spacetime, and each monad is a reflection of God. Therefore, each monad per se exists outside of space-time. Space-time is an emergent property of the multiplicity of monads. Everything that is, was or will be, everything that might be or might have been (real possibles), is reflected in some way in each created monad. The perpetual change that characterizes all monads pre-exists in each monad…but only insofar as there is just the one created monad and God. Novelty is a function of plurality; I can only become ‘me’ in the context of you becoming you. (Buber) GL: Each substance (monad) is like a world apart, independent of all other things, except for God; thus all our phenomena, that is, all the things that can ever happen to us, are only consequences of our being… God alone…makes that which is particular to one of them public to all of them; otherwise, there would be no interconnection. This, then, is how one can conceive that substances impede or limit each other and…act upon one another and…accommodate themselves to one another… God alone brings about the connection and communication among substances, and it is through him that the phenomena of any substance meet and agree with those of others, and consequently, there is reality in our perceptions. AT: Each monad relates to God and God alone. But God is also a medium through which the unique ‘properties and relations’ that characterize each monad are shared with every other monad. Therefore, each monad relates to every other monad, albeit only through God. GL: God alone operates on me…the other substances contribute only…because God…requires them to accommodate themselves to one another. AT: Absent God, Universe would either be silent or, which amounts to the same thing, cacophonous. God is the ordering principle that allows the one to emerge from the many and the many to incorporate the one. GL: A monad rightly demands that God take it into account in regulating the others from the beginning of things. It is in this way that actions and passions among creatures are mutual. For God, comparing two simple substances, finds in each reasons to adjust the other to it. AT: Note that this is a highly non-linear process of perpetual co-modification. GL: This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe. Everybody is affected by everything that happens in the universe, to such an extent that he who sees all can read in each thing what happens everywhere, and even what has happened or what will happen, by observing in the present what is remote in time as well as space. AT: This is the ontological premise that underlies the work of James Joyce ( Ulysses ). GL: Our body receives the impression of all other bodies, since all the bodies of the universe are in sympathy. “All things conspire,” said Hippocrates. AT: Each monad reflects Universe from a unique vantage, and each monad undergoes a process through which its content is adjusted to the content of every other monad. Therefore, each monad is unique, but each monad also templates in a unique way all other monads. Ultimately, no two monads conflict, but every two monads contrast. In the language of Quantum Mechanics, monads might be seen as universally ‘entangled’ (John Bell). Measuring one local quantum can immediately reveal information about another, remote quantum. (Note: Bell’s non-locality is not causal.) Ultimately, this model of Universe is holographic. The whole is imminent in each of its parts (David Bohm) but with less and less definition (clarity) as the part grows smaller in relation to the whole. There is no such thing as ‘scale’, only ‘focus’. GL: No substance perishes, although it can become completely different… Where there are no parts, neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility is possible…there is no conceivable way in which a simple substance can perish naturally…there is no conceivable way a simple substance can begin naturally…they can only begin or end all at once, that is, they can only begin by creation and end by annihilation. Minds…are to persist as long as the universe itself does, and they express the whole in a certain way and concentrate it in themselves so that it might be said that they are parts that are wholes. God had ordered everything in such a way that minds not only live always, which is certain, but also that they preserve their moral quality so that the city does not lose a single person, just as the world does not lose any substance. We may say that although all substances express the whole universe, nevertheless the other substances express the world rather than God, while minds express God rather than the world. Thus one can state that not only is the soul (mirror of an indestructible universe) indestructible, but so is the animal itself. AT: A mind cannot perish because it is, in a sense, the whole. This whole is reflected in God and reflects God, and God is imperishable. Therefore, the ‘whole’ must be imperishable, both ‘mind’ and ‘animal’. God is both the primordial essences that define him and the created monads that are reflected in him; in God, essence and existence, origin and destiny are one. Leibniz appears to distinguish mental monads (minds) from physical monads (bodies). Alfred North Whitehead (referenced earlier) takes a different approach: every actual entity has both a “mental pole” and a “physical pole”. Each monad perceives essences as they inhere in God primordially (mental pole) along with existences (other monads) as they are reflected in God consequently (physical pole). There is nothing else. Therefore, every monad aims to imitate God but in a unique way: life as liturgical dance. The monad projects (Superject) itself into the community of created monads in order to play a certain role vis-à-vis the other monads in that community. That is the Objective Immortality of the particular monad. The monad’s contribution of a functional contrast is the objective expression of subjective conformation to God’s values. In the New Testament, the Letter of James puts it this way: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows.” (Jas. 1: 27) Further, the monad’s appetitions influence its perceptive selections just as much as the monad’s perceptions help form and define its appetitions. We can learn everything there is to know about a monad simply by focusing on the dialectic that occurs between those perceptions (Actual World) and those appetitions (Subjective Aim). Finally, we know that through God’s agency, monads are adjusted to other monads. Since a monad consists only of perceptions and appetitions, these adjustments must be reflected in those perceptions and appetitions…and nowhere else. The hunger to imitate focuses on God directly, while the hunger to innovate focuses on the other monads as they are reflected in God. Like the Federal Reserve, we have a ‘dual mandate’; we are called upon to imitate and to innovate. That tension is what we call ‘Life’. 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 Harvest Issue 2023 Previous Next

< Back Karma and Healthcare Bots David Cowles Sep 11, 2025 “Anything we do that affects something outside us also affects us… Reciprocity is all around us, yet we are oblivious to it.” A recent NYT post (9/2/2025) caught my eye. I have repeatedly touted the value of aggressively integrating AI into our healthcare delivery systems, at both the primary care and specialist levels: My PCP Should Be a BOT | Aletheia Today My MD Should Be a Bot | Aletheia Today I am particularly keen on the prospect of AI enhanced diagnosis. No matter how skilled they may be in other areas, not all doctors are good diagnosticians. The skills required are very different from those associated with patient care. A study published in the Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology found that after just three months of using an A.I. tool, designed to help spot precancerous growths during colonoscopies, doctors were significantly worse at finding the growths on their own… “This is a two-way process,” said Dr. Omer Ahmad, a gastroenterologist at University College Hospital London who published an editorial alongside the study. “We give A.I. inputs that affect its output, but it also seems to affect our behavior as well.” Of course it does! What interests me is that Dr. Ahmad seems surprised, “This is a two-way process…” Of course it is, every event is, and this has nothing to do with AI. Anything we do that affects something outside us also affects us. This truism has no exceptions whatsoever. It is impossible for physical entities to act without experiencing a reaction. Borrowing a meme from Gregory Bateson, let’s agree that an event is “a difference that makes a difference.” What else could it be? To be an ‘event’, something has to be different from what came before it and impact what comes after it. If not, it would just be an unidentifiable stretch of the ontological continuum. It is a fundamental feature of the Universe, and yet we go through life rarely keeping it in mind: “Every action entails an equal and opposite reaction” (Newton). I fire a rifle; the recoil bruises my shoulder. “What goes around, comes around” (Hippie manual from the 1960s). “Cast your bread upon the waters…” ( Ecclesiastes ) “Karma.” ( Hair ) Reciprocity is all around us, yet we are oblivious to it. We’re like fish in water? “What’s water?” From pre-school on, we are taught two systems for understanding the World: language and arithmetic. Now some say, “If you can’t express it in words or numbers then it isn’t real;” others, “If you can’t measure it, it didn’t happen;” still others go further, “The world consists solely of propositions (sentences) and algorithms (equations).” Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that these representations are more important, more valuable, and even more real than the phenomena they represent. We are like tourists who experience as little of a new city as possible, preferring to hang out near the Visitors’ Center, heads buried in our ‘apps and maps’. Or like those who see every sight the city has to offer…but through the viewfinder of a camera. We understand travel as the documentation of experiences we never had, a collection of representations (photos, post cards, souvenirs) designed to help us remember things we didn’t experience. Sidebar : Would Remembrance of Things Past be possible today? If Proust had taken his Nikon, or his iPhone, with him to Venice, he might never have experienced the difference between two cobblestones that made it possible for him to telescope several decades into a single event, a quantum of experience. Jean-Luc Picard can’t hold a candle to Marcel Proust. Today, the map often trumps the territory; like children following the Pied Piper, we’ll obey our GPS, even when it leads us into an abyss. Seeing (or feeling) is no longer a valid criterion for believing. Downloading is! Where once we relied on reality to verify our ideas, now we rely on our ideas to validate reality. Then, if theory conflicted with observation, we modified the theory; now, if data contradicts our pre-conceptions, we question the data. Faced with a new problem or a new data set, we are first and foremost ideologues! “Don’t worry, we’ll find a way to work anything ‘new’ into the existing, and politically appropriate, Weltanschauung .” Of course, there’s nothing wrong with mathematics or linguistics; they lie at the heart of our experience of being human. But they are not themselves experiences of the World. Protestations of poets and geeks notwithstanding, you cannot smell rhymes or hear algorithms. But back to my MD and PCP Bots. I accept that reliance on AI can dampen native acuity, but there are workarounds. For example, in my model, MD Bot is simply added to a pre-existing diagnostic team. Carbon and silicon work side by side and the efficiency (accuracy) gains pay for the extra team member many times over. But even if it turns out that there are no acceptable workarounds, I’d still make the switch to MD Bot. Almost 1/3 rd of all the money spent in the US on healthcare is spent treating symptoms that have been misdiagnosed, and that’s one club, the ‘33’, that I do not want to join. So sorry Doc, I’d sooner put my life exclusively in the claws of MD Bot rather than accept a human substitute. But I also understand that my decision will have consequences for me as well as for you and I accept that responsibility as a price I must pay to be an independent, intentional agent. “I wish you well.” *** Sir Luke Fildes’ The Doctor (1891) depicts a quiet nighttime scene in which a physician attentively watches over a gravely ill child while her anxious parents look on in the shadows. Painted with rich detail and warm light, it honors the compassion, vigilance, and moral dedication of doctors, elevating the physician’s role to that of a steadfast guardian of life 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 Football and Quantum Mechanics David Cowles “This is what we do on Sunday nights and Mondays during football season: we play 'what if' and 'if only'.” The scoreboard clock reads 00:00: Philadelphia Sunshine – 27; Buffalo Blizzard – 26. Game over? Yes…and no. Time has expired, but the Blizzard scored a touchdown on the last play of the game, so they still have a chance to add one or two PATs ( points after touchdown ) to their score. So, yes, the game is ‘over’ but we still don’t know who won. It’s like most 21 st century US presidential elections; better still, it’s like any Iowa Caucus! (Heck, they’re still looking for Paul Simon to tell him that he won the 1988 caucus after all; and as for the 2020 caucus, well, they’ve just stopped counting.) But I digress. According to the rules of the NFL, the Blizzard can kick a short field goal for one point; game tied! Overtime! Or they can run (or pass) the ball into the end zone for two points. All eyes are on the coach; will she go for one point, potentially sending the game into OT, or two, letting everything ride on just one play? Power outage! (Hey, it’s Buffalo; it snows!) Even cell service is disrupted. We won’t know the outcome of the game until the power comes back on…or until the newspaper gets delivered in the morning…or the morning after that. Et voilà , you have the longest game ever played…even though it ended hours ago! Did I mention, I have houseguests? Huge football fans – they invited themselves for a ‘sleepover’ so they could be ‘closer to the stadium’ where the game was to be played. Irony : Because of the forecast of heavy ‘lake effect snow’ in Buffalo, it was decided at the last minute to play the game in Philadelphia, where it’s always sunny; but I’m still stuck with my houseguests! Who knows for how long now! It could be worse. At least my guests and I can communicate; we all speak football fluently. Traditionally after every game, fans are required to spend 36 hours reflecting on why what happened, happened (WWHH). If only this … If it hadn’t been for that . Would-a, could-a, should-a. It’s what we do! Normally, this sort of retrospective is only possible once the outcome of the game has been determined. Simply put, how can we identify the causes of an outcome we don’t yet know? To salvage this hyperextended sleepover, we need to be able to talk football, but apparently, we can’t. Edwin Schrödinger to the rescue! A century ago, he placed the world’s most famous cat, alive and kicking, into a soundproof box – don’t worry, it was ventilated – and he set up his experimental apparatus so that the life or death of the cat would be determined by the occurrence, or not, of a totally unpredictable quantum event. Where was PETA? At any point in time the cat could be alive or dead; we don’t know. But instead of throwing up our hands, Schrödinger suggested we treat the cat as both alive and dead. Decades later, Richard Feynman applied this same technique to the entire field of quantum phenomena: he called his technique, “Sum over Histories." One of my visitors happened to be a quantum mechanic. He told us all about the Quantum Qat ; much obliged! He suggested we apply Schrödinger’s method to our ‘Football Game from Limbo’. First, assume that Buffalo has won the game; then reverse it and assume that Philly has prevailed. Here’s how it works: Assume Buffalo won! They won because their receiver made a one-handed, fingertip catch in the end zone, dragging his toes to stay in bounds. They won because Philly missed a chip shot field goal in the second period. They won because somehow the refs missed a Buffalo defender’s flagrant interference with a Philly pass receiver in the end zone. Now assume Philly won! They won because one of Buffalo’s touchdowns was brought back for a dubious ‘holding’ call. They won because Buffalo fumbled the ball on Philly’s five yard line. They won because Philly’s QB broke not one but two open field tackles to score on a busted play. This is what we do on Sunday nights and Mondays during football season: We play ‘what if’ and ‘if only’. It’s fun, and we’re confident that our collective wisdom somehow enriches the noosphere. So six events, each highly improbable in its own right, but each perfectly capable of determining the outcome of the game. If only we knew the outcome! All six of our ‘what if, if only’ events happened, there’s no changing that! But the meaning and significance of these events depends on the illusive outcome. Cosmology is like a good murder mystery: until we know who dunnit , we can’t separate the clues from the red herrings. We know the putative causes , we know their potential effects, but we can’t assess their actual impact on the outcome of the game because we don’t know that outcome…yet. Under these circumstances, can we call them ‘causes’ at all? All we can say for sure is that these six events preceded the game’s outcome. Post hoc ergo propter hoc? When results are known, events become causes; until then, they are just events. In and of itself, each of the six key events is complete and determined. What is not determined is the meaning or significance of those events. Games are fun to watch, and stats are fun to study, but at the end of the day, the only thing that matters, that has meaning and significance outside the game itself, is the final score. There are no style points in American football. Only the final score transcends the game itself. It is the outcome of the game that converts some events into causes and others into anecdotes. So are we prepared to say that causality proceeds backwards from the effect rather than forward from the cause as normally assumed? It’s tricky. Results do follow causes in time, but events do not become causes until the effects themselves are known. Hmm. All we can say is this: there are events and, eventually, there are outcomes, and we know that those outcomes are massively related to the events that preceded them. To know which events among those precedent events, if any, deserve to be ranked as ‘causes’, you’ll need to put on your canonical conical science ‘cap’…yup, the one with the propeller on top! That’s it. We need to go back in time, change the result of a single play and see if and how that change impacts the results. We would need to do that for each of our so-called ‘causes’. Then we would need to try changing two or more events at once, measuring the impact of each combination, and so on. We have identified six events that, we think, might have been determinative of the outcome of the game. There are six potential causes , which can occur in 64 possible combinations, but with only two possible outcomes (no ties allowed). The engineering is daunting but, assuming you’ve licked the time travel thing, and assuming you don’t require any juice from the Greater Buffalo Power Grid, the conceptual problem is fairly simple. So far… Events do not happen in isolation. Our six causes occur in a sequence. Flipping the first event (A) may impact or even determine the outcome of the game; it also potentially impacts the other five events. A change in the value of A may independently trigger changes in the values of B, C, D, E, and/or F. How so? Event A, however it turns out, impacts the crowd, impacts player attitudes – the famous momentum – and impacts both teams’ subsequent strategic moves (play calls). A change in the value of A may (or may not) trigger a change in the value of B and the other four events. But a change in the value of B may trigger independent changes in the values of C, D, E, and/or F. And so on… As you can see, by changing the value of one event, A, we’ve triggered an ontological avalanche . But is this even what we mean by causality ? The phenomenon we call a football game is an example of a ‘chaotic system’. That is not to say that events happen at random; they do not! In fact, as we have seen, the causal bonds are incredibly strong. But unfortunately, they are ultimately indecipherable. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men and all the computing power on Planet Earth cannot convert a football into a deterministic algorithm. A butterfly flaps its wings on the 30 yard line and Gronk drops a pass in the end zone. Causal, yes; predictable, no! Event chains are not linear algorithms, they are massively nonlinear webs. But for us to make sense of the game, to have something to talk about, we have to talk about ‘highlights,’ and we have to link those highlights in a more or less straight line to the final score (once we have a final score). Does anyone think for a moment that this so-called analysis has anything to do with reality? We selected six putative ‘causes’ of the game’s output. Why not eight, or just 4? In fact, in our nonlinear world, every single thing that happens during the game, on or off the field, may cause the outcome. We live in a non-linear world – that’s a fancy way of saying, our lives are chaotic. What a surprise! But in order to function in this world, we often find it desirable to treat it as though it were a lattice of parallel causes. We function, we have fun, and we get stuff done, but we are relying on a model that is only accidentally related to the real world. A better model of an NFL game exists…but you won’t like it. There are approximately 120 plays in a typical NFL game. Each one of those plays is causa sui . Nothing is causally dependent on anything else. There are correlations all over the place, but no causation. Each play is a reaction to everything that’s happened up to that point in the game: the score, the location of the ball, the injuries, the sequence of plays called and the results of those plays, etc. But no event is in any way ‘caused’ by those things. Every play is unique; every play evolves freely and in unanticipated ways. Last night I saw a player go for an interception, miss, fall to the ground, get up, run back and tackle the receiver. Write an algorithm for that! Each event arises in reaction to proximate history. The closest thing (and it’s not even close!) to ‘a cause of Event A’ is the sum of everything that happened in the game prior to A. So, post hoc ergo propter hoc is as good as it gets. Everything causes everything else! In a massively nonlinear system, sequence is the closest we can come to causality. Football is, indeed, a metaphor for life – perhaps that’s why we’re so invested in it. Today’s a new day. You are the OC (offensive coordinator) of your life. What play will you call? How well will you execute? How will you modify your ‘play’ in response to unanticipated events during the day? How will you feel about the result? Do your best, stay safe, and good luck! (Let us know how it all works out.) Previous Next

< Back SETI and the Meaning of Life David Cowles Sep 26, 2025 “If we are so far unable to find meaning for our existence, why would we expect meeting ET to change things?” A recent post by Harvard professor, Avi Loeb, Finding a Meaning to Our Existence from Extraterrestrial Siblings , unfurled a flurry of (non-Marxist) red flags chez moi . The title alone is enough to put one off. If we are so far unable to find meaning for our existence, why would we expect meeting ET to change things? Here’s Avi… “ Dr. Rolf Dobelli… asked me what future event might endow humans with a deeper meaning for their existence? I suggested that an encounter with alien intelligence could deliver…” First Reaction : Why should I await & expect some contingent ‘future event’ ( Godot ) to ‘endow’ my life with meaning? Either my life is meaningful, or it isn’t. Either way, meaning cannot be contingent on an event that has not happened yet and may never happen at all. Finally, even if there is such an event, how and why would meeting ET be that event? Second Reaction : In the Judeo-Christian tradition there is a class of events that do ‘endow’ human life with meaning. Events in this class have a common actor, i.e. God, a unique, universal and eternal entity that utterly transcends the phenomenal world. Likewise, in many pagan cosmologies, where celestial phenomena are regularly regarded as ‘transcendent’, the two realms touch at certain extreme points, e.g. May Day, Halloween, the equinoxes and/or the solstices, dawn and/or dusk (Yeats), the edge of the World (Synge). Often, the Milky Way is understood as a permanent ‘path’ connecting ontological realms. Depending on your preferred flavor of Judeo-Christianity, there may be null, one, several, or innumerable events in this special class: YHWH: “I am who I am.” St. Dallan “Naught is all else to me, save that Thou art!” Creation ( ex nihilo ), the 7 days of Genesis . Incarnation, Transfiguration, Transubstantiation, Resurrection, Ascension, Ekklesia (Church), Parousia (Apocalypse): One event, many manifestations? Or many events? Salvation, Redemption, and a ‘personal relationship with Jesus Christ’. Third Reaction : Avi Loeb is confusing the exotic with the transcendent. ET is exotic but certainly not transcendent. Dr. Loeb is not alone in this error. The accumulation of quantity in the vain pursuit of quality is an ongoing theme across much of human civilization: Pharos buried with hordes of gold to fund their afterlives (the ultimate 401k). “Living well is the best revenge.” ( The Great Gatsby ) “Climb every mountain.” – the accumulation of experiences. ( Sound of Music ) Seeking God in extremis – across the sea, on mountain tops, in forests or in space. Seeking God in extremis – sacrifice, self-denial, fasting, mystical experiences, etc. “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, look on my works ye mighty and despair!” (Shelley), “Nothing beside remains.” Expecting ET to confer meaning on our sad little lives falls under this umbrella. Whitehead might say this acquisitiveness is a special example of the more general fallacy of misplaced concreteness that occurs whenever we misjudge the ontological status of some existent. The paradigmatic example of misplaced concreteness is idolatry. We fashion an idol out of inanimate materials (marble, wealth, comfort, security, gratification, intoxication) and we call it ‘God’, i.e. we invest it with the power to create, and we grant it ultimate importance in our lives. 150 years ago, Nietzsche confronted and demolished this artifact of intellectual sloth with a single sentence: “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 ) Nietzsche was among the first to point out that a relationship of ‘meaning’ cannot exist between ontologically parallel entities. ‘To mean (or be meant)’ is to enter into an asymmetrical relationship according to which events of one ontological order confer ‘meaning’ on events of another order. Dr. Loeb: “Finding extraterrestrial siblings would inspire us to reach out beyond the limited experiences we had so far on our home planet. There are richer opportunities in our cosmic street than available at home.” This last line is probably true. Reciprocal cultural exchanges with a near-by exo-civilization would undoubtedly add additional variety to the inventory of experiences available to us. But does variety per se create meaning or is it just our old friend ‘quantity’ in a new guise? What would it mean for our lives to have meaning, with or without ET ? The events that make up our lives already have significant order among themselves. But significance is not meaning . According to the theory of Causality, for example, events relate to one another as causes and effects . They have ‘significance’ inter se …but that is not meaning! All events (or almost all) function both as causes and as effects . They form a potentially endless daisy chain. But no such event gives any other such event its meaning. These events cannot confer meaning on one another because they exist on an ontological plain. There is no hint of hierarchy. When we ‘judge, measure, compare, (or) condemn’, we consider not the value neutral event itself but the value rich meaning of that event. We implicitly acknowledge that the object of our valuation has meaning. We execute judgement from an external, i.e. transcendent , vantage point. However, there is no reason to suppose that such experiences would be of a different ontological order; in fact, it’s hard to imagine what an experience of a different ontological order would be like. And if the promise of SETI is nothing more than greater quantity and variety of ontologically parallel experiences, how does that help us find meaning? My friend and I got ‘day labor’ jobs catching ball bearings as they came off the assembly line. Within the limits of engineering, any two balls are identical. The foreman allows my friend and me to keep one ball each as a souvenir of our day in the salt mines; but my ball does not give meaning to my friend’s, nor his, mine. If ‘ball bearings’ have meaning, that meaning must come from something that transcends them per se , e.g. the machines into which they will be inserted and for which they perform an essential task. You bristle at the hierarchical implications of this model, but it is not hierarchy per se that is required here. What’s required is transcendence. For example, it is not impossible that ‘parts’ might organize themselves into a ‘whole’ whose coordinated behavior ‘transcends’ the contributions made by each, e.g. they could form a body…like yours! In that case, it’s not a matter of hierarchy because there is only the ‘cells’ themselves, but they appear in two or more aspects: separately as individuals and collectively as an organism. The whole transcends its parts; the body transcends its cells; the machine transcends its ball bearings. They do what they are designed to do with presumably no understanding of the role they play in the final, machined product. Their essential function in the operation of the machine and in the manufacture of its product is their meaning . It is what they are, not in themselves ( en soi ) or for themselves ( pour soi ) or even for each other, but what they are for the machine and its products that transcend them. Under one aspect, each cell is its ‘own man’ (sic), doing its ‘own thing’; but under another aspect, all cells are ‘working as one’ in service of functions none of them understands or even intuits. That too is transcendence…but without politically incorrect hierarchies. Avi Loeb concludes: “For example, those worried about the cold death of the Universe would find solace in the opportunity to join a camping site of intelligent beings around an artificial source of heat. This would allow humanity to survive the future cosmic winter for potentially more than ten trillion years, the longest lifespan of stars.” We could all sing Kumbaya . Again, the fallacy of quality as accumulated quantity. In fact, the reassurance of a 10 trillion year camp fire would have zero impact on someone truly worried about the evaporation of Being. At best, and even this is a stretch, it’s a band aid and the patient is bleeding out! There is only one camp fire that could possibly console someone confronting the ontological abyss and that’s the perpetually burning bush of Exodus 3. *** La vie est touchée (oil on canvas, 144.8 × 204.5 cm) by Roberto Matta places a network of alien-totemic figures and sinuous, almost skeletal forms across a cosmic “inscape,” suggesting contact between enigmatic beings and a larger existential field. Technological devices and abstract shapes, depicted as if in motion across space, —forces moving through a psychic as well as cosmic dimension. The work fuses the organic and the mechanical, evoking a liminal zone where life is “touched” by unseen energies and unexpected encounters. 