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< Back My PCP Should Be a BOT “Dr. Bot would handle patient in-take, conduct the initial interview…order appropriate tests, and offer a preliminary diagnosis…” David Cowles I like my PCP. She does her best, swimming against the tide of a dysfunctional healthcare system. And let’s be clear: if I had a serious medical condition, I’d want to be treated in the U.S. and nowhere else. So I have no time for yet another tear jerking expose of American healthcare! I mean, if that’s how you feel, don’t use it, and next time a loved one needs a complex medical procedure, feel free to head off to Canada, or the UK, or Sweden - wherever you think you’ll fare better; but as you travel, be careful not to bump into ‘medical tourists’ from those countries ‘sneaking’ across our borders to get their care in the U.S. Not your cup of tea after all? Then shut it! ( Full disclosure : I worked 40 years for a company I co-founded to provide health benefits to employees of mid-sized U.S. businesses. So caveat lector .) That said, enough is enough! Prior to 2019, my interaction with the healthcare system consisted of an annual physical and a monthly prescription for a beta blocker. In the most recent 5 years, I have been admitted (overnight) to the hospital a half dozen times - incarcerated for a total of 40 days overall. Not fun! However, I was mainly well treated and the care I received was helpful, albeit minimal. Then I stubbed my left big toe. I’ve been stubbing my toes since the age of 3. Painful but no big deal! This time, however, I damaged the nail and after a week or so it was clear that the nail was coming off, whether I liked it or not. So I called my podiatrist…who could not see me for a month. No problem. I called my PCP and made an appointment for the next day. Her PA took one look at the toe and announced, “We can’t treat this here. You’ll need to go to Urgent Care (UC).” Not a problem either! I’m a strong believer in UC; it has served my family well in the past. This time, however, the two closest UC facilities were ‘booked solid’ and ‘not seeing walk-ins’ that day; so much for ‘urgent’. Plus I needed an X-ray and neither had X-ray capability on site. So my PCP sent me off to the ER…for a stubbed toe! They took me in right away (glad for the revenue perhaps), but 5 hours later, I was still there. Following an X-ray, my ER Doc proudly announced, “Your right toe has a small fracture…which BTW we don’t need to treat.” Ok, but it was the left toe I stubbed! Hmm… In any event, I was sent on my way with a tetanus booster and an Rx for an antibiotic and a referral back to my Podiatrist who suddenly found he could ‘fit me in’ after all. So, all is well, right? Not even a little bit! In a country where some folks have virtually no access to healthcare, I unintentionally and unnecessarily consumed thousands of dollars’ worth…for a stubbed toe. Plus, during my week-long ordeal, I noticed that my docs were more interested in ‘ruling out what isn’t’ than they were in ‘treating what is’. They were running through a check list; they were practicing defensive medicine. They weren’t really looking at my toe…or listening to me ! So how can the system be made better? Begin by transitioning healthcare generalists (PCPs, Pediatricians, Family Doctors) from their current ‘front line’ positions to an ‘oversight’ role. Most current PCP functions could be the responsibility of a new uber-doc, AI Bot, MD, first in its class at Harvard Med. Dr. Bot would handle patient in-take, conduct the initial interview, download my electronic health record, build my medical history, order appropriate tests, and offer my PCP a preliminary diagnosis along with any alternatives that ‘we can’t rule out’. Each diagnosis would come with a full complement of treatment options, including the ‘null option’, and prognoses for each. Only now, at this stage, would a human healthcare professional (PCP) review the data, evaluate Dr. Bot’s conclusions, and make a recommendation to the patient. This sounds good…but can it work IRL? Turns out, it can and it does. On February 10, 2026, the University of Cambridge (UK) reported the following: “Researchers…analyzed heart sounds from nearly 1,800 patients using an AI algorithm trained to recognize valve disease, a condition that often goes undiagnosed until it becomes life-threatening. “ Valvular heart disease affects more than half of people over the age of 65, with around one in ten having significant disease. In its early stages, it is often symptom-free. ‘By the time advanced symptoms develop, the risk of death can be as high as 80% within two years if untreated’, said co-author Professor Rick Steeds from University Hospitals Birmingham. “The AI correctly identified 98% of patients with severe aortic stenosis , the most common form of valve disease requiring surgery, and 94% of those with severe mitral regurgitation. When tested against 14 GPs who listened to the same recordings, the algorithm outperformed every single one and did so consistently. “The technology is not intended to replace doctors, but could be a useful screening tool, helping doctors decide which patients should be referred for further investigation and treatment.” So what does this change accomplish? We have ensured that each patient and PCP get to see the full playing field of potential diagnoses and treatment options. We have massively boosted the productivity of every PCP, allowing them to spend more quality time with each patient and allowing us to increase their compensation. We have empowered doctors to do more MD-level work. We will save money by more often getting the right diagnosis the first time, by reducing the number of ‘false positives’, and by cutting back on the ineffective care wasted treating misdiagnosed conditions. ( Note : 20 – 30% of all the care delivered in the US today is not appropriate for the patient’s actual condition.) And last but by no means least, we will deliver better patient outcomes…much better! As you can see, we are not talking about incremental improvement here. We are talking about revolutionizing the practice of medicine. Results will include a better professional experience, better patient outcomes, and dramatically lower costs. But this future depends on our willingness to integrate Dr. Bot into our practices. Once upon a time only white men were doctors; we fixed that! Now we need to add AI docs to our treatment teams…and we need to do so now! *** Image: "The Doctor," oil on canvas by Luke Fildes, 1891. Located at the Tate Gallery in London. Share Previous Next

< Back Slime! David Cowles Feb 14, 2026 “We’ve come a long way, baby! From little less than angels we have been reduced to little more than bacteria.” It all began with the whales, humpback whales, during the Summers of Love (1967 – 1970). Somebody noticed the gorgeous melodies coming from this species of sea mammal… and recorded them. Whale-song quickly became a chart topper. I mean, what else are you going to listen to, midday in your darkened flat, smoking ‘weed’ with friends? It’s either Led Zeppelin or it’s the whales. (This was the ‘60s after all!) Next question : Why? Why do whales sing? Why do their melodies co-evolve over time? Are they communicating? Communication requires information and intent, a function of mind. Perhaps whales are not mindless automata after all. Perhaps they have their own language, their own topics of conversation, their own minds . Et viola , a few tokes and the entire fabric of the biosphere is unravelling like Laertes’ shroud. If whales are conscious, what about dolphins? And the race is on! Jane adds gorillas to the mix and therefore bonobos, chimpanzees, and other primates. Homophiles quickly move in to limit the damage: “Primates and sea mammals only!” But then along comes octopus, parrots and crows. Surely then, we can agree, “Animals only! I mean, they’ve got to have a brain, a central nervous system, right?” Apparently not. Soon symptoms of consciousness were noted in trees, forests, and the Wood Wide Web (fungi). And what about our single celled cousins? There is no containing this tidal wave. And how about me? (A question that is always appropriate!) Am I one conscious organism, made up of dozens of conscious organs, made up of 30 trillion conscious cells? We’ve come a long way, baby! From ‘little less than angels’ (Heb. 2: 7, Psalms 8: 5) we have been reduced to ‘little more than bacteria’. Now, thanks to Ancestary.com , you can add another member to your cognitive family tree. You should be so proud! Turns out you are 2nd cousin, once removed, to…wait for it…Slime Mold! “Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Cousin Slime.” – St. Francis (2025 update) A recent article in Knowable Magazine (2/11/2026) spells it out: “Some slime molds of the species Physarum Polycephalum consist of one giant, pulsating cell that keeps changing shape as it moves around and branches out to access food and avoid unpleasant things like salt or light. “But it took a 2010 experiment led by Japanese biologist Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University to reveal the depths of its sophistication. When Nakagaki placed the oat flakes that Physarum likes in a pattern mimicking the cities surrounding Tokyo, the slime mold’s branches almost exactly reproduced the efficient transport connections between them that humans had taken years to develop.” Wait up! You’re telling me that a unicellular, brainless mold solved the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP)? And in hours, not decades? Apparently so…with caveats. Slime doesn’t care about precision. It cares about utility. Therefore, it shoots for the quickest possible solution within a functionally acceptable range of accuracy (91% - 96%). This range is a great example of natural selection at work. Accuracy contributes selective advantage; but so does efficiency. Evolution ensures that Slime Mold achieves an optimum balance between the two values. (Note: There may be more than one set of optimum values; the set of all optimum values is called a Pareto Frontier .) Survival is a function of task achievement (food) and energy conservation (rest). Did I get enough food? Ok, but did I expend too much energy getting it? Oops! Natural selection also ‘considers’ a third variable, flexibility, i.e. future adaptability. A perfect solution that is too precious can leave the organism defenseless in the event of a shift in the environment; and since such change is an eventual certainty, inflexible solutions are dead ends, emphasis on dead . Slime’s 4% - 9% ‘wiggle room’ allows it to arrive at a functional solution within a practical time frame (a few hours). Wiggle room also makes the slime’s solution more flexible and therefore more adaptable to changes in underlying conditions. Example : Suppose Tokyo decided to close a station, a supercomputer (like the Concorde TSP Solver) would have to start from scratch; Slime Mold might not need to make any adjustment at all (to remain within the 91% fault tolerance), but if it did, it would require minimal time and energy. Slime builds on past experience; computers cannot, they have no past. So all and all, how do our two heavy weight champions stack up? In one corner we have the Concorde supercomputer (or its equivalent); in the other, we have a unicellular organism known as Slime Mold. Should be a doozy! Haven’t seen a battle like this since a tortoise challenged the great Achilles to a road race. Nakagaki tested Slime Mold against a supercomputer based on the 25 nodes (stations) that constitute the Tokyo area railway system. Both were asked to optimize routes for several different variables simultaneously, understanding that there could be more than one ‘right answer’ along a Pareto Frontier. Note : There are 10^32 possible solutions. So, how’d our champs make out? The ‘Concorde’ solved the problem in several hours with 100% accuracy. Bully! The Slime Mold solved the problem in the same (or less) time but achieved only 91% – 96% accuracy. By design! Because it is more fault tolerant, mold came up with attractive solutions (i.e. points on or near the Pareto Frontier) that the computer had to rule out. So? A draw? Not even close. It’s a knockout! And the winner is… But first…back to Tokyo: Over the