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< Back Good God Too David Cowles Oct 4, 2025 “Where once I was judged by the standard of the Decalogue, now I judge the Decalogue by my standards.” Once upon a time, we defined ‘being good’ in terms of an external metric like the Ten Commandments, or the 613 mitzvah of Torah, or the precedents of English Common Law, or the Rules dad just posted on the refrigerator door. ‘Good’ was a function of Rules, Rules a function of Authority, and Authority a function of Divine Right. Once upon a time… Now we determine for ourselves what is Good, and we use that determination to regulate our conduct and ultimately, to define our God . God no longer offers standards for us to meet (“Love one another”), now we impose our standards on God (“Do this for me”). Where once I was judged by the standard of the Decalogue , now I judge the Decalogue by my standards. When I say something is ‘good’, I mean that I would like it to be so. It’s how I’d like things to be: ‘a good job, a good marriage, good children, etc.’ It may or may not be so or, very likely, it may be so but only imperfectly or in part; but to whatever extent it is so, it is good . To be is to be good! What is not good, to the extent that it is not good, simply is not . Of course, many things seem to mix good and bad parts or aspects…but that is an illusion! Such ‘things’ are just incomplete . (They avoided military service; they failed to be all that they could be.) Example : A glass of milk turns sour. Now it is less perfectly ‘milk’ than it was before. It has lost one of the defining characteristics of ‘milk’, namely, its refreshing drinkability. Of course, it is still a liquid; it retains those attributes. But as ‘milk’, it is less good than it was before, and therefore it is ‘less milk’ than it was. Its ‘milkness’ is incomplete. I know, crazy…but makes sense. Evil is privatio boni - a privation or absence of good, much like darkness is the absence of light or cold the absence of heat. Evil is Good, unrealized! They say there’s no such thing as a ‘bad boy’ and they’re right! But I’ve known my share of ragazzi who were ‘insufficiently virtuous’. In fact, I think Sister Mary Martha wrote that very phrase at the bottom of my 3rd grade report card. (P.S. It was not well received by my overlords!) If this seems like an arcane distinction, it isn’t. It’s a crucial tenet of Christian ontology, dating back at least as far as Augustine (c. 500 CE). It is part of what distinguishes monotheism from gnostic dualism. Of course, we still use the word, ‘evil’: “Deliver us from evil!” But evil in this context refers to sin, entropy and death: privationes boni. Some translations of the Lord’s Prayer replace ‘evil’ with ‘the evil one’ (or Satan). But even here, ‘Satan’ needs to be understood as Being’s template or shadow, not as an Actual Entity in his own right. Without God, there is no Satan! There is no such thing as Evil per se ; it does not exist because to be is to be good. Nothing is bad per se . “Everything is beautiful in its own way,” (Ray Stevens) and all things are bright and beautiful…to the extent they are at all. Admittedly, this is an unfamiliar way to view the world. We love black and white; we hate grey. (Or is it that we love grey and hate black and white?) We love to put labels on things so that we can relativize them and contextualize them down the road. God is Good. Good is God’s essence; it’s what God is. Good is who God is. Good is what God does. According to Sartre…and Job ... God's essence (Good) precedes (logically only) his existence. God is Good. It’s hard to imagine otherwise. And yet, for that very reason, knowing that God is good is not very helpful. It only matters if we know what constitutes Good . And where might we find such knowledge? Perhaps it was revealed by God in Torah or the Gospels…but note the circular reasoning. Or, as noted above, defining Good may be up to us after all. But how? Perhaps we are endowed by God with souls that have an innate sense of Good…but that too would be circular. Or maybe an innate sense of Good has evolved naturally and is now encoded in our DNA. But in that case, Good would just be synonymous with pragmatic and we know that that is often not the case. Or perhaps we develop a sense of Good by applying reason to our experiences, personal and collective. Obviously, this is a big leap. It confers virtual sovereignty on our capacity to experience events accurately and to reason about them logically. Nevertheless, of the options available, this is the ‘least obviously impossible’, so following the logic of Blaise Pascal and Sherlock Holmes, when we remove whatever is absurd, meaningless, oxymoronic, irredeemable or impossible , we must consider that whatever is left is at least probable . ‘Good’ has a dense connotative value but zero denotative value. Saying something is ‘good’ says nothing specific about the thing itself but everything about how the thing templates its world. In this context, Good is a verb. It describes a process rather than a steady state. That is why we only experience God as ‘active’ in our World. That is why idolatry is a bad faith , passive version of iconoclastic Atheism . For a concept to be useful, it needs to be fleshed out with applications identifiable in the course of ordinary human experience (e.g. measurements); but those applications