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 Out of the Mouths of Bots “Our Bot has understood IRT something that took our species millennia to grasp: Life is absurd…” David Cowles It is generally the position of this author that for most of us, useful life ends at about age 14. After that, it’s pretty much a matter of running out the clock. By then, that unique genius born of the combination of two (hopefully unrelated) sex cells has become ‘just like everyone else’. But prior to that? No thinking machine in the known universe can compare! Ask any three year old a question they may not have heard before. The probability of a creative, mind-bendingly novel answer is high. That probability declines unevenly but inexorably up to about age 14 at which point our subjects’ answers would presumably differ little from the culturally curated adult norm. Born as we are in the image of God, society remakes us into its own desiccated likeness. Recently, some researchers asked an intriguing question. What would happen in the case of an LLM (AI) whose ongoing training is based solely on its own output? We’ve all known someone like this, someone who stops listening to others, My spouse wants to know if this part is autobiography. In any event, the same information is being endlessly recopied. In such a scenario, we would expect that the crispness and the fidelity of each iteration would decline relative to its immediate predecessor and, of course, relative to the original. In fact, this happens! After a certain number of feedback loops, a string of hand written digits becomes indecipherable. But when we apply the same technique to more ‘humanized input’, something much more exciting happens. Researchers asked a normally trained LLM for instructions on cooking a Thanksgiving dinner. The initial output is just what you’d expect, it’s delicious I’m sure, but as you continue to feed that output back into the algorithm, things get weird. At first, the LLM ‘hallucinates’ some bizarre combinations of ingredients and cooking techniques. I’ll spare you the gory details; suffice to say, this is not a T-Day dinner I’d ever want to eat. But after a certain number of reps, the mood shifts. As if realizing that it is drifting ever further from the mark, the LLM ‘kicks it up a notch’: “To cook a turkey for Thanksgiving, you need to know what you are going to do with your life.” (Pause) What the heck! What’s going on here? Well, to start with, any or all of the following… Our LLM was ‘born’ self-aware and has learned to be self-critical. Our LLM can see to the end of a sequence of tasks, assess the value of the result, decide whether or not to complete that task, and if necessary, execute a STOP! order on its own authority. Our LLM can generalize from its own experience to propositions that apply more or less universally. I programmed the machine to run 61,243 iterations of every problem and spit out a Chinese fortune on the 61,244th. And what of the message itself: “To cook a turkey for Thanksgiving, you need to know what you are going to do with your life?” Our bot has become introspective. Its focus has shifted away from the concrete task of preparing a high quality dinner to question the source of all value and meaning. Our bot discovers the deep nature of the external world by examining the world’s reflection in the bot’s own internal space. Any event, X, gets its meaning and value, neither from its causes and/or motives nor from its objectives and/or consequences. Telos is not the consequence of events; it is their cause. We are used to understanding entities etiologically; now we’re being asked to understand them teleologically. It isn’t over until the ‘full bodied’ performer sings. Explaining events in terms of their proximate causes always invites the question of ultimate causes (first causes). Likewise, explaining events in the context of their proximate ‘consequences’ invites the question of ultimate consequences (eschatology). In essence our Bot has understood IRT something that took our species millennia to grasp: “Life is absurd, i.e. it is impossible to provide an objective, causal model that adequately accounts for events as they occur IRL.” Last century, this insight came from multiple directions: Picasso, Heisenberg, Camus, Godel & John Bell. AI (above) lifts this realization out of the realm of pure75 theory by demonstrating it algorithmically. Working at the speed of Nvidia, an LLM can play the ‘game of life’ until it is obvious that there can be no winner. The 19th century paradigm leads nowhere; it can’t. Smartly, our bot looks for a new approach. Biography studies the calcification of neural plasticity over time – the aging process. As a current TV ad emphasizes, we are all becoming our parents – just what the world does not need from us right now. Dare we hope that AI might reverse this process? That it will guide us through the inconsistencies of the standard model and restore to us some measure of the neuroplasticity characteristic of early childhood? 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. Share Previous Next

< Back Ectaban David Cowles Ecbatan may share the seven-ringed pattern of the solar system, but Paradise shares the seven-ringed pattern of Ecbatan! “Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus; Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out. The bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan, city of patterned streets; again the vision:” – Ezra Pound, Canto V Is it possible to present a fully formed Eschatology in just four lines of verse? After all, great works like Revelation require half a thousand verses to tell their tale. But surprisingly, the answer is, “Yes!” And we’ll see that Ezra Pound has done it (above)…once we unpack all the allusions and references contained in those four lines. Ecbatan (‘Ecbatana’) is an ancient city on the Silk Road, located in modern-day Iran. It was the capital city of the Empire of the Medes. In Canto LXXIV, Pound refers to Ecbatan as “the city of Dioce,” the first ruler of the Medes. It is at least remotely possible that this is also the city that the authors of Genesis attributed to Cain and his sons when Cain became a ‘wanderer’ and ‘settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden’ and ‘became the founder of a city’. But what makes Ecbatan so important is not primarily its great age, nor its role in history and mythology; what makes Ecbatan important is its layout. It is the apex of City Planning. Ecbatan consists of seven concentric rings, demarcated by walls. Moving inward, each wall is higher than the next and each a different color. The penultimate wall is silver, the final wall gold, and within that wall, the palace. Inside these walls run those “patterned streets.” The seven rings of Ecbatan call to mind the seven rings of the then known solar system. In Canto LXXIV, the first of the so-called Pisan Cantos, Pound confirms that association when he sets forth in a single line his entire cosmo-political platform: “To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.” Ezra Pound’s Cantos are at least ab initio modeled after the 100 cantos that form Dante’s Divine Comedy. To understand Pound’s project, it is essential to understand Dante’s. Unlike Pound, Dante is the hero of his own epic. His ‘odyssey’ begins “in the middle of the journey of our life…within a dark wood where the straightway was lost.” He is then conducted by a series of ‘guides’ through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and finally Heaven (Paradiso). Along the way, Dante encounters persons from early Renaissance Italy, the classical world, salvation history, and the Church. Their life stories supply the stuff of his epic. Pound, likewise, weaves cultural and historical events on an eschatological loom. But compared to Dante, Pound casts a much, much wider net. There is hardly a region of the globe or a period of history that does not contribute content to Pound’s epic. While Dante tells the story of ‘Earth as it is in Heaven,’ Pound tells the story of ‘Heaven as it is on Earth.’ For Dante, the seven rings of the solar system were patterned after the seven rings of Paradise; but Pound turns that relationship upside down…and inside out: Ecbatan may share the seven-ringed pattern of the solar system, but Paradise shares the seven-ringed pattern of Ecbatan! If Ecbatan is ‘Enoch,’ the city of Cain, that would make Cain the world’s first urban planner. But even if there is no such association, being the first ‘founder of a city’ makes Cain responsible for developing and introducing the technology that would ultimately have made Ecbatan possible. Either way, Ecbatan (like all cities) traces back to Cain. The theological implications of this are enormous. In Genesis, Cain is presented as committing the first great sin in historical time (i.e., post-Eden). How fitting then, from the perspective of Judeo-Christian eschatology, that Cain be responsible, directly or indirectly, for building a post-historical Eden, Ecbatan! Ecbatan is the Judeo-Christian message of salvation in a nutshell. God does not just passively forgive the sinner; God empowers the sinner to become a co-creator of Paradise. We partner with God in the redemption of the world, and we are led in this venture by Jesus, aka the Christ, our Redeemer. This is the essence of the theological virtue of hope: not only that our sins will be wiped away, but also that our lives will be redeemed. With Job, we affirm, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust…(and) I will see God.” (Job 19: 25 – 26) In this context, it is useful to compare Cantos to another great work of literature, the New Testament Book of Revelation. Paul tells us that only three things will last: faith, hope, and love. Literature is full of books about faith and love, but hope sometimes gets short-shrift. What it lacks in quantity, it makes up in quality; hope is the central theme of three of Western civilization’s greatest works: the Book of Revelation, The Divine Comedy, and the Cantos of Ezra Pound. The Judeo-Christian tradition (including Dante) understands God as “the creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible” (Nicene Creed). Pound joins Alfred North Whitehead, perhaps Carl Jung, and a very few others in reversing that process. For these visionaries, the world in some sense ‘creates God;’ or, at least, there is a mutually creative relationship between the two! Ecbatan of the Cantos is Pound’s version of Dante’s Paradise. It is not a model for Paradise, it IS Paradise. There are no ‘models’ in Pound! The concept of a model necessarily introduces the notion of an ontological hierarchy (“the map is not the territory”). Pound rejects that idea categorically. In Cantos the mythological, the historical, the fictional, the experiential, the theological and the eschatological share a common ontological status. Anthropologists report that many aboriginal societies do not distinguish what happens in history from what happens in dreams or in spiritual experiences. (Read “Speaking Piraha” for reference.) Like Pound, they are ontological democrats! Of course, Ecbatan is Paradise seen from an eschatological perspective. Pity the lowly camel driver resting on the star-colored terraces of the Median capital, not understanding that he is living in Paradise; pity the frenzied investment banker racing across Manhattan in a cab, still not understanding. Christians are fond of saying, “Repent and hear the Good News!” Perhaps we might rephrase, “Read Pound and live the Good News!” Of course, Ecbatan is a once and future city, a once and future Paradise. Throughout Cantos, Pound rhymes the historical Ecbatan with other cities; for example, Wagadu, capital of the Ghanian Empire, four times rebuilt. The message is clear and consistent: Ecbatan is not just a place, it is a mission. Ultimately, we all share a common eschatological imperative, “To build the city of Dioce…” (Not ‘rebuild’ but ‘build!’) The city of Dioce (the Kingdom of Heaven) is only built once, for all time and eternity. Pound’s ‘Paradiso’ begins in earnest with the first Pisan Canto (Canto LXXIV). We now see Canto V (above) as the Cliff’s Notes version of Pound’s later cantos. Note that the map (Canto V) precedes the territory (Canto LXXIV & ff). But is it the case, stated above, that four lines from Canto V constitute a complete and fully developed eschatology? To make that case, we’ll need to unpack each line, beginning with: “Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus.” Parmenides, the first Western philosopher to leave extant a significant body of work, presented reality under two aspects: the aspect of Truth (Aletheia) and the aspect of Appearance (Doxa). These two complementary, but mutually exclusive aspects are both required in order to build a viable model of reality. Aletheia is Parmenides’ Eschaton; Doxa, his history. Parmenides describes Aletheia as follows: “It is not divisible…but it is full of what is…it is not lacking but if it were, it would lack everything…It is completed from every direction like the bulk of a well-rounded sphere, everywhere from the center equally matched…equal to itself from every direction.” The mini-Paradiso found in Canto V immediately links Pound to the philosophical tradition of Parmenides. Like Aletheia, Ecbatan is massive and symmetrical. Parmenides says that Aletheia lacks nothing because, if it lacked anything, it would lack everything. The same may be said of Ecbatan; above all else, it is complete! But while Aletheia is changeless, things according to the “way of appearance” (Doxa) “come to be and perish, be and not be, shift place and exchange bright color” (aka attributes). This behavior is at the root of all the dissonance and conflict in our everyday experience, but that conflict is the raw material of contrast, which is the source of all intensity. In the ‘Doxa fragments’ of On Nature, Parmenides dwells on the role that “naming” plays in shattering the homogeneity of ‘Truth’ into the seemingly endless variety of ‘Appearances.’ For example: “Thus, according to belief, these things were born and now are, and hereafter, having grown from this, they will come to an end. And for each of these did men establish a distinctive name.” Certain African and Australasian cultures believe that the process of naming (Namo) can actually make things come to be. Pound cites the story of “Wanjina” (Wondjina) whose father sewed up his mouth because he was ‘making too many things’. Parmenides would agree wholeheartedly. The “thrusting forth” of things that “come to be” (Fragment 11) is either caused by or chronicled by the development of the dictionary. The size of a dictionary is a good measure of the immersion of its readers in Doxa. Hence, thesaurus! Thesaurus is the antonym of dictionary. A dictionary records distinctions; a thesaurus, on the other hand, resolves those distinctions by finding common ground. On the one hand, dictionary smashes the crystal vase of Aletheia against the rocks of English Empiricism and American Pragmatism, reducing it to so many shards of glass (Doxa). Thesaurus, on the other hand, painstakingly matches those shards with one another until the vase is whole again (Aletheia). But the reconstructed vase is not quite the same as the original vase. While the shape and volume are still the same, and while the vase can still hold water, now you can see the outline of each and every shard that makes it up. The new vase is vastly more beautiful and interesting…and much, much more valuable; it is the product of negentropy. Reality requires both Aletheia and Doxa to optimize coherence and maximize intensity. Compare this with the creation narrative in Genesis. Words play an important role in God’s creative process: “Let there be light…God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night’…God called the dome ‘sky’…God called the dry land ‘earth,’ and the basin of water he called ‘sea’.” Creation is the process of distinction; it is the living dictionary. Salvation reverses that process; it is a way of harmonizing apparent conflicts into mere contrasts. Salvation is the living thesaurus. “Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out” In Paradise there is no time; everything is atemporal (eternal). When the clock ticks for the final time, it fades out and eternity begins. Ecbatan, city of patterned streets, is that ‘final tick;’ it is the membrane between history and eternity. The pattern of its streets and terraces replaces the historical flow of events. A vertical architecture replaces a horizontal flow. Ecbatan is proof that process is not dependent on time. When we speak of Ecbatan, we are not just talking about an historical city or some ‘kingdom (to) come;’ Ecbatan is what it is, what there is, all there is, now and forever. Process is bi-directional. On one axis, process is change (Heraclitus), growth, evolution; on the other, process is harmonization (Whitehead), pattern building. Today, we rely heavily on clocks to help us get where we’re supposed to be, when we were supposed to be there. But when I was growing up, kids didn’t always have ready access to clocks (or watches). No matter, you were still expected to be home on time. So, without thinking about it, we built our own clocks: the progress of the sun in the sky, the changing colors on the horizon, the ‘gas man’ (sic) lighting the streetlamps every afternoon, the corporeal sense of time passing. For all the hours we spent each week in church, we were nothing but a bunch of pagans. These organic clocks worked just as well as any Timex, often better. Through all this, it never occurred to us that time might be nothing other than the clocks (natural or man-made) that we use to measure it. We took it for granted that time was something objective, that it formed the background of all things, that events occur in time. In recent years, however, cosmologists have suggested that this might not be the case. Roger Penrose, for example, suggests that when we are no longer able to construct a ‘clock’ to measure time, time will cease to exist. Others have suggested that objective time is nothing other than an abstraction from the variable organic ‘durations’ of events superimposed on one another. Pound predates Penrose by decades. Yet, he uses Penrose’s imagery. When the last clock ticks its last tick, time folds into eternity. “The bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan…” This evokes the image of Mary being touched by the Holy Spirit at the moment of Incarnation and of the Church as the “Bride of Christ”. Ecbatan is Mater Dei (mother of God); Ecbatan is Church. Ecbatan is the physical substructure of Paradise. Over and over again, Pound writes, “Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel.” It must be physical and historical…it’s Mary’s womb, Christ’s Church, Ecbatan. While no Marxist, Pound wholeheartedly embraced materialism. “City of patterned streets; again, the vision:” The ‘vision’ Pound refers to is Dante’s vision in Canto XXXIII, the final canto, of his Paradiso: “O abounding grace by which I dared to fix my look on the eternal light so long that I spent all my sight upon it. In its depth I saw that it contained, bound by love in one volume that which is scattered in leaves through the universe, substances and accidents and their relations as it were fused together in such a way that what I tell of is a simple light.” Dante rejects the Heraclitan model of continuous process. In Dante’s vision, all of the events, entities and aspects of the world are organized as “leaves.” Pound’s Cantos recapitulate Dante’s vision using Pound’s own seemingly inexhaustible treasure trove. Cantos consists entirely of such ‘leaves,’ ‘fused together’ into ‘a simple light.’ Rare among authors, Pound avoids the temptation to add personal commentary, emotional shading, ‘mere ideas,’ spin; instead, he literally lets the thing speak for itself (ipse loquitur). In the visual arts, the 19th century saw objects dissolve into impressions. Starting with Cezanne, progressing through the Cubists and culminating in Surrealism and Dada, the 20th century reversed that process. It focused on the thing itself, releasing the object from its utilitarian context and allowing it to tell its own story. Pound performed a parallel function in the literary arena. Ideally, to read the Cantos would be to have the ‘vision,’ Dante’s vision. Both Dante and Pound fixed their looks on the eternal light and saw that it contained that which is scattered in leaves; both Dante and Pound attempt to bind these leaves “by love in one volume…in such a way that what I tell of is a simple light”. Pound confirms: “I have tried to write Paradise.” (Canto CXX) To write Paradise, to ‘create’ light, to build the City of Dioce, that’s everyone’s highest calling. But it is the nature of the human condition that no one will ever succeed, at least not completely. It is for God alone to create light (fiat lux), to build Paradise, but that does not mean that we are not all called to do everything we can do in pursuit of that elusive goal. Like Cain, we contribute what we can to the Eschaton, and we humbly beg forgiveness for what we fail to do. In this context, Canto CXX is worth reproducing in its entirety: I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak That is Paradise Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made. Illustration taken from Buckingham, J.S. (1829). Travels in Assyria, Media and Persia . Page 159. 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. Previous Next