next, say, 100 years, how many times will there be changes, temporary or permanent, to the railway network: stations closed, stations opened, lines extended? Plus short term reroutes to accommodate construction and repairs. Ok, but we need our solution to work 24/7/365. Slime Mold will adjust to each of these changes in a matter of minutes; Concorde will need the full several hours, each time . Eventually, the wasted energy cost will swamp any gain in accuracy. Slime builds on the past; Concorde has intelligence…but Slime Mold has wisdom. The supercomputer is never a viable long term strategy, at least not in a world with finite energy resources. Stick with it only if you’re satisfied with an answer that is static and therefore correct ‘only for one time and for one place’ (Eliot). But if you want a solution that will perform long term under real world conditions, Go Slime! Does Slime Mold seem strange to you? Well, did you know, you were once slime? No, I’m not referring to our species’ evolutionary past. I’m talking about you ! When you were in school, there were always a few kids who lived to study and weren’t satisfied with anything less than 100% on every test, right? Slime-like, tell me if I’m wrong, you estimated that you could test in the 85% to 90% range, good enough to satisfy the ‘rents’, and study only half as long…leaving more time for important things…like play . Plus your strategy gave you the flexibility to modify your schedule in special circumstances (e.g. final exam week). “To Karen Alim, a theoretical physicist starting a postdoctoral project at Harvard University at the time… the flow of fluid can be a way of transmitting information…in Physarum , a creature that appears able to learn, remember and make decisions — all without a brain. “Though Physarum is a single cell, the large body it forms can often be easily seen by the naked eye, growing to more than a foot in diameter under favorable conditions. It looks like a central blob from which a network of vein-like tubes emanates — larger tubes, then smaller tubes that fan out from them. Inside those tubes, cytoplasmic fluid is rhythmically flowing back and forth… “Alim, who now works at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, figured out that encounters with food lead to an increase in local fluid flow within the tubes. This exerts greater shear force on the tube walls. The walls in that region grow thinner, allowing the tubes to expand. “The opposite happens when Physarum encounters something awful like salt or light that it wants to get away from. In response to a repellent, the tube walls stiffen and contract, which redirects fluid flow elsewhere. “More recently, Alim and colleagues discovered just what creates a tube network as efficient as Tokyo’s transport links. It ties into something crucial about the fluid flow in Physarum’s body: Tube walls respond to changes in flow with some delay. First the flow increases. Then, slightly later, the tube expands in response, causing the flow to decrease. This causes the tube to shrink, again with some delay. “The result, Alim found, is that the best-positioned tubes will grow larger and larger and receive more and more flow, while others will fade away — and hence, over time, a super-efficient network of links will form. “Put another way, Alim adds, you could say that the shape of the network (and its underlying fluid flow dynamics) helps Physarum to remember. Appropriately sizing its branches in accordance with food sources it has encountered recently makes for a simple but effective way to recall where food can be found…contraction patterns may persist and store information similar to the way waves of activity in our brain can store information. “Slime molds can learn about each other: They are sensitive to aspects of each other’s behavior. They will approach others that have access to food, and avoid (burdening) ones that are starving or stressed…they also prefer to approach young individuals… But intriguingly, when they go through dormancy, or fuse with a younger individual, it’s as if they’re young again.” Perhaps we have a thing or two to learn from our slimy cousins! *** Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Vertumnus (1591) portrays the Roman god of seasonal change as a human portrait composed entirely of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and leaves, symbolizing the unity between human identity and plant life. By constructing a recognizable human face from botanical elements, Arcimboldo expresses the idea that humans are formed from and sustained by nature’s cycles of growth and transformation. The painting also served as an allegorical portrait of Emperor Rudolf II, suggesting his power was aligned with natural order, abundance, and the forces that govern life itself. 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< Back Parmenides and Time Crystals David Cowles Feb 9, 2026 “Our earliest model of Being reappears as the latest in a string of recent cosmological breakthroughs that began with Relativity.” 1000 words, 5 minute read On Nature is the oldest work of European philosophy still extant. The verse epic was composed in the 5th century BCE by Parmenides of Elea, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, widely regarded as ‘the father of Western philosophy’ and ‘the father of Western science’. Parmenides divides Being into two modes: the “Way of Truth” ( Aletheia ) and the “Way of Seeming” ( Doxa ). Most scholars hold that the realm of Aletheia is preeminently real…and Doxa ? Not so much! But Parmenides anticipated such a misinterpretation and took pains to refute it at the outset: “But nevertheless you shall learn…how the things that seem had to have genuine existence, permeating all things completely .” In other words, there is no ‘thing’ without Doxa . Doxa is real, genuine, and universal…as is Aletheia ! Which words did you not understand, Herr Plato (4 th century BCE)? Doctor Popper (20 th century CE)? Nothing spreads quicker or endures longer than interpretive error. For example, we’ve completely misunderstood the 5 th century Book of Job as well. “…What-is (in the mode of Aletheia ) 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…Thus coming-to-be is extinguished and perishing not to be heard of…it is not right for what-is to be incomplete; for it is not lacking, but if it were, it would lack everything…Therefore, it must either be completely, or not at all.” Every actual event needs a little Aletheia in its life. It is not enough to say with Heraclitus, “Everything flows!” Whatever ‘flows’ flows relative to what is static. Nor can we define stasis solely in terms of variations in the rate of change. Change is necessarily ‘change from’ and/or ‘change to’. Aletheia is the immobile point from which every actual event must be evaluated; it is the universal measure, ergo the Truth. On the other hand, by applying Bateson’s criterion, ‘a difference that makes a difference’, we see that participation in Aletheia alone cannot constitute an actual event. Aletheia is undifferentiated and inert: imperishable, whole, steadfast, complete, one, continuous. It cannot pass Bateson’s test. Nor can an actual event exist exclusively in the realm of Doxa . As card waving Heraclitians, we like to say that change is the only constant; what we used to call ‘stability’ is just a measure of variations in the rate of change. However attractive to our modern sensibilities, this view makes no sense, empirically or logically. In the realm of Doxa , everything is perpetually coming to be and/or perishing. Therefore, nothing ever really is. There is Past and there is Future but there is no Present; without Aletheia , eternal presence, there is no now . “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, and to shift place and to exchange bright color,” – Parmenides describes what it is to exist in the realm of Doxa. An actual event needs Doxa , ‘genuine existence permeating all things completely’, as much as Aletheia – ‘ungenerated and imperishable’. Like sex and marriage before the Summer of Love (1967), Aletheia and Doxa are inseparable. Actual events occupy a space between Aletheia and Doxa and resonate with both. Since Plato, the pre-Socratic philosophers, Parmenides included, have been ignored by the academy . However, their ideas and models, often without attribution, pop-up, most recently in Kant, Heidegger, Sartre, and Whitehead. In 2025 a team of physicists led by Leo Joon Il Moon discovered a configuration of matter that is reminiscent of the ideas found in On Nature . In a ‘Rondeau Time Crystal’ (RTC), aka ‘Time Rondeau Crystal’, a pattern repeats indefinitely across time . Immediately, you can see that these new entities combine permanence ( Aletheia ) with proliferation ( Doxa ). An RTC consists of three phases which I’ve labeled: Alpha , Delta, and Omega . I propose that we equate RTC’s Alpha phase with Parmenides’ Aletheia and Omega with Doxa . Drawing heavily on the work of Alfred North Whitehead, I understand Alpha to be the set of permanent, objective values that motivate, guide, and judge every actual event. Doxa , then, is the set of eventualities, possible outcomes , all potential matters-of-fact to the extent that they embody, reflect, and are not inconsistent with, Alpha values. The relationship between Alpha and Omega is determined. The realm of Delta , on the other hand, is the home of indetermination: free will, intentionality, agency…plus chaos. Nothing that happens in Delta is caused or even influenced by anything else. Whatever happens is causa sui and sui generis . But there’s more! The topology (shape) of Delta is a function of its position between Alpha and Omega – like a hammock strung between two trees. As a result, conditions in Delta are conducive to the emergence of ‘local’ islands of low entropy, i.e. increased order. That order takes the form of patterned relationships among elements and patterns resonate. Specifically, patterns, actual but transient in Delta , resonate with potential but eternal patterns in Omega . Patterns in Alpha resonate with patterns in Omega , uniting the two. Patterns that emerge indeterminately in Delta may (or may not) resonate with patterns in Alpha and Omega , but whenever patterns resonate, they fuse: one pattern, many manifestations. The Parmenidean-Moon model channels Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Actual events in Delta resonate with potential events in Omega and eternal values in Alpha , resulting in a World that is both concrete and atemporal. Again, Parmenides was out in front: “…She (the goddess) devised Love ( Erota ), first of all the gods…” Erota ↔ Resonance. Our earliest model of Being reappears as the latest in a string of recent cosmological breakthroughs that began with Relativity . What a gift it is to be alive today, curious and conscious! *** Hilma af Klint — The Ten Largest (1907) presents human life as a continuous process of growth, transformation, and renewal, from childhood through old age. Using vibrant color, spirals, and organic forms on monumental canvases, the series visualizes invisible forces—spiritual, emotional, and biological—that shape becoming rather than fixed identity. The paintings suggest endless possibility by treating change not as disruption, but as the fundamental rhythm of existence itself. 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< Back God, Christians, and… Aliens David P. Bugay Feb 5, 2026 Exploring the Edges of Faith with an Inquiring Mind 1500 words, 7 minute read (This post is contributed by David Bugay, PhD, an author, professor, and ordained minister devoted to equipping people to live with purpose, integrity, and faith.) If any group is philosophically prepared to consider the possibility of non-human intelligences, it may well be Christians. At first glance, this seems counterintuitive, as discussions about aliens and extraterrestrial life are frequently presented as challenges to belief in God, implying that faith and a populated universe were mutually exclusive. However, when we look more closely at Christian theology, a surprising realization emerges: Christianity has always affirmed a reality filled with intelligences beyond humanity—long before science gave them new names. At the foundation of Christianity stands belief in God as the most extraordinary Being conceivable. God is not merely stronger or intelligent than humanity; rather, God is understood as the source of all existence itself. Christians readily acknowledge that the fullness of God’s nature lies beyond human comprehension. Scripture does not attempt to tame this mystery; instead, it invites believers to live within it. That invitation quietly prepares Christians for a universe far stranger, richer, and more populated than everyday experience suggests. A Reality Beyond the Human First, Christianity insists that God is not human. While Christians believe God entered history in the person of Jesus Christ, this act was not because God was limited or confined, but rather because humanity required redemption and reconciliation. The incarnation represents divine accommodation with God stepping into human experience so that we might come to know Him. Jesus taught that “God is Spirit” and repeatedly emphasized that God’s ways and thoughts transcend human thoughts and experiences. From the very beginning, Christian faith affirms that reality extends far beyond what can be seen, touched, or measured. Second, God’s capacities defy all human limitations. Christians believe that God hears the prayers, fears, gratitude, and cries of billions of individuals while simultaneously sustaining the cosmos each moment. This form of intelligence is not bound by space, time, or physical constraint. It is a vision of consciousness operating on a scale that dwarfs anything in human experience. Non-Human Intelligences in Scripture Scriptures describe encounters between humanity and non-human intelligences. One of the most debated passages is found in Genesis 6, where Scripture refers to mysterious beings called the “sons of God.” These beings interact with humanity, and their influence is portrayed as deeply corrupting, contributing to violence and moral collapse. The text speaks of “giants” and “men of renown,” figures who loom large in both physical presence and cultural memory. Historically, many scholars have believed these beings to be fallen angels—spiritual intelligences in rebellion against God, who seek to distort creation and undermine God’s redemptive purposes. Others interpret the passage symbolically or theologically. Regardless of interpretation, the text undeniably presents the idea that powerful, non-human beings once interacted directly with human civilization, with catastrophic consequences. Within this framework, humanity alone stands under the promise of redemption first articulated in Genesis 3:15. Here we see the promise of our future redeemer crushing Satan’s head and Satan bruising His heel. These other worldly beings are not described as its recipients. The narrative suggests a violation of God’s created order, resulting in beings that do not reflect His design or intention. The flood, as judgment, marks a decisive reset—an act of preservation as much as punishment. What It Means to Be Human Christian anthropology further broadens this already expansive worldview. According to Scripture, humans are created in the image of God—not physically, but in nature. Humans are not merely biological organisms. They are embodied souls, possessing mind, will, and emotions. Within the soul resides the human spirit—the dimension of being capable of communion with God. Christians believe that at death, the body ceases, but the soul and spirit continue in the presence of God. This transition occurs beyond human observation and scientific instrumentation, yet it is affirmed as real, conscious, and meaningful. In other words, Christians believe in personal existence beyond the physical body and that challenges strictly material explanations of reality. A Populated Invisible World Christian theology affirms the ongoing presence of invisible intelligences in the contemporary world. Angels are described as non-human beings created to fulfill God’s purposes including guiding, protecting, or intervening in human affairs. Conversely, Scripture speaks of malevolent spiritual entities, commonly referred to as demons, whose objectives include deception, corruption, and destruction when permitted. These beings are not visible to the human eye, yet Christians maintain that their influence is both real and consequential. Even more striking, Christians believe that the boundary between the living and the dead is not absolute. Scripture describes believers as being “surrounded by a cloud of witnesses,” referring to those who have gone before them in faith. Some Christian traditions describe this as the Communion of Saints. While often expressed in general or poetic terms, this belief affirms a conscious, populated reality beyond the physical world. A Vast and Abundant Creation This theological perspective exists with Christianity’s awe-filled vision of creation itself. The universe contains trillions of stars organized in galaxies stretching beyond human comprehension. Christians interpret this vastness as the visible handiwork of God—a testimony to divine creativity and abundance. The night sky is not seen as empty space; it is viewed as a canvas proclaiming generosity rather than scarcity. This leads to an uncomfortable but unavoidable question: Is it reasonable to believe that God created all of this solely for one small planet and one species? Humanity has a well-documented tendency toward self-centeredness, instinctively placing itself at the center of existence. Yet the immense scale of the universe challenges this assumption. “If God created such immense cosmic real estate, vastness itself may be part of His signature.” Faith and the Possibility of Extraterrestrial Life Christians already affirm the existence of intelligent, non-human beings. God, Angels, and demons are all believed to be not human entities. Even humans, according to Christian doctrine, are not solely material; they are supernatural, destined for continued existence beyond physical death. If this is already accepted, then the possibility of additional created intelligences elsewhere in the universe should not be surprising. Contemporary science often speaks of other dimensions or planes of existence when addressing realities beyond direct observation. Christianity has spoken of this concept for millennia. The deeper challenge may not concern the existence of extraterrestrial life, but rather our willingness to accept that reality is far larger and more populated than our senses allow us to perceive. Surveys indicate that a strong majority of scientists believe life exists elsewhere in the universe, and an increasing number of Christians share this belief. Many prominent Christian leaders and institutions have publicly stated that extraterrestrial life would not contradict Christian faith. The relative silence on the topic within churches may reflect discomfort or simple habit rather than theological impossibility. Questions at the Edge of Faith If humanity were ever to encounter intelligent life beyond Earth, profound theological questions would follow. First, it would be necessary to consider whether such beings are “human” in the theological sense—not in physical form, but in being made in the image of God and possessing body, soul, and spirit. Or might they resemble the disruptive entities described in Genesis 6, seeking to circumvent God’s purposes? If so, how would the people of Earth know without interaction with these beings? Would we have to explore their perspectives of the universe itself and of God? Second, how would God relate to such beings? Are we the only ones where God Himself visited through His Son or, would God have multiple incarnations of Himself with other forms of life? Is Earth the only place where God in the flesh has made an appearance? If so, there is a far broader mission in sharing Christ with others, maybe beyond the bounds of this world. Third, would such beings need to hear the Gospel from humans, or would God have already revealed Himself to them in ways appropriate to their nature? Might they possess their own testimony of God’s Word, suited to their unique world and history? Nothing to Fear Ultimately, the central issue is trust. If God is with us, there is little reason for fear. Christian faith has always demanded humility before mystery, courage in the face of the unknown, and hope beyond sight. Should the universe contain intelligences which challenge all human imagination, then it would also provide opportunities to witness anew the depth, creativity, and sovereignty of God. In that sense, Christians may be well prepared to encounter the unknown—whether in this life or beyond. They already worship a God who exceeds every conceivable boundary. 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 St. John’s Time Crystal David Cowles Feb 2, 2026 “Order and freedom can and do coexist in a single entity.” 2100 Words, 10 Minutes Who discovered the Rondeau Time Crystal (RTC), aka Time Rondeau Crystal, Leo Joon Il Moon (2025 CE) or John the Evangelist (c. 80)? Hint : Dr. Moon applied for a patent only to be told by the U.S. Patent Office that his idea had been in the public domain for almost two millennia. A Crystal (think diamond, quartz, et al.) is a state of matter in which a particular pattern repeats indefinitely in space . They’ve been around for at least 4 billion years. A Time Crystal is a state of matter in which a particular pattern repeats indefinitely in time . Time Crystals were discovered in 2012. A ‘Rondeau Time Crystal’ is a type of time crystal that consists of three phases: Alpha and Omega phases, which are co-determined, separated by a Delta phase which is entirely indeterminate ( aka chaotic). RTCs were discovered by Dr. Moon’s team in 2025. Who cares? We do, all of us! At least since the dawn of the so-called Enlightenment, physicists, philosophers, and theologians, strange bed fellows they, have been wrestling with a common problem: How can we reconcile free will with causality? Innumerable solutions have been proposed but none has achieved anything approaching consensus. Many exclude free will entirely (Laplace); some exclude causation (Hume). Others have suggested ways to package the two without slipping into the intellectual quicksand of dualism (Sartre). But frankly, it’s a bit of a mess. Now the Moon Team has suggested that determinism (causality) and indeterminism (chaos, freedom) might co-exist in a single entity. But they have done more than just suggest; they have demonstrated it IRL! (In my view, this is the most important scientific breakthrough in 60 years, i.e. since John Bell proved mathematically that the universe is non-local and Alan Aspect demonstrated it experimentally a few years later.) In an RTC, the determinate phases recur, oblivious to the chaotic Delta phase, while Delta , whose content is wholly undetermined, is nonetheless ‘shaped’ by its position in-between Alpha and Omega . How so? Remember that Summer when you decided to take life easy for once? You ordered a hammock from Amazon, and when it arrived (next day), you left it in a heap on your lawn. As a pile of rope and canvas, it had no defined shape. But when you strung that material between two trees as directed, voila , it suddenly assumed a mathematically well-defined shape: catenary . The hammock acquired its signature (and oh so welcome) topology (shape) from its position between two trees, and it is because of that topology that you were able to spend the summer sipping gin & tonics and chipping away at your multiyear sleep deficit. Likewise, in an RTC the content of the Delta phase is wholly indeterminate, but its topology is strictly a function of its position between Alpha and Omega . Importantly, Delta’s shape turns out to be conducive to the formation of short-lived local islands (yes, I’m aware I just ‘three-peated’) of low entropy, i.e. relative order as measured by the absolute order characteristic of Alpha/Omega . But what could any of this possibly have to do with John the Evangelist? John’s Gospel includes events in the life of Jesus that the other three evangelists (MM&L) skip over. Understandably so! John’s Gospel addresses a different audience and serves a different purpose. John is more focused on theology, less on biography, than his predecessors. By the time John put pen to paper, the story of Jesus was