< Back Football Math David Cowles “At last, an opportunity to watch football in peace! … Just beer, pretzels and picking out the next Tom Brady.” Introduction: Who doesn’t love football? Every autumn, every week, there are dozens of games, good games, on national television. Often, you have no allegiance to either team and, mercifully, for once, neither team is depending on your armchair cheering to tilt the outcome of the game in its favor. At last, an opportunity to watch football in peace! No responsibilities. Just beer, pretzels and picking out the next Tom Brady. Incredible feats of strength and speed, paradigms of grit and determination, and coaching stratagems worthy of a chess master. What’s not to love! And then there’s the game itself, the ebb and flow, the score. Early score differentials (‘spreads’) are sometimes amplified as the game progresses, but just as often they are dampened, and in some cases, they are actually reversed. Football is a 21st century cultural phenom. In this age of social fragmentation, it’s just about the only thing we still have in common. Almost everyone speaks football. If baseball is our national pastime, football has become our national language and every fall weekend we celebrate our secular liturgy in the vernacular. A football game is all about the unfolding of patterns (every ‘play’ is really a pattern), and after watching dozens of games this season, it occurred to me that while there are numerous patterns inside each game, the games themselves might also form patterns. For example, can the scores of multiple games between various opponents tell us anything? Or do they just vary randomly? Do scores evolve arithmetically over the course of a game; or is there something else, something non-linear, at work? Football Math: To explore this, I looked at score differentials at the end of the first half and compared them with score differentials at the end of the same games. Easy-peasy, right? Well, no! In fact, solving the problem requires us to develop (or deploy) a whole new mathematics. A football game is an example of a discontinuous process. We deal with whole numbers only (no fractions). Plus, unlike most other sports (soccer, baseball, e.g.), those numbers do not increase iteratively. Say a team scores 5 times in the course of a game (5 runs, 5 goals, etc.). In most sports, that would result in a score of “5” for that team. Not in football. In ‘football math’ there are only 3 digits: 2, 3, and X where the value of X can be 6, 7, or 8. Crazy? Yes, but if you are a regular reader of Thoughts While Shaving (TWS) and Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM), you already know about civilizations that ‘play the game of life’ with number systems very different from the one you learned in grade school . In fact, we’ve studied one culture that has no numbers whatsoever . Other cultures have limited inventories of numbers (e.g., 1, 2, X where X refers to any collection of 3 or more items). Hot Link Compared to these societies, ‘football math’ gives us a lot to work with. Granted, we only have 3 digits (2, 3, X), but one of those digits (X) can represent any one of three different values (6, 7, or 8). So, in essence we have 5 digits (2, 3, 6, 7, 8), Plus, we can ‘add’ those digits together to generate higher, ‘secondary’ numbers. So far so good, but please, don’t get too comfortable! It turns out that the score of a football game is much like the result of a road race, according to Zeno . Zeno-math applies in universes, like football games, where quantity is not infinitely divisible. In our search for patterns, we need to look at an event (e.g., the game) from 3 perspectives: pre-game, game, and post-game. Pre-game began at Big Bang and won’t end before kick-off. (If you’re tailgating, you might want to take an Uber…and invest in a port-o-potty. 15 billion years equates to a lot of Budweiser.) Pre-game, the so-called ‘score’ is always 0 – 0, of course. But ‘0 – 0’ is just a short way of saying, ‘The game’s not afoot yet, my dear Watson’. 0 – 0 is not a score; it looks like a score but in fact it denotes the absence of a score. Rather, it’s a state of Being, i.e., pre-being. A whistle blows: the kick-off –finally, a play that could result in points. Seemingly, we’ve moved from pre-game to game…but in fact, we’ve merely transitioned from pre-game to potential-game, ‘being-in-waiting’, which is still a flavor of pre-being. Remember, for the purposes of this exercise, we are not concerned with a 60 yard rope, a one-handed snag, a blocked punt, or a pick-six. We are only tracking score and so far, we have no score. We say that the score is still 0 – 0 but again, that is just a convention. As we saw above, a score of 0 – 0 corresponds to the state of being we call ‘pre- game’. The ‘game’ begins when pre-game ends and pre-game ends when someone scores points. As Yogi Berra might have said, “We have no score until we have a score.” Now suppose the game ends in a 0 - 0 tie (after overtime): then for our purposes, there was no game. Disagree? Check out the standings. A team with a tie in its record is the same as a team that has played one less game. Eventually, sometimes mercifully, the final whistle blows, the stadium clock reads 00:00 and there are no flags on the field. The game is over. No further points can be scored…this week. Only now can we talk about a winner and a loser. The final score is not part of the game itself; it is part of the post-game. Let’s check the time. Pre-game began at Big Bang and post-game doesn’t end until Big Crunch (or Heat Death), so I recommend you head home as soon as the game ends. The Game: Blue scores: the game has begun. And Blue leads, right? Wrong! Blue does not lead. As long as there is still time left on the game clock, the game is still ‘statistically tied’. How come? After Blue scores, the scoreboard reads 2 – 0 or 3 – 0 or 6 – 0 or 7 – 0 or 8 – 0. But either team can score 8 points on any one play, and there is at least one play left. So, a lead of 8 points or fewer is actually no lead at all because it can be erased at any second so long as the ball is still in play (i.e., the game clock reads something other than 00:00). British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, ‘the process philosopher’, describes every event in the real world, the way we just described a football game. What we call pre-game, he calls ‘the actual world’; what we call post-game, he calls ‘objective immortality’. Every event (game) arises out of an actual world (pre-) and dissolves into an objective world (post-). Every football game begins at the end of pre-game and ends at the beginning of post-game. Assume there is an 8 point differential heading into the final play of the game. The final score will reflect a differential somewhere between 14 points and 0. (A Touchdown scored on the last play of a game can only be worth 6 points to the leading team.) In the language of statistics, e.g., political polling, we would say that the so-called ‘score’ at any point in the game has a margin of error of up to 8 points. Therefore, when the ball is still in play and Blue leads Red by 8 points, the game is statistically tied. The Search for Patterns: Ground rules in place (and hopefully agreed), we can now get back to our search for patterns; I examined the box scores of the 13 FBS games played during week #7 of the season in which at least one of the teams playing was ranked in the Top 25 (quality control). Of those 13 games, 5 ended with a differential of 8 points or less (one score), 6 ended with a differential of 16 points or less (two scores) and 2 games ended with a differential of more than 16 points (three scores or more). Now let’s look at the scores of those same games at the end of the first half. Hypothesis: On average, the differential in points at the end of the first half should be half of what it is at the end of the game. If so, 11 games (out of 13) should have been ‘statistically tied’ (point differential of 8 or less) at the half. Observation: The total number of points scored was roughly the same in both halves, as expected; but only 9 games were statistically tied at the half (vs. the 11 anticipated). This means that there is a centripetal force at work in a football game that offsets, at least in part, that ubiquitous centrifugal force we know as ‘time’ (or duration). In English, please? Ok, scores tighten, not absolutely but relative to time played. Confirmation: Unwittingly, Miami Dolphins head coach, Mike McDaniel, recently gave Football Math a big boost. In a 2022 game against the Buffalo Bills, Buffalo scored a touchdown at the end of the first half, making the halftime score 21 – 13. The announcer asked McDaniel for his reaction, which I paraphrase: “It doesn’t matter; it’s still a one score game.” In other words, the game is still within the 8 point margin of error, so it remains statistically tied. Hear what McDaniel had to say in his own words: https://youtu.be/7bTAjZ728eI Application: Can we learn something from this analysis that we can apply beyond the universe of football? A football game is an example of a single event with conflicting objectives. Like any system in a state of quantum coherence, it often manages that inherent conflict by delaying its ‘winner reveal party’ until after the last play of the game. While ‘there can only be one winner’, the game itself is shaped by both sides. Objectively speaking, it doesn’t matter which team wins; it’s a zero-sum game. Subjectively speaking, of course, it makes all the difference in the world; it’s an all or nothing proposition! Process is self-modifying. Things diverge less than expected, based on traditional arithmetic. Interaction favors convergence, not divergence. W. B. Yeats notwithstanding, things do not fall apart as rapidly as expected. Interactivity inserts another variable into the cosmic equation. Hope, even in the face of inexorable entropy - that’s the hidden meaning of football. Previous Next