well known, at least in certain circles. The challenge now was to articulate the meaning and significance of that story. Appropriately, John records in detail Jesus’ final teaching to his apostles, delivered at the Last Supper and during their post prandial procession to Gethsemane. The so-called ‘Farewell Discourses’ (FDs) occupy four chapters (13 – 17) in John . Here the evangelist presents a cosmology whose structure, as we’ll see below, prefigures Dr. Moon’s RTCs. The FDs mainly concern relations among three entities: (1) God the Father (YHWH), (2) God the Son (Christ), and (3) the World, beginning with the 11 faithful Apostles. Jesus describes the Father-Son relationship in language suggestive of the Alpha and Omega phases of an RTC with the World as its Delta : “I am in the Father ( Alpha ) and the Father is in me ( Omega )...” (14: 10) Alpha ↔ Omega “…And you in me and I in you.” (14: 20) Delta ↔ Omega “…I in them and you in me.” (17: 23a) Alpha → Omega → Delta “…You love them as you loved me.” (17: 23b) Omega ← Alpha → Delta “…So that the love you had for me may be in them and I may be in them.” (17: 26) Delta ← Omega ← Alpha → Delta This is a paradigm of the differance (Derrida) that is the foundation of consciousness. Delta experiences Alpha directly and then again through the mediation of Omega . This slight displacement, which applies in varying ways and degrees to most experiences, creates the ‘gap’ which consciousness bridges. This gap is what consciousness experts mistake for a Global Workspace or for the site of Information Integration . Sidebar : This also explains why consciousness seems so widely distributed among living organisms, even those that lack any sort of brain or central nervous system (e.g. bacteria). Basically, any organism capable of both direct and mediated experience is at least dimly conscious (Whitehead). *** “He who dwells in me and I in him will bear much fruit for apart from me you can do nothing. He who does not dwell in me is like a withered branch thrown into the fire and burned.” (15: 5-6) Applying a formula first proposed by Gregory Bateson, Being consists of ‘babies having babies’ – i.e. differences making a difference. Whatever occurs only in spacetime is finite; by definition it makes no ultimate difference, so it is not (and never was). Things are just as they would be if nothing had ever happened (nothing ever did happen). . An event isolated in Delta is like a withered branch consumed by fire… unless that event can somehow be eternalized . (Stay tuned) “This is my father’s glory , that you may bear fruit in plenty…” (15: 8) Alpha ← Delta → Omega Glory is a deceptively simple concept. We think of it as some sort of spectacular theophany, preferably accompanied by fireworks, but the Hebrew root suggests something more mundane, like gravity . Glory shapes spacetime as two trees shape a hammock; it’s closer to a cause than it is to an effect. “…Through them my glory has shone…that they may be one as we are one.” (17: 10-11) Delta exists only in the context of Alpha/Omega and while the latter does not determine the content of the former, it does exert some subtle influences as noted above. Those influences may be summarized as God’s Glory , i.e. God’s gravitational influence . *** I am reminded of Deuteronomy (30:19): “I set before you life and death, blessing and curse, therefore choose life.” Of course, this is not a choice at all because Option B cannot in fact be chosen…it runs afoul of the Grandfather Paradox . To cease being is never to have been at all: Is you is or is you ain’t? But if you had never been, you would not be on hand now to choose Option B. So choosing Option B precludes you from choosing Option B. Clever… So there is only one option, Option A: Live long and prosper! Choose life and be! Virtual events in Delta vanish into the oblivion of never having happened… unless they are somehow able to transcend spacetime by co-locating in Alpha/Omega . *** “As the Father has loved me so I have loved you. Dwell in my love.” (15: 9) Alpha → Omega → Delta “This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you.” (15: 12) Delta ↔ Delta ← Omega → Delta ↔ Delta “If you heed my commands, you will dwell in my love, as I have heeded my Father’s commands and dwell in his love.” (15: 10) Delta ↔ Omega ↔ Alpha So how do I, in Delta , co-locate with Christ in Omega ? This simple question summarizes the entirety of Christian spirituality and ethics…and not just Christian. In the end, it is the existential question, the only question that matters. If I fail to solve this riddle, at least intuitively, I lose everything. Bumper Sticker : Co-locate or Be Not! YHWH makes this clear at the outset of his first intervention in human history, the Exodus: “I am who am.” (Ex. 3: 14) Billboard : Want to be? Go through me! When I heed a command, I conform my behavior to the will of another; I perform physically what another has willed intellectually. God’s sole command is that we love one another. When we do so, we conform our actions to his will ( Omega ) and our will to his values ( Alpha ). God is primordially and essentially co-located ( Alpha and Omega ). His acts and values resonate, they share a common wavelength, they are mutually reinforcing. When we act in concert with God’s will (i.e. when we love), we are co-located as well but accidentally , not essentially. Still, we share the common wavelength and our acts resonate with God’s values and will. Sidebar : Resonance is pattern and pattern is information and information (bit) trumps infrastructure (it): “It from bit” (Wheeler). When patterns resonate, they merge and become one pattern across many structures. The epiphenomenal figure (pattern) becomes the substructural ground. When patterns merge, they co-locate, so one pattern may, and usually will, appear in all three phases ( Delta , Omega and Alpha ) simultaneously. Events in the World ( Delta ) are undetermined; they are sui generis and causa sui , free to conform, or not, to God’s will and values. By obeying God’s command (‘love one another’) we freely choose to conform our actions so they resonate with God’s will and values and co-locate in Alpha/Omega - a union of act, value, and will. Fortunately, God is omni potentia . Alpha defines his nature (Values) but Omega consists of every possible state-of-affairs that is not inconsistent with those values. The ‘way’ is not narrow after all; it is exceedingly broad. We do not have to guess at God’s will. We’re not required to pick THE right answer; we just need to avoid wrong ones, i.e. ones that are incompatible with his values ( Alpha ). “In my father’s house there are many mansions.” (14: 2) “We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus, to do good works that God has prepared for us in advance that we might step into them.” - Paul’s Letter to Ephesians (2: 10) The set of good works God has prepared for us includes whatever is not incompatible with his values. Here God’s Providence and Mercy come into play. The shaping of Delta (Providence) favors the emergence of order , measured by compatibility with God’s will. We can do what is right in our own eyes, confident that if we allow our actions to be guided by Divine Values (e.g. Beauty, Truth, Justice), we will not act in ways that are incompatible with God’s will, knowing that a merciful God redeems every act, no matter how ‘divergent’, as long as it does not conflict irredeemably with his nature. Confirmation of this is found in 4 places in the Book of Judges : “In those days, Israel had no king; everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” (17: 6, 18: 1, 19: 1, 21: 25) When we successfully conform our acts ( Delta ) to God’s values ( Alpha ), our temporal acts resonate with states-of-affairs located in Omega , merging with them to effect co-location so that we may participate in Eternity. Mortality is not an alternative to Eternity ( StarTrek ), it is the deprivation of Eternity. To exist exclusively in the Delta phase, i.e. to be ‘temporal only’, is to be incompletely real. Whatever is fully real is co-located. Eternity trumps mortality. Once an event is eternal, mortality loses all meaning. To be clear : we are not saying that God, or the Universe, is an RTC. Rather, we’re saying that the discovery of RTCs proves that order and freedom can (and do) coexist in a single entity, suggesting that what is transient in Delta can also be eternal in Alpha/Omega . Not bad for a day’s work! *** El Greco — Saint John the Evangelist (c. 1605) presents John as a youthful, inward-looking figure, emphasizing spiritual intensity over historical realism. El Greco’s elongated forms, cool blues, and flickering highlights create an otherworldly presence, suggesting John’s role as visionary and theologian rather than narrative actor. The saint’s upward gaze and symbolic attributes (often associated with revelation and the Eucharistic chalice) reinforce themes of divine inspiration, love, and mystical insight central to John’s writings. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back The Power of Prayer David Cowles Feb 3, 2026 “May what is potential become actual and what is transient, eternal.” Earlier we introduced our readers to a new development in physics that may have earth shaking significance for philosophy and theology . I am referring to the 2025 discovery of a ‘Rondeau Time Crystal’ (RTC), aka ‘Time Rondeau Crystal’, by Leo Joon Il Moon, et al. Recap : An ordinary Crystal (think diamond, quartz, et al.) is a configuration of matter that repeats a particular pattern indefinitely in space . A Time Crystal is a configuration that repeats a pattern indefinitely in time . An RTC is a specific flavor of Time Crystal with its own unique, and surprising, internal structure. An RTC consists of three phases which I’ve labeled: Alpha , Delta, and Omega . There is a causal (deterministic) link between Alpha and Omega . Delta is an indeterminate ( aka chaotic) region separating the two . The introduction of indeterminate elements does not disrupt in any way the hard-wired causal connection between Alpha and Omega … which raises another question: What role does the Delta phase play in overall evolution of the crystal? Stay tuned for that, but in the meantime… Resolved : “That Free Will and Causality can co-exist in a single entity.” Up to now, this was a fit topic for high school debate club. No more! The Moon Team just built a working, physical model that combines determined and indeterminate behavior in a single entity. We know the world through propositions , i.e. patterned relationships among disparate elements. We do not see a figure ; we only see a figure in the context of a ground . We see patterns, the juxtaposition of elements. “It’s cloud illusions I recall; I really don’t know clouds at all.” (Joni Mitchell) Propositions (patterns) may be physical (the juxtaposition of objects) or conceptual (the juxtaposition of symbols). Caveat : We must resist the temptation to think of ‘propositions’ merely in terms of words organized into sentences. A sentence is a proposition, but so is a melody, an image, a recipe, or the tower my toddler just built with her blocks. Propositions are patterns and patterns resonate. Patterns in Alpha resonate in lock step with patterns in Omega , uniting the two. Patterns that emerge indeterminately in Delta may (or may not) resonate with patterns in Alpha and Omega . But whenever patterns resonate, they are one! One pattern, multiple manifestations; but the pattern is the thing . Sidebar : Subatomic particles that interact with one another become ‘entangled’ so that the behavior of one is immediately correlated with the behavior of the other, even if they are separated by vast distances. Similarly, when patterns resonate, they become entangled; the many become one. Same process? Or merely analogous? Spend an evening at the symphony: dozens of musicians playing dozens of instruments yet no cacophony, just soaring melodies. When the tones of different instruments resonate, they fuse into a single, albeit complex, sound. Likewise, patterns in Alpha , Delta , and Omega can resonate. What makes this extraordinary is that the ‘raw material’ of each phase differs from the other two. Patterns are apparently ‘medium agnostic’. Sidebar : Being combines appetition and satisfaction. We are motivated by qualia , i.e. values, and we seek to realize those values in a real event, i.e. to make a difference. It is convenient for our purposes to allocate qualia to the Alpha phase and outcomes to Omega . However, there is no suggestion that this reflects anything we currently know about the internal constitution of Moon’s RTCs. So Alpha is home to values , the qualities that make the cosmos cook. Omega consists of outcomes , potential matters-of-fact. Delta is the realm of indeterminate acts, free or random, conceptual as well as physical. In an analogy from Quantum Mechanics, Delta = decoherence. Events in Omega are eternal but potential; events in Delta are actual but transient. If only we could somehow merge these two worlds! Prayer : May what is potential become actual and what is transient, eternal. Because of the hard wired causal connection between Alpha and Omega , potential outcomes in Omega include only those matters-of-fact that are consistent with the values resident in Alpha . The patterns that emerge in Delta are subject to no such filter. However, a pattern in Delta resonating with a pattern in Omega is one and the same pattern: what was potential is now actual , what was transient is now eternal . We are left with a single pattern co-located in Delta and in Omega . The wave function collapses in Delta ; it is atemporal, i.e. eternal, in Omega . That is the function of the Delta phase (above): to make the potential actual. Here is where some ‘religionists’ go wrong: they deprive God of novelty, adventure, creativity and intensity of experience. They assume that Omega consists of settled matters-of-fact. As a result, they define the human project as conforming behavior in Delta to specific, set patterns in Omega . If these Preachers of the Narrow Way were right, then absent God’s infinite mercy, only Jesus would be saved. He is the grain; we are the chaff. But on the contrary, Omega consists of every potential matter-of-fact that is consistent with the Alpha values. Everything , to the extent that it is consistent with Alpha , pre-exists potentially but eternally in Omega . It is our job is to conflate selected possibles resident in Omega into specific actual events in Delta . Excuse me! Wasn’t this article supposed to be about prayer? So it is! A prayer is a conceptual proposition in the form of a petition. It proposes a specific matter-of-fact: “May what is potential become actual and what is transient, eternal.” And when the pattern that is our petition resonates with a potential matter-of-fact in Omega , we say that our prayer has been ‘answered’. “If you dwell in me and my words ( Alpha values) dwell in you, ask what you will and you will have it.” (John 15: 7) “…If you ask the Father for anything in my name, he will give it to you.” (16: 23) “Ask and it will be given to you.” (Matthew 7:7) It’s just that simple. The way is not narrow after all; in fact, it is exceedingly broad. Whatever we do in Delta is redeemed, saved, eternalized in Omega – only so long as it does not contravene the divine values (Alpha). So live life to the fullest, always keeping Beauty, Truth, Justice et al. top of mind, joyously and gratefully embracing the promise eternal life, for “in my father’s house there are many mansions.” (John 14:2) *** Caravaggio’s The Conversion on the Way to Damascus captures the instant of Saul’s spiritual transformation, showing him fallen, blinded, and utterly vulnerable as divine light interrupts his former life. The composition shifts focus away from spectacle to inner change, emphasizing humility and surrender rather than heroic action. Prayer here is implied not through gesture but through total dependence, marking a radical turning point from persecution to faith. 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 Kids and Curiosity David Cowles Sep 1, 2025 “No parent or grandparent fails to notice that their kids’ insatiable curiosity wanes with the onset of puberty.” Andrea Tamayo, a newsletter writer, recently published a short reflection in Scientific American (August 29, 2025). Everything she says in this mini essay is 100% true, and yet the essay itself is not! How can that be? Let’s listen in: Science is about asking questions. Yet, over time, many parents notice that their child might lose interest in exploring the world around them. Scientists hypothesize this might be due to some linguistic cues. When talking to children, adults may say things like “Let’s be scientists today!” (to promote curiosity) or “You’re such a good scientist!” (to praise a child). But this language focuses on science as an identity, rather than a set of activities and actions that people do, which can be demotivating. Framing science as actions that we take , for example saying, “Let’s do science!” seems to protect children’s interest in and motivation to engage with science over time. Andrea is right, of course! No parent or grandparent fails to notice that their kids’ insatiable curiosity wanes with the onset of puberty. Yes, it is a tragedy, but it has almost nothing to do with an adult saying, ‘Let’s be scientists’ instead of ‘Let’s do science’. Of course, it is better to talk of ‘science’ as something we do rather than as something we are; but this fine distinction has almost nothing to do with the huge drop in teenagers’ intellectual curiosity. In fact, both phraseologies are demeaning and reflect adults’ insatiable need to infantilize the children in their orbit. We make it abundantly clear to our charges that they are not doing real science, that they are not being real scientists…they are just playing . And yet it is precisely to children (or child-like minds) that we need to look for our next conceptual breakthroughs. There is a reason why the Fields Medal is only awarded to mathematicians under the age of 40. Adults are bigger and stronger and know more than most kids, so why do we feel a need to marginalize them and trivialize their contributions; why do we damn them with faint praise? Do adults realize, consciously or not, that their rugrats are orders of magnitude smarter than they are? Is this what makes us insecure and defensive? Between a 50 year old and a 5 year old, I’d choose to spend time with a 5 year old any day…I would, that is, if I could keep up. I can hang with my 50 somethings for months on end and never hear a fresh idea; I’m sure they would say the same of the time they spend with me. “…People talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.” (Bob Dylan) Adults speak ‘rote words in rite order’ but for the most part they are incapable of novelty. They can reprise CNN, Fox News, or NPR for me, but they can’t tell me what they think. Nor can they float a totally novel idea. We sub-out our thinking to academia and the media. After all, creative thinking is a lot of work, and we have lost confidence in our ability. We are more than happy to let those ‘more qualified’ do it for us. On the other hand, I can’t spend an afternoon with a 5 year old and not hear at least 3 fresh ideas. Not all of them will turn out to be Nobel Prize worthy; but they do make me think. They show me the world in a new way, and isn’t that the point of it all after all? Kids know nothing of ideology; they don’t watch CNN or Fox! They have few preconceptions. Everything is possible…until it isn’t. Everything is new to them and they encounter everything on its own terms. They see the world through the eyes of a poet, an artist, a mystic. Every second we can spend with them is an incredible gift…if we can endure the heat, which of course we can’t ! Sidebar : I’ve watched videos of incredible adults interacting creatively with groups of children. They’re awesome! But tellingly, none lasts more than 20 minutes, most are shorter; the adults cannot hold their own with kids for longer. As adults we see the world as a collection of symbols; we confront nothing on its own terms, we see nothing as it is in itself. Everything we experience is carefully protected by its semantic packaging. Adults understand how things are used , where they fit in , but they have no hint of what things are . Case in Point : I have a spatula in a drawer in my kitchen; I pull it out only when I need to flip a fried egg or a pancake, and that’s not very often. But if I hand that spatula to a preschooler, they will play with it for hours and then carefully place it in their toybox so they can retrieve it at will…and they will do so, even though (or especially since) they have no idea what it’s used for. Utility profanes Sancity. As adults we apply a complex ontological grid to our perception of the world. We impose our own Great Chain of Being: adults > kids > pets > other animals > plants > ‘ stuffies ’. Children know nothing of symbols or semantics; they know neither grids nor hierarchies. They confront everything on its own terms. Everything is unique, a one-off, everything has its own soul . Children are born Hasidim – they perceive the divine spark at the core of everything they encounter (animate or otherwise). What we call playing , they’d call ‘releasing the Shekinah ’…if only they could pronounce it. But sometime along the way, children shed their luminous bodies and put on the shroud of adulthood. Sartre called it ‘the spirit of seriousness’. Typically, this happens gradually but with two major inflection points, one around the age of 10 and the second at 13 or 14. But the tragic loss of our innate sense of wonder and reverence has nothing to do with whether some adult says ‘we are scientists’ rather than ‘we do science’. Proof : this happens to almost all children, whether they have any interest in science or not; some have probably barely heard of science. It’s happening now in our super-scientific century but there’s every reason to believe it happened to much earlier generations of children as well. Andrea is right. The problem is tied up with ‘identity’…but it has nothing to do with science. Put yourself back in your mother’s womb. Your cognitive infrastructure is, well, ‘embryonic’; your experience of the world consists of swimming in a sea of amniotic fluid. Imagine the shock of being born: “Who am I? Where am I? What is all this?” Your brain is still developing, and it is immediately tasked with making sense of, and surviving in, an entirely alien world. Since Plato, Westerners have thought in terms of classes and members. There is a class of objects known as ‘chairs’; they all serve a common function but no two of them are identical. Children know no classes. They learn how to ‘classify’ from adults. Initially, every object, every person is its own class. ‘William and Mary’ have no more in common than ‘William and Oatmeal’ – a great name for a new British pub BTW. Children have no role in society. They serve no function (unless being ‘cute’ is a life’s work). Each is an independent entity immersed in a sea of independent entities. But as they ‘grow up’, they gradually internalize the categories of the adults around them. The way our contemporary languages are structured, children must learn about classes in order to communicate. They must learn to identify ‘a chair’ rather than just ‘that chair’. Sidebar : When I was a child, our house was filled with all sorts of interesting furniture. Each piece had its own unique name. I had no idea that the so-called Winged Chair was simply a chair that happened to have wings . When children age from day care through kindergarten into first grade, they begin to understand their day to day experiences as part of a ‘role’. How many parents have said, “Our job is to go to work and earn; your job is to go to school and learn?” And so learning becomes a programmed task, not a spontaneous response to one’s environment. As we age further, we become immersed in roles. We are players on a little league team, members of a cub scout den, voices in a church choir. Later, we are cast members in our high school’s musical, we play right guard on the football team, and we write for the school newspaper. We have gained competence…but at the expense of curiosity. But it doesn’t have to be this way! There’s nothing wrong with competence per se ; in fact, it’s a good thing and a prerequisite for survival in this world. The problem comes when we identify with the roles associated with those