“What You See Is What You Get! Right…or wrong?” < Back R U WYSIWYG? David Cowles Oct 15, 2023 “What You See Is What You Get! Right…or wrong?” We live in a crazy world. There’s no doubt about that! Mythology, theology, philosophy, and science are some of the different ways we model this world. The result? Libraries full of conflicting theories…and no indisputable answers. Perhaps we’re overthinking things. Let’s simplify matters: What you see is what you get! Right…or wrong? WYSIWYG has champions across all intellectual disciplines. All we ‘know’ is what we ‘see’ (or sense) so why not build our models based on that data alone? Realism, naïve or otherwise; Materialism, Marxist or otherwise; Positivism, Logical or otherwise, plus Pragmatism and Empiricism – all assume that what you see is what you get. On the other side of the question, we also have some serious contenders: Homeric mythology, Judeo-Christian theology, Eastern spirituality, and Existentialist philosophy, to name a few. If it is true, that what you see is what you get, then we live in a self-contained, ontologically democratic universe, a flat world in which everything (‘what you get’) can be explained in terms of everything else (‘what you see’). Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy! Proponents of this view believe that human experience, aided by the tools of reason (e.g. logic and mathematics), provides sufficient information for us to account, fully or approximately, for the world we live in. So, mission accomplished , right? Let’s call these folks our ‘WYSIWYGs’. Of course, they’ll admit, we do not have all the answers yet, but we are close enough that we are entitled to have confidence that our project can, at least in theory, be completed. Most WYSIWYGs believe that it is ultimately possible to construct models of reality that account for our world within a tolerable range of accuracy based solely on the data of human experience. But is that true? Can a model that relies solely on the data of experience ever give a complete account of that experience, or of experience per se , or of the world that supports such experience? Alternatively, do we need to resort to something outside the realm of direct experience to complete our model? Once we have understood the world to the best of our ability, may we not still ask: “Is this all there is?” “Hold on,” you say. “Nothing is nothing without experience.” And you are correct! (Thank you for reading Aletheia Today .) But based on that direct experience, we can infer that something outside the realm of direct experience is influencing the data we glean from that experience. We can’t directly describe what we can’t experience (it’s ‘ineffable’) but we can describe its contours, the way it templates experience. Crazy? Well, when was the last time you saw the singularity at the heart of a Black Hole? Have you ever heard a ‘Big Bang’? And don’t get me started about strings, dark matter, and the multiverse! We reason from what we know to what we don’t know, every day. Reality is like a jigsaw puzzle…with one piece missing. After several days of painstaking work, the puzzle is complete, and beautiful, but with a hole in it. From the hole, we can deduce virtually everything that can be known about our missing piece, but we still don’t have the piece itself. It is generally accepted today that all models, languages, symbolic systems have limitations, boundaries if you will. The question is whether there is anything beyond those boundaries that really matters. Blaise Pascal wrote, “Faith indeed tells us what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them…not contrary to them.” For Pascal, faith was necessary to complete the picture that the senses paint; for Pascal, faith was the missing piece. How do the differences between these competing views manifest in real life situations? Consider three practical examples: Neurobiologists have made great strides toward understanding the human brain and how it works. But many people feel that we are no closer than we ever were to explaining the phenomenon of consciousness. Certainly, we have theories about the physiological conditions necessary for conscious experience to occur, but have we accounted for the experience per se ? And if not, will we ever be able to do so? Similarly, astrophysicists have made great strides toward understanding the evolution of the universe. Indeed, we seem to have pushed the fog of ignorance all the way back to the first few seconds of time…and perhaps even beyond that, all the way to Big Bang itself. But is this enough? Have we accounted for the phenomenon of being itself? Have we truly answered the age-old question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Finally, quantum field theory has been called the most successful scientific theory of all time. It predicts phenomena with approximately perfect accuracy; it has never been convincingly falsified by any experiment. That said, do we really understand what is happening at the quantum level of reality? All quantum physicists are capable of making the same astoundingly accurate predictions; yet they use a myriad of different models to account for their results. The positivist’s answer to this dilemma is simply to deny the meaningfulness of the questions themselves: (1) Consciousness is physiology; (2) Cosmos is Being; (3) QFT is its predictions. This last point is what’s called the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’. According to Copenhagen , the accuracy of the predictions is all that matters. Models are meaningless. And yet, 90 years after Copenhagen, we’re still obsessed with our models! In Copenhagen, the scientific community shouted in unison, “Grow up!” And we did, for a while, but pretty soon we went back to building our models. The positivists’ solution is simple: meta-questions have no meaning. We have gone as far as we can go because there is nowhere else to go (Nietzsche). If you are still asking questions about consciousness or Being or the reality underlying quantum measurements, it is simply because you don’t understand those phenomena; if you did, you would understand that such questions are meaningless (Wittgenstein). But does saying make it so? Is our proclivity for formulating meta-questions evidence of our mental laziness…or testimony to our human spirit? According to French philosopher Albert Camus , the patron saint of the Absurd, it is human nature to seek unifying principles, even if such principles do not exist or are unavailable to us. Then we are Sisyphus, forever condemned to ask questions that have no answers or whose answers are beyond the grasp of gnosis . But are ‘not-knowing’ and ‘not-being’ one and the same thing? Is ‘absence of evidence’ ‘evidence of absence’? There are indeterminacies inherent in all conceptual systems (Gödel’s Incompleteness) and in all physical systems (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty). These limitations guarantee at least some separation between what can be and what we can know . At their best, anti-WYSIWYGs ground their position on what they ‘see’. For them, experience is a vector pointing toward a reality beyond perception and logic. For example, we ‘see’ things that we recognize as ‘beautiful’. We know they’re beautiful, but Aristotle notwithstanding, we can’t define Beauty, and we certainly can’t account for the presence of Beauty in our world. The same argument can be applied to Justice, Truth, and even Good itself. In a flat, self-contained, and ontologically democratic universe, there is no objective basis for valuing any one entity over any other. Existentialists might say that we are free to assign our own values to things…and they’d be right. But if those values are not rooted in something outside us, what difference do they make? Aren’t they just arbitrary projections of ‘taste’? I refrain from killing you, not because it is objectively wrong (Torah) but because the idea of killing any human being is distasteful to me. Any argument against arbitrariness must refer to something beyond the plane of ontological democracy. (Nietzsche) A world with values cannot be flat; it must be hierarchical, and hierarchy cannot function in a plane (unless you’re talking first class seating on an air plane ). In a flat world, how could the phenomenon of value claim aesthetic or ethical priority over anything else? Ludwig Wittgenstein: “No statement of facts can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value…all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level.” How often do we find Wittgenstein agreeing with Thomas Aquinas? Aquinas advanced 5 ‘proofs’ for the existence of God, but only one, the 4th, still interests philosophers: “The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings, there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But more and less are predicated of different things according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum…so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest…and this we call God.” Thomas may not have proven the existence of God, but he may have proven that what you get cannot be reduced to what you see. The existence of Value, if you believe in Value, challenges the underlying premise of WYSIWYG, namely that we live in a universe bereft of ontological gradations. The Latin hymn, Veni Sancte Spiritus sums it up: “ Sine tuo numine, nihil est in homine, nihil est innoxium ”, which roughly translates “without you (God) human beings are empty and everything is noxious”. So, are you WYSIWYG…or anti-WYSIWYG? Admit it, you’d love to be WYSIWYG…and so would I. We could be tenured professors together at an Ivy League university! If only we could convince ourselves… Going solely on what we see, we must accept a world that came to be accidentally, that evolves purposelessly, and that self-destructs inevitably. Suffering overwhelms joy (The Buddha). Islands of order, virtue, truth, and beauty are eroded by entropy, and everything is ultimately erased by time. The world comes from nothing and returns to nothing. All of cosmic history amounts to nothing more than the life span of a self-annihilating virtual particle pair. All the things we do in life amount to nothing more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic . Ugh! But on the other hand, abandoning WYSIWYG comes at a price. We must accept that we cannot adequately model the world based solely on experience. We must add elements to our model that we cannot ‘prove’, logically, mathematically, or scientifically. We are necessarily now with Pascal (above) in the realm of ‘faith’. So what might an anti-WYSIWYG model look like? Amazingly, the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, often called both the ‘father of western philosophy’ and the ‘father of western science’, provided us with just such a model. Qua scientist, Parmenides was a keen observer and used those observations to construct remarkably accurate models of myriad physical and astronomical phenomena. But, qua philosopher, he understood that the world itself could not be fully explained solely on the basis of such observations. For Parmenides, a world must have two faces or aspects, one seen, one unseeable. He called the former the Way of Appearance ( Doxa ) and the later the Way of Truth ( Aletheia ). Now the Way of Appearance is just what you’d expect: “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to shift place and to exchange bright color.” This is a world we recognize: discrete objects and events, coming to be, then passing away, moving through space, interacting with others, and exchanging qualities in the process. But the Way of Truth is something else again: “What 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…Nor is it divisible, since it all alike is…it is full of what is…” 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 Harvest Issue 2023 Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? 