skills. We do not just ‘play’ football, we are football players; we do not just ‘write’, we are editors. And yes, Andrea, we do not just ‘do’ science, we are scientists. In fact of course, we are none of those things. In fact, we are not anything in this world . We are the “inbreaking” of the Transcendent. We are consciousness! We are the simultaneous awareness of our environment and of ourselves. We are recursion! We are the Universe looking at itself…and making adjustments. We are right to be terrified. Our power is awesome…and we are totally alone with that power. Like kids on their first day of middle school, we are desperate to fit in, to sand down all our rough edges, to cover-up any identifying marks. We yearn to be ‘just like everybody else’. We are sleeper agents of a foreign power - not the USSR this time but God (or Gaia if you prefer). Our MO is to blend in, to attract no notice, to be as much like everyone else as possible. But just like sleeper agents during the Cold War, we are almost certain to go native . We forget all about our secret mission and we focus on lowering our handicap (that’s golf talk). And when our ‘handler’ finally reaches out with orders from ‘on high’, we say, “We don’t know who you are; you must be mistaking us for someone else.” We have become what we are here to observe and correct; we have become part of the problem we were meant to solve. And, of course, we will eagerly perpetuate this cycle of doom with our own offspring. So again, Andrea is right, identity is the enemy of creativity…but on a scale she doesn’t imagine. As we age, we become ever more identified with our roles. We become spouses, parents, employees, bosses, entrepreneurs. Gradually, these are no longer things we do or roles we assume; they are who (or what) we are. The pressure of living in our aspirational society is all consuming. We are 110% invested in making a living, raising a family, saving for retirement, and there’s no relief until we reach seniority (or senility, whichever comes first). “Work/Life Balance” is a meme without meaning. Or, if it means anything, it refers to balancing our different roles: e.g. cutting back on work time so that we can coach our kids’ sports teams, etc. There’s no question of our making any room for us . Now none of these activities is bad per se ; they are only ‘suboptimal’ when we become what we do. Once we’re hooked, most of us will not have a realistic opportunity to pull back until we’re ‘seniors’. Of course, by then we’ve totally lost touch with the infinitely curious 5 year old inside us. We want to rediscover ourselves, but we have no idea where to begin. A recent study in Psychological Science , led by postdoctoral scholar Radhika Santhanagopalan, Ph.D., confirms this hypothesis and offers a compatible but different explanation. “Children are notorious for seeking out information, often in the form of endless questions. So when do we… decide that, actually, the number of calories in a slice of cake is none of our business?... As children aged, the tendency to avoid information grew stronger. Though 5- and 6-year-olds still actively sought information, 7- to 10-year-olds were much more likely to strategically avoid learning something if it elicited a negative emotion.” Pre-tweens learn that information has real world consequences, and often those consequences trump satisfaction of curiosity. Information becomes a tool…and eventually, perhaps, a weapon. It is no longer ‘merely’ a source of pure enjoyment. Bit has become It. Eventually, they will learn to say things like, “What I don’t know can’t hurt me…curiosity killed the cat…it’s on a need to know basis,” etc. Perhaps Social Security needs to be expanded to include free classes, or even complimentary consults, on Rediscovering You . In the meantime, do yourself a favor: worship the pre-teens in your life and spend time learning from them and enjoying their company…as much, that is, as you can stand. *** Jan Steen’s A School for Boys and Girls (1670) humorously depicts a chaotic classroom where misbehaving children and inattentive adults reflect human folly. Through lively detail and satire, Steen turns everyday disorder into a moral lesson about the need for discipline and proper upbringing. 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.

Society Society is the way we live together. It is the concrete manifestation of Culture in interpersonal behavior and institutions. From Marx to Mark “The Gospel of Mark is no biography…It’s a call to action, a manifesto, a How to manual for non-violent guerilla warriors everywhere, 1st century…or 21st.” Read More Christian Anarchism ”A heretical state is not a bad state…A heretical state is not a state at all. There are no bad states. There are only states and pseudo-states.” Read More Fifth Grade Slump, Eighth Grade Cliff “We must surrender the notion that adolescence is a dress rehearsal for adulthood. It’s not; it’s real life! Read More Jesus Christ Revolutionary “He cured the sick and fed the hungry…because it was the right thing to do, here and now, and because it demonstrated what might be possible, universally, in a time to come.” Read More The End of History “Fukuyama proclaimed ‘The End of History’ with a celebratory flourish. But be careful what you celebrate!” Read More The Wonder School “Learning begins with curiosity and children are nothing but question-boxes.” Read More Leviticus and the Fed "The Fed’s 2% inflation policy is a modern version of the Levitical program. It pays for the social safety net that is our way of redistributing wealth.” Read More Home Alone “Macaulay Culkin is ‘every boy’ and his Home Alone family is ‘America’s family’ – except it’s not!” Read More Satan, Mary, and ‘Da Judge’ “Satan glorified political power for its own sake. He defended the socio-economic status quo…Jesus’ mother proclaimed a political and economic revolution...” Read More Political Alienation “Marx’s hypothesis that a person’s voting habits would be determined by their relationship to the means of production was blown out of the water…” Read More How Moses Saved Egyptian Civilization “…Walk through the streets of Jerusalem, through the marketplace at Mahane Yehudah, and find distinctly Judaized foods, dress, music, and customs from every part of the world.” Read More The Lottery “The state lottery is just about the only financial vehicle that offers some folks a realistic opportunity to materially impact their economic circumstances.” Read More Jean-Paul Sartre and Pope Leo XIII “Separated by c. 75 years, these men nonetheless faced a common challenge: Rebuild civilization!” Read More Christ the King “Sir, you are quite simply insane. We know exactly what holds our universe together; it is electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong force…not Christ.” Read More Job vs. James, Rex “God is good because he’s good, not just because he’s God.” Read More

< Back The Wonder School “Learning begins with curiosity and children are nothing but question-boxes.” David Cowles 1250 words, 6 minute read Would you send your child to a school that didn’t teach reading, writing or arithmetic? Suppose that same school had a track record of producing PhD’s too young to toast their own success? It’s a wonder that anyone in our society learns anything at all. We have turned the whole process of education upside down. We begin by teaching abstract tools, the three Rs, before we give students any sense of how to use these tools IRL. We have modeled our educational system on ‘machine learning’. We educate our children as if they were LLMs (AI for you muggles) and they’re not! This is not how humans work. We set goals, guided by transcendental values such as Beauty, Truth, and Justice, and then we design, assemble or manufacture tools to help us achieve those goals. Our education system reverses the process. We drown our children in tool making exercises, long before they have any inkling of why they might want such tools. To paraphrase Jacques Ellul, we suppress curiosity and purpose in favor of La Technique , technical skill. Only children who manage to swim up through the swamp’s tangled undergrowth to reach the surface are allowed to climb onto lily pads and contemplate the stars. Those who do not make it to the surface, the majority as it turns out, are considered just so much collateral damage . Even those who do make it are often ‘changed’ by the ordeal. Some no longer have any interest in lily pads or stars; they are content to gorge themselves on the lavish buffet spread out on the swamp’s surface. Others are just grateful for the relative security of the pad. They are content to live out their days in sloth, never bothering to raise their heads (“Don’t look up”). Not satisfied with the severity of ‘kill or be killed’ natural selection, we have added an arbitrary layer of cultural selection. Brilliant! We apply the same logic to the education of physicians. Day One, the med school class is full of young idealists, anxious to devote their lives to the wellbeing of humanity generally and the welfare of their own patients specifically. We soon put an end to that! Suppose you’re the evil overlord of some hostile alien civilization (R U?). Your job is to stifle intellectual development on Planet Earth. How do you do that when the planet is covered with 2 and 3 year olds, chirping like hungry chicks in a nest, asking their never-ending questions. Your predecessor in this job, Herod the Great (c. 0 CE), came up with a clever solution: Slaughter all 2 year old ‘boys’ (sic)! But how did that work out? Now you’ve been sent to come up with a more effective, and possibly less abhorrent, solution. According to the Handbook of 20th Century Atrocities , when you cannot eradicate some social phenomenon by force, the next best thing is to co-opt it. And so you did! You designed an education ‘system’, powered by curiosity, but virtually guaranteed to extinguish that curiosity. You’re a marvel! Would you mind if I put your name in the hat for a Nobel? Or would that be an anti-Nobel? Your genius was to insert a layer of technique (the legendary 3 R’s) between the questions and their answers. “I’d love to answer your questions, Susie, but first you need to master trigonometry. Let me know when you’ve done that, and then I’ll be glad to help you.” Learning begins with curiosity and children are nothing but question-boxes. Why wouldn’t they be? They are thrown naked, ignorant, and defenseless onto an alien shore (Earth). They can’t afford to be bored…yet; their survival depends on figuring things out…quickly. From their first cry in the delivery room to the last gasp on their death bed, they are collecting data points for their own personal Mappa Mundi . Perhaps a future generation of extra-terrestrial overlords will see some value in Earthlings’ insatiable curiosity. In anticipation of such an eventuality, I propose a pilot project, a test market. Let’s set up a small chain of magnet schools; we’ll call them Wonder Schools . Our motto: “Today’s question is tomorrow’s Nobel!” So if my Wonder Schools are not going to teach the 3 R’s, what will they teach? The curriculum will grow out of the specific interests of the students and their teachers. No two schools, no two grade levels, no two semesters will be the same. To accommodate the wide range of students’ curiosity, we’ll need to ‘stock’ our schools with enthusiastic, creative teachers who have multi-disciplinary interests. Our curriculum will emerge from the ground up, student directed. If this sounds a bit like 4th/5th century (BCE) Greece, or 9th century (CE) monastic Europe, or 15th/16th century Italy (Renaissance), I’m ok with that. Traditional miseducation introduces new subjects to students as they mature biologically. We will not do that! Our pre-K curriculum will mirror our Grade 12 curriculum…but at a very different level of depth, obviously. We will teach Quantum Mechanics to toddlers. Geometry will be non- Archimedean . Topology will be non-orientable . Set theory will be taught without Bertrand Russell’s precious Axiom of Foundation . We understand learning as a lifelong spiral, not a straight line. Of course, students will not study every subject every year; but neither is it ‘one and done’. Older students will often choose to re-explore, at a deeper level, subjects that they were exposed to at a younger age. And what about those pesky 3 Rs? Can you do university level work without the ability to read or do arithmetic? Of course not! So we’ll have special skill workshops . When a student wants to learn to read or write or do math, we’ll have resource rooms available for them…but the impetus to learn must come from the students themselves. And of course our schools will be full of musical instruments and art supplies to enable students to be creative in multimedia. James Joyce ( Ulysses ) described the world as ‘signs we are here to read’. The Wonder School takes Joyce seriously. We trust our students to pick out the signs; we’ll help them read them. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Click the cover image to return to Holy Days 2024. Previous Next