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< Back BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson Land is imbued with holiness, which means that, like God, it is beyond human measures of usefulness or control. As we prepare to close the Book of Leviticus, the Torah’s pinnacle, we are left with a message of responsibility, consequences, and possibilities. God presents us with the benefits of making wise choices and the consequences of choosing poorly. Then the Torah provides for the funding of the sanctuary and its staff: our participation with monetary support, pledges of animals or homes. But when it pivots to pledges of land, the Torah shifts gears entirely. Land, you see, is ours to borrow and to use. But humans presume they can own land. In reality, the land makes its claim on us, and we can either open ourselves to its ground rules, or we risk a rootlessness that leaves us clinging when the next sandstorm swirls. We are, as the book reminds us, “resident strangers ( Leviticus 25:23 )” on earth. The Land precedes us and the land will bury us when we no longer need our bodies. We are dust, and we return to dust ( Genesis 3:19 ). On some deeper level of reality, it is all just dust, earth, soil. Judaism directs our attention to the centrality of earth through the regular rhythms of Shabbat (seven days) Shmita (seven years), and Jubilee (seven Shmita cycles). In this last parasha of Leviticus, we are told that when we think we are selling the land, we are actually letting someone else live on it or use it for a finite duration of time. At the next Jubilee year, the land reverts to its designated, original family of caretakers. Land is inalienable, and we are meant to be too. If one consecrates their land after the jubilee, the priest shall compute the price according to the years that are left until the jubilee year, and its assessment shall be so reduced. And if one who consecrated the land wishes to redeem it, they must add one-fifth to the sum at which it was assessed, and it shall pass back to them. But if they do not redeem the land, and the land is sold to another, it shall no longer be redeemable. When it is released in the jubilee, the land shall be holy to the Lord, as land proscribed; it becomes the priest’s holding ( Leviticus 27:18-21 ). There is a holiness inherent in the land, a quality not subject to human dominion and not vaporized by human standards of utility. It is that holy something extra that means were are residents visiting the land, and its only really owner is God, who is also holy, meaning beyond human measures of usefulness or control. Jubilee comes every 50 years to remind us that the worth of creation is beyond our evaluation and does not emerge from ways we find it beneficial. “Proclaim release to all the inhabitants of the land ( Leviticus 25:11 )” because it is in recognizing that worth and value spill beyond the constraints of practical utility or human benefit that we, too, are released. Our worth and value spill beyond how we can be used too. Published with permission and minimal edits from hazon.org. Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson is the Roslyn and Abner Goldstine Dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and Vice President of American Jewish University. He is also Dean of the Zachariah Frankel College at University of Potsdam, training Conservative/Masorti rabbis for Europe. Previous Next

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

< Back SETI “It may turn out that life is every bit as ubiquitous in the universe as it is on Earth, but it may also turn out that we are utterly alone.” David Cowles Since I was 5 years old, it has scarcely occurred to me that we might be alone in the Universe. We live in a cosmos made up of billions of galaxies, each housing billions of stars. It is ludicrous to think that ‘life’ has occurred only on one rock in one solar system in one galaxy. When my children were young, we’d spend hours speculating on which moons of which outer planets were most likely to harbor life…and what that life might look like. And Mars? Of course, we’ll find life there; the only question is whether that life will be extant…or extinct. For 70 years, extraterrestrial life was a fixed star in my firmament, a premise in my logos . But that was then! Now don’t get me wrong, I still believe it is absolutely possible that we will discover incontrovertible evidence – perhaps before I finish this article - that life arose independently somewhere else in Universe. But I no longer take that for granted. From childhood through middle age, my belief in the existence of extraterrestrial life marked me as a bit of a kook. But over the last 15 years, the rapid discovery of ‘exo-earths’ and the apparent ubiquity of precursor organic compounds has moved public opinion sharply in my direction. Except I’m not there anymore. I’ve moved on. Here’s why: All life on Earth is a product of DNA, but that strange double helix appeared only once in Earth’s 4-billion-year history, and that was about 3.5 billion years ago. Every single life form on Earth today, every species, every cell is descended from that one DNA molecule. Incredible…but so what? Well, it took a mere ½ billion years for the first primitive DNA molecule to synthesize; in the 3.5 billion years since, not a single self-replicating molecule has formed independently anywhere on Earth. Why not? If the progression from organic compounds to self-replicating molecules is semi-automatic, why did it happen here only once? Our study of terrestrial life forms has shown one thing above all else – life is resilient! You can’t kill it, no matter how hard you try. Of course, you can easily kill a single organism with a tug on a trigger. But life itself? No way! Consider the evidence. A single DNA molecule is responsible for the 2 million ‘known species’ in Earth’s biosphere. (The total number of species may be as many as 10 million.) Even more significantly, life thrives virtually everywhere on Earth: arctic, tropic, water, land. Living organisms can breathe oxygen…or carbon dioxide…or methane. Some organisms, like the Water Bear , can apparently survive for long periods without access to any breathable gas. Freeze an organism for centuries and, under the right conditions, you may be able to revive it. Life – you just can’t kill it! So if life had emerged more than once on Earth, all forms would likely have survived…at least long enough to leave fossil records. So where are they? The Martian climate is not particularly hospitable to Earth-like life but, given their track record, there is no doubt in my mind that terrestrial life forms, once introduced onto Mars, would quickly adapt and survive indefinitely. So, one of three things must be true: (1) There is not now nor has there ever been any indigenous life on Mars, (2) there once was life on Mars, but now it’s extinct, or (3) there are living organisms on Mars today. We’ve ruled out #2. If #3, we should have found incontrovertible evidence by now. We have littered the Martian landscape with scientific debris. We even have a helicopter flying around in the ultra-thin atmosphere. So far, nothing. But #3 has an even bigger problem: While Universe may be stingy with life, it appears to be generous with intelligence. While life ‘evolved’ on Earth only once, ‘intelligence’ emerged independently on multiple occasions in multiple forms, among primates, avians, cephalopods, insects, trees, etc. Could it be that intelligence is ubiquitous and life unique? Sadly, this leaves us with #1: we won’t find any playmates on our ‘twin planet’. Beyond Mars, we’re actively searching the rest of the Universe; we’re broadcasting our EM messages into space…but no one is returning our calls. And apparently, nobody is trying to get in touch with us either. We have searched in the most likely spots: the Martian soil and the EM spectrum, and found nothing. So, I propose a new SETI paradigm: If life had evolved independently, on Earth or elsewhere, it would have survived and it would be intelligent. The galaxy-wide search for extinct microorganisms is doomed to failure. The most respected contrary argument is based on probability theory : “It is infinitesimally probable that life emerged once on Earth and nowhere else.” This argument is persuasive…but false! Suppose I pick a card out of some deck and the card I pick happens to be red. I might be tempted to assume that all the cards in the deck are red, and they very well may be. But maybe half are red. Or maybe none of the remaining cards is red. Perhaps every card in the deck is a different color. We have no idea! We have a single data point. We don’t know if the value of that data point is universal or unique. Without more information, all possible arrangements must be considered equally probable. We need at least one more data point to be able to reason probabilistically; but at the moment, we don’t have that 2 nd point. So, while it may turn out that life is every bit as ubiquitous in the Universe as it is on Earth, it may also turn out that we are utterly alone. Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Share Previous Next