< Back Revolution Number 9 David Cowles Jan 25, 2026 “Beatles’ lyrics, despite the Fab Four’s suspiciously overzealous denials, are rarely without meaning, albeit often esoteric and obscure.” 1,500 words; 7 minute read The Beatles are not shy when it comes to including enigmatic lyrics in their hit songs. I am the Walrus is a classic example; but Revolution 9 takes it to a whole other level. Listening makes you feel like you’re hearing words from an Edward Lear non-sense poem . But regardless of your take on Lear, Beatles’ lyrics, despite the Fab Four’s suspiciously overzealous denials, are rarely without meaning, albeit often esoteric and obscure. Like that other Lear’s Fool, the Beatles embed difficult, controversial, and politically incorrect messages in language that allows them plausibly to deny such intentions, turning the spotlight instead on their critics, aka their accusers, in the process: “Of course we didn’t mean that . Why would you think that? What a perverse imagination you must have!” Revolution 9 lives in the White Album (1968) along with the much better known Revolution 1 . The latter takes an equivocal but largely conservative approach, well-crafted for public viewing, but then Revolution 9 comes along and blows the lid off. Bottom line : the Beatles are understandably skeptical of a merely political revolution rooted in ideology; instead they call for a much more radical ( radix = root) cultural revolution. This situates the Mop Tops’ social philosophy in a long tradition, for example: Jesus of Nazareth – “I have come to set fire to the world and oh how I wish it was already burning…render unto God the things that are God’s.” Mao Tse-Tung – "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” Revolution 9 lyrics are a mash-up; they beg to be excerpted and quoted…but not necessarily reproduced in toto. In that way, they are very much in the tradition of the holy trinity of 20th century English language literature (Pound, Eliot, and Joyce). Check it out: “Then there's this Welsh Rarebit wearing some brown underpants…” An absurd juxtaposition of images introduces us to the genre with a sidelong allusion to the high priest of cognitive revolution, Lewis Carroll. “About the shortage of grain in Hertfordshire.” A snippet from a radio broadcast, a political stump speech, or perhaps the PM’s question time in the House of Commons. “Every one of them knew that as time went by, they'd get a little bit older and a little bit slower but it's all the same thing, in this case manufactured by someone who's always…” Someone…who? Always…what? We’re left to guess. “I sustained nothing worse than/Also for example/Whatever you're doing/A business deal falls through/I informed him on the third night/When fortune gives…” A mash-up of everyday memes and phrases, taken entirely out of context. Memes have a life of their own, divorced from context, denotation, reference, and meaning. “With the situation/They are standing still/The plan, the telegram/A man without terrors from beard to false/As the headmaster reported to me/My son, he really can try as they do to find function…” Ah, to ‘find function (as they do)’ – that’s the pre-eminent virtue in the ethical pantheon of the bourgeoisie. (And BTW, who is this they ?) Now there’s nothing wrong with being Useful per se but consider the ‘old fashioned’ virtues it’s crowding out: Kind, Honest, Brave, Nobel, Creative, Compassionate, Loving, et al. Sidebar : Children’s literature was forever changed by Thomas the Train , a multi-media franchise built around Thomas’ obsessive desire to be ‘a really useful tank engine’. “ His head was on fire, (but) his glasses were saved...which enables him to move about.” Reminiscent of Kafka’s Metamorphosis , the catastrophic is buried in the mundane. The practical obscures the existential. Techne trumps bios , but…and this is key…we mistakenly credit technology (e.g. glasses) with things accomplished organically (e.g. mobility). “So the wife called me and we'd better go to see a surgeon/Or whatever to price it yellow underclothes/So, any road, we went to see the dentist instead/Who gave her a pair of teeth which wasn't any good at all.” Notice his head was on fire, but she got the teeth. What a cock-up! He had no need of new glasses so she got new teeth , which presumably she did not need either, leaving the inconvenient matter of the flaming head unaddressed. Faced with a major but difficult problem, we tend to create smaller, imaginary problems that we could solve more easily…but don’t. We spring into action, but our actions (1) ignore the real need, (2) deliver the wrong solution and (3) deliver it to the wrong person. It’s a perfect Trifecta. Place a tenner with the Cream Cookie (‘bookie’) for me…and box it! Paraphrasing and expanding on St. Paul, ‘I do not do what I intend to do, but what I do not intend, that I do, and what I neither intend or not, God does through me’. We are men (sic) of action, but our acts are radically alienated from our intentions and from the problems at hand (e.g. a flaming head). And yet reality, dream-like, leaves a trace: she gets ‘a pair of teeth’, suggesting ‘a pair of glasses’, which of course would have been no help either. “So instead of that he joined the fucking navy and went to sea/In my broken chair, my wings are broken and so is my hair/I'm not in the mood for whirling…” Faced with an absurd and dysfunctional reality, we seek a way out: we run away from home to join the circus, or the French Foreign Legion, or our country’s armed forces. We also give up our precious mobility in the process, yet our head’s still smoldering. But back to functionality: “Dogs for dogging, hands for clapping, birds for birding and fish for fishing, them for theming and when for whamming…” We are what we do and we do what we’re told (i.e. what society demands of us). Dogs do doggie things, fish do fishy things, etc. Note #1 : ‘Dogging, clapping, birding, and fishing’ are not things dogs, hands, birds or fish do ; they are what we do to them, e.g. by turning ‘wolves’ into household pets. Note #2 : They do not exist to be them ; we turn they into them . From our privileged perch, we turn subjects into objects. Dogs are not for dogging; they are not for theming! “Only to find the night-watchman/Unaware of his presence in the building…” Exactly! If ‘finding a function as they do’ accomplished something, it might perhaps be defended…but it doesn’t. The person whose one and only ‘function’ is to guard a building is completely unaware that an intruder is already inside. It’s the plight of the middle class: we trade freedom for security and get neither. “Onion soup/Industrial output/Financial imbalance/Thrusting it between his shoulder blades/The Watusi/The twist/Eldorado/Take this brother, may it serve you well…Hold that line! Hold that line! Hold that line!” Our chants become memes, endlessly cycling though our pre-conscious minds. “It's quick like rush for peace is/Because it's so much/It was like being naked/It's alright, it's alright, it's alright/If you become naked.” Revolution is immediate and opportunistic; no time to dress the part. It may catch you naked. “Block that kick! Block that kick! Block that kick…” Sports culture taps into our brain at its most primitive, reptilian level. With Revolution 9 , we have a sense that we’re eavesdropping on random conversations, always cut short. It is as if we were gradually circulating at a posh cocktail party or slowly turning an old fashioned AM Radio dial. The result is weird snippets of language and odd juxtapositions of words and phrases. Language is divorced from its usual denotative function. ‘Spoken word’ is treated the same as output from any musical instrument, appreciated solely for its sound and emotive associations. Specifically, Revolution 9 is reminiscent of Leopold Bloom’s soliloquy near the end of Ulysses . Joyce captures Bloom’s thoughts, becoming progressively less discursive as he drifts off to sleep: “Sindbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer…” Which leaves one last question: Why the number 9 (rather than, say, 42)? Nine, 3 x 3, captures an important and yes, revolutionary, aspect of things: Being is essentially fractal (self-similar at all scales) and trinitarian (three in one). As such a case can be made that 9 is fundamental, even substructural. “No Stephen, you misheard me. It’s not ‘turtles all the way down’, it’s ‘triplets’, triplets all the way down, triplets embedded in triplets across 60 orders of magnitude.” Does this seem like a stretch? Of course it is…but I’m not alone in my obsession with this number. The Lord’s Prayer is a fractal consisting of triplets in a triplet. The Enneagram ( Ennea = 9) is a mainstay of certain Roman Catholic spiritual traditions and Kabbalah consists of 9 sefirot (plus Keter, the ineffable whole). Revolution 9 is no more a collection of random ravings than The Waste Land (Eliot), and the Beatles’ revolutionary street cred is no less genuine than Bakunin’s . *** Dean Martin in Some Came Running (1990–1991) by David Salle is a large postmodern painting in oil and acrylic that exemplifies his characteristic layering of disparate imagery and cinematic juxtapositions, executed with three inset panels on the canvas. The work’s title references the 1958 film Some Came Running starring Dean Martin, while the painting itself combines historical tapestry motifs, modern figures, and fragmented visual elements to create a complex, non-narrative visual “chorus” typical of Salle’s style 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 No Kids and No Curiosity David Cowles Dec 5, 2025 “Worship the pre-teens in your life and spend time learning from them and enjoying their company…for as long that is as you can stand them.” 1000 words, 5 minute read No parent or grandparent fails to notice that their kids’ insatiable curiosity wanes with the onset of puberty. In a recent study ( Psychological Science ) Radhika Santhanagopalan, Ph.D., discovered that as children aged, the tendency to avoid information grows stronger. Though 5- and 6-year-olds still actively seek information for its own sake, 7- to 10-year-olds are much more likely avoid learning something if it elicits a negative emotion. We learn to filter the truth from a very early age and apparently we were doing so even before the onset of Century 21. Recent findings ( Nature Communications ) reveal that central nervous system hubs grow and reorganize on a timeline that doesn’t map neatly onto the milestones we typically celebrate (e.g. ages 6, 16, 21, etc.). For this study, scientists compared MRI diffusion scans of more than 3,800 people, ranging from newborns to 90-year-olds; they found that our brains ‘molt’, i.e. shed one skin for another, at 9, 32, 66, and 83. The human brain experiences five distinct eras as we age, and each is defined by changes in our neural architecture that influence how we process information. What this means, according to the researchers, is that our brain’s connections wire themselves in pretty much the same way from birth to nine years of age. Then our neural architecture starts to organize differently as we enter adolescence, continuing through age 32. At this point, the brain’s structural development appears to peak, according to the study. “What we find suggests that the journey from childlike brain development (through age 9) to this peak in the early 30s is distinct from other phases in the lifespan,” says Alexa Mousley, the study’s lead author and a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. At age 32, the brain’s longest rewiring era begins, marking the opening of the adult years. It’s at this point that brain architecture starts to stabilize compared with the previous phases, and Mousley says this corresponds to past research that found that there is also a “plateau in intelligence and personality around this time.” By the time of our first ‘molt’, we have begun to understand some things about information: (1) Knowledge is power. (2) Information is a tool. (3) Tools (e.g. information) can be weaponized. Between a 50 year old and a 5 year old, I’d choose to spend time with a 5 year old any day…I would that is if I could keep up. I can hang with my 50 somethings for months on end and never hear a fresh idea; I’m sure they would say the same of the time they spend with me. We sub-out our thinking to academia and the media. After all, creative thinking is a lot of work, and we have lost confidence in our ability and in our results. We are more than happy to let those ‘more qualified’ think for us. On the other hand, I can’t spend an afternoon with a 5 year old and not hear at least 3 fresh ideas. Not all of them will turn out to be Nobel worthy; but they do make me think. They show me the world in a new way, and isn’t that the point of it all after all? Sidebar : I’ve watched videos of incredible adults interacting creatively with groups of children. They’re awesome! But tellingly, none lasts more than 20 minutes; adults cannot hold their own with kids for longer. We see the world as a collection of symbols; we confront nothing on its own terms, we see nothing as it is in itself. Everything we experience is carefully protected by its semantic packaging. Adults understand how things are used , where they fit in , but they have no idea what things are . Jean-Paul Sartre focused his most successful novel, Nausea , on this phenomenon. In one scene, his hero encounters the roots of a tree as they are, in and for themselves alone, for the first time. As adults we apply a complex ontological grid to our perception of the world. We impose our own Great Chain of Being: adults > kids > pets > other animals > plants > ‘ stuffies ’. Children are born Hasidim – they perceive the same divine spark at the core of everything they encounter (animate or otherwise). What we call playing , they’d call ‘releasing the Shekinah ’…if only they could pronounce it. Ludo = Laudo . Since Plato, Westerners have thought in terms of classes and their members. There is a class of objects known as ‘chairs’; they all serve a common function though no two of them are identical. Children know no classes. They learn how to ‘classify’ from adults. Initially, every object, every person is its own class. Ab initio , every noun is a proper noun. But as they ‘grow up’, they gradually internalize the Platonic categories of the adults around them. Children routinely nominalize adjectives. To the extent that we internalize Plato’s categorical scheme, we lose contact with ‘things in themselves’. Children have no role in society. They serve no function (unless ‘being cute’ qualifies). Each is an independent entity immersed in a sea of independent entities. The way our contemporary languages are structured, children must learn about classes in order to communicate. They must learn to identify ‘ a chair’ rather than just ‘ that chair’. Seniority offers us a chance to rediscover ourselves, but of course we no longer have any idea where to begin. Perhaps the best you can do is to worship the pre-teens in your life and spend time learning from them and enjoying their company…for as long that is as you can stand them. *** Norman Rockwell’s Grandpa Listening in on the Wireless (1920) shows a young boy demonstrating an early radio set while his grandfather, dressed formally, leans in with a mixture of amusement and genuine wonder. The grandfather’s tentative posture and wide-eyed expression reveal an older man momentarily returning to childlike curiosity as he engages with new technology. Rockwell uses this intimate, intergenerational moment to highlight how learning—and delight—can flow from child to adult just as naturally as the reverse. 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 Can AI Save Healthcare? David Cowles Jan 18, 2026 “What was once a healing art has become physiological engineering… the healthcare system treats me as if I were a cheap knock-off of the 6 million dollar man.” When was it that the US Medical establishment stopped providing healthcare? The kindly family doc, making house calls and practicing medicine intuitively, is a relic of another century. Today, what was once a ‘healing art’ has become ‘physiological engineering’. Yet we are not ‘bionic’ men and women…and we never will be. (AI has already superseded mechanical robotics.) But the healthcare system treats me as if I were a cheap knock-off of the 6 million dollar man. To be clear, if you have a clearly diagnosed and reasonably serious health condition, you have never been better off. We can do things today with laser knives and designer drugs that were the stuff of science fiction only a generation ago. But if you’re a poor slob who just doesn’t feel good, you’re sh*t-out-of-luck. Show up at your PCP’s office, at Urgent Care, or at the ER and you will be put through a battery of generic tests and a lengthy ‘true or false’ intake questionnaire. Your healthcare professional is undoubtedly well intentioned and would like nothing better than to see you leave the building feeling great. But that concern is no longer center stage in medical practice. For most Americans, healthcare consists of a series of check lists imposed by insurance carriers, government regulators, and our tort system (malpractice). A successful engagement has the patient leaving a doctor’s care with no possible grounds for a lawsuit. Not that you leave empty handed. Your test and interview scores trigger a series of recommendations that are ‘evidence based’ and reflect ‘best practices’. Your data is analyzed by inflexible algorithms that deliver totally predictable results, but you are receiving the best care that Machine Medicine can offer. The current system is well designed to diagnose conditions such as elevated blood pressure or high cholesterol. It is much less suited to discovering the causes of these conditions in a given patient and, if you’re looking for creative ways to treat the patient’s condition, forget about it. And so we treat symptoms and move on. AI First healthcare is something all together different. Yes, AI runs on algorithms, but it has the flexibility to think outside the box and the capacity to suggest novel diagnoses and treatment strategies. Working with a highly trained professional, AI can bring intuition, the gut, back into the practice of medicine. AI is able to build a model of each patient that includes vastly more variables than any human (or any check list) could possibly keep in mind at one time. AI combines virtually limitless memory and instant recall with a full medical school curriculum at its finger tips. The smartest, best trained, and most compassionate human care giver cannot possibly compete. Plus, medical knowledge is now doubling every 5 years. All the continuing education in the world cannot keep a doctor current, but AI is 100% current all the time. It makes no sense to think that any human doc could compete. Now to be clear, we are not proposing to remove the MD from the healthcare team; human oversight remains absolutely essential. But in the future, the practice of medicine must be AI First . Already, AI consumer sites are fielding 50 million health-related inquiries every day. That’s an average of 50 health inquiries per American per year…as compared to the current 20 minute annual check-up. Today’s Machine Medicine relies on discrete answers to specific questions but Ars Medica , the art of medicine, requires clinical reasoning capability. To test for that, scientists turned to the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) – one of the world’s leading medical publications. NEJM publishes Case Records from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), presenting a patient’s care journey in a detailed, narrative format. These cases are among the most diagnostically complex and intellectually demanding in clinical medicine, often requiring multiple specialists and diagnostic tests to reach a definitive diagnosis. How does AI perform in this arena? Surely here we need the empathy and imagination of a well-trained and highly experienced human agent, right? To answer these questions, Microsoft created a series of interactive diagnostic challenges based on 304 recent NEJM case studies. Clinicians, be they AI Bots or human physicians, were able to ask iterative questions and order appropriate tests. As information became available, the clinicians could update their reasoning, gradually leading to a final diagnosis. This diagnosis was then compared to the gold-standard outcome published in the NEJM. The Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO) is a system designed to emulate a virtual panel of physicians with diverse diagnostic approaches collaborating to solve cases.  The Orchestrator can integrate diverse data sources. It can turn an LLM into a ‘panel’ of virtual clinicians that can ask follow-up questions, order tests, deliver a diagnosis, and then run a cost check before deciding to proceed.  MAI-DxO solved 85% of the NEJM benchmark cases. Pretty good! But how does this compare with the recommendations of real life, flesh and blood specialists? For comparison, Microsoft created a panel of 21 practicing physicians from the US and UK, each with 5-20 years of clinical experience. On the same problem sets, these experts achieved a mean accuracy of…wait for it…just 20%. Astonishing! AI is 4 times better at diagnosing complex medical conditions than MDs. If Microsoft’s findings are confirmed, traditional medicine is, or should be, dead. The big question now is how long it will take society ‘to stop life support and pronounce’. In the meantime, the surest evidence of malpractice is the practice of medicine without AI support. Another measure comes from healthcare quality watchdog, Healthgrades. Each year for the past 20, they have monitored patient outcomes at 4,500 US hospitals. According to Healthgrades, if all hospitals delivered care at the quality level of the best 250, more than 200,000 lives would have been saved in 2025: 1 in every 14 in-patient deaths can be attributed to subpar healthcare. An article by Kristen Brown, published in the New York Times on 1/8/2026 caught the spirit: “Amid rising interest in alternative medicine and growing skepticism of physicians , health and wellness companies have begun providing Americans a more direct route to medical testing that does not require a doctor’s visit. “In November, the telehealth giant Hims & Hers debuted extensive laboratory testing for customers, just weeks after Oura and Whoop unveiled blood-testing products of their own. The national laboratory network Quest Diagnostics now sells its own consumer-facing tests. LabCorp does, too. “But perhaps no other company has capitalized as explicitly as Function has on frustrations with the U.S. health system …For $365 a year, the company provides its hundreds of thousands of members with access to more than 160 lab tests.” Of course, there are downsides to an AI Only approach to healthcare. False positives and unwarranted patient anxiety lead the list. That is why we don’t recommend such an approach. Our AI First model includes the genius of the human physician, interpreting results and presenting them to the patient in context and with specific recommendations. But this can only happen after AI has done its thing. *** Nurse in Red (1991–1993) by Keith Holmes portrays a nurse in a vibrant red uniform with calm authority and professional poise, conveying her expertise and readiness within a clinical setting. The painting reflects the evolving professional identity of nurses in the late 20th century, highlighting their competence and command in modern healthcare through her composed demeanor and the presence of medical equipment in the background. 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.