need to be something other than habits, tastes, and opinions. There can never be 100% consensus about what constitutes the Good but, if the concept has validity, we should be able to detect some semantic convergence. Indeed, folks broadly agree that Good is experienced by us in our world as Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Let’s be clear: we may vehemently disagree about what objects are beautiful, what propositions true, what social structures just. But for the most part, we agree that there are such things as Beauty, Truth, and Justice and that they are desirable in their own right. The alternative is some form of nihilism . Of course, my ideas of what constitutes Beauty, Truth, or Justice may be polar opposite to yours. That doesn’t matter as long as we agree that it is legitimate to apply these three values, as we interpret them, in every situation. Consider the alternative: you are a person who assigns no value, or even a negative value, to Beauty, Truth, and/or Justice. Now we have a problem, don’t we? I will debate forever about what constitutes Justice, but I can’t have any conversation with someone who does not recognize Justice as a value. Of course, in God, Beauty, Truth, and Justice are not distinct. God is one, God is simple, God is just plain Good . But that Goodness appears in our world in diverse forms appropriate to different media of experience. *** Pablo Picasso — Guernica (1937), oil on canvas - Picasso’s vast monochrome mural confronts the horrors of the Nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Fragmented human and animal forms writhe in a shattered space, their beauty stripped to stark geometric agony. Light—symbolized by a glaring bulb and a woman’s candle—flickers as fragile truth amid overwhelming darkness and moral chaos. 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 I'm Bored! David Cowles Jun 23, 2022 “We are co-responsible for the world. We are all always our siblings’ keepers!” What parent has not heard this cry a million times? It’s annoying, but we usually just ignore it. We do so at our peril. Boredom is more than meets the eye. As we noted in the June 21st edition of Thoughts While Shaving (TWS ), information is the difference between what is and what might have been. Therefore, ‘information happens’ whenever an event occurs. The universe consists of events and only events. If it is, it is an event, or part of an event; and if not, not. Each event springs from a unique ‘actual world.’ An event has one and only one such world, but each actual world has the potential for innumerable, mutually exclusive , events. Every ‘real event’ occurs in lieu of many other, ‘potential events.’ The difference between a real event and its potential alternatives constitutes the information content of that event. Information is interesting! We are interested in ‘what is’…to the extent that it differs from ‘what might have been.’ What is and couldn’t have been other that it is is not interesting. Of course, the converse is true as well: anything interesting must have information content. Information and interest are two axes of the same phenomenon. ‘Information’ measures an event in terms of other (potential) events. In that sense, you might say that information is the ‘objective’ element of an event. Graph that quantity on the X-axis. Interest, on the other hand, is the ‘subjective’ element; it is a measure of the ‘intensity’ of the experience (every event is an ‘experience’). Graph intensity on the Y-axis. So, an event must be informative, and it must be interesting. A universe where so-called events are predetermined by other events (and, therefore, cannot be other than they are) is neither informative nor interesting; nor is it even event full . In fact, there are no actual events in such a world and without events, there is no world at all. Boredom is a symptom of ontological breakdown. To be bored is to deny the existence of anything interesting, and if nothing is interesting, nothing is. We refer to the end of the universe as Heat Death (or Big Freeze). A good definition of Heat Death is the absence of any communication, i.e., an information vacuum; and when there is no longer anything of interest to anyone, then there will no longer be anything…or anyone. In ancient mythology, there are many examples of individuals with outsized roles in the creation and/or maintenance of the world: Atlas supports Earth on his shoulders (Greek), three norns weave the threads that determine destiny (Norse), and God says, “I am who am.” (Hebrew) In contemporary mythology, we all have an outsized role. We are co-responsible for our world. We are all always our siblings’ keepers! We are called to imitate the Clerk in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales : “Gladly would he learn and gladly teach.” Chaucer’s dictum in a version of Kant’s categorical imperative. It is binding on all for the benefit of all. Imagine a world where no one wishes to teach, and no one wishes to learn. (Sounds like some schools I’ve encountered.) Such a world would not be a world at all: no interest = no information = no being. After completing work on the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, paraphrasing the Bhagavad-Gita , said, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Next time a youngster complains of being bored, ask yourself, “Is this the beginning of the absence of Being?” Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Archimedes and Christianity David Cowles Aug 26, 2025 “Science is not the antithesis of Christianity; it is a subset of it… not the enemy of religion but its most powerful engine.” Don’t blame Archimedes (b. 280 BCE); he got a bum rap. He did not invent the Archimedean Property nor did he lend it his name. That came much later when someone noticed that Archimedes’ work entailed certain previously unidentified assumptions about the structure of the phenomenal world. The Archimedean Property (AP) boils down to the assumption that real phenomena can be exclusively and exhaustively modeled within the domain of Real Numbers (extended to include Complex Numbers). Certainly sounds reasonable and it is…for most purposes. Sure, it fails to capture certain features of the deep structure of the Real World but how often does that come up in polite conversation? You can live your life from birth through NLE and never give a thought to anything beyond Real Numbers…and in fact that’s exactly how people lived from the time of Plato until the 18 th century. We most often discuss AP in the context of Geometry (and Topology). The Euclidean Geometry we learned as adolescents assumes AP. So do most non-Euclidean Geometries (e.g. geometries applicable to curved spaces). However, there is a class of esoteric geometries that reject the Archimedean Property. They seek to model phenomena that can’t be adequately approximated using Real Numbers alone. These phenomena require the introduction of ‘Unreal’ Numbers such as infinities and infinitesimals and ‘p-adic’ numbers (loosely related to logarithms for the few of you out there who don’t have a PhD in Pure Mathematics, yet). Without AP, if any two entities intersect (tangent or overlap), one must be a subset of the other. Nothing touches, nothing overlaps, unless it absorbs totally or is totally absorbed. It’s a readymade plot twist for the next Sci-Fi Silver Screen blockbuster. It’ll be a remake of Goldfinger , which itself retells the legend of King Midas. I touch you, I absorb you…or you absorb me. This gives new meaning to ‘Kill or Be Killed!’ It is a game of tag…for adults, but a game with apocalyptic consequences. Not sure you want to go down this path? No problem: you can try it before you buy it. The game could be simulated on a computer; it could even anchor a whole new genre of computer games, competing with Fortnite , Grand Theft Auto , and Tour of Duty . Of course, such ‘individual imperialism’ is not the only possible response to life in a world without AP. For example, we might decide to live our lives in hermetically sealed pods. Or we might learn to live together, harmoniously and symbiotically, without invading each other’s personal space…what a concept! Or we could just go with the flow. I could welcome the other into myself and I could graciously reciprocate by freely allowing myself to be uploaded into ‘another other’. Again, feel free to try before you buy, but know this: the process may not be reversible…so your life literally depends on the result! ‘Another other’? Makes sense. A absorbs B, another, then AB is absorbed by C, another other, and so on ‘up the food chain’. But what if we turned Jacob’s Ladder into an Ouroboros? What if we allowed A to absorb B…and B to absorb A, simultaneously. What if we allowed our two sets to be subsets of themselves and of each other? Now that would be some cool place to live, agreed? Too much for you? Well, stay tuned! You are the product of a single fertilized sex cell. Today, your body consists of 30 trillion descendants of that cell, working more or less in harmony to ensure your (temporary) survival and to allow you to make all the contributions to human history your parents had planned for you. There will be no peace on earth or cure for cancer without you and there would be no you without the immediate and enduring cooperation of 30 trillion independent organisms (100 trillion over your entire lifetime). But there is something very special about these cells. Unlike simple life forms (e.g. bacteria), most of the cells in your body include a nucleus that houses copies of your primordial DNA. All animal and plant life consists primarily of nucleated cells. But while the first living organisms (prokaryotes) appeared on Earth 4 billion years ago, the first nucleated cells (eukaryotes) evolved just 2 billion years ago. More astounding, every eukaryotic cell on Earth today is likely descended from a single 2 billion year old ancestor. (By comparison, Abraham was a dilatant!) So how did the primal eukaryote evolve? Two unicellular life forms, bacteria perhaps, gave each other reck (Anaximander, Buber) and entered into a covenant (Jeremiah et al.). The process was described in 1986 by Nobel winning biologist, Paul Simon: “If you’ll be my bodyguard, I will be your long lost pal.” ( You can call me Al ) Perhaps Paul was drawing on an earlier description: “You will be my people, and I will be your God!” ( Jeremiah 7: 23). And so it happened! One cell agreed to give up its independence to become the nucleus of another cell in exchange for that cell’s protection (an early version of the feudal contract)…and together they conquered the Earth. Alexander, Augustus, eat your hearts out! We life forms are stubborn. It took 2 billion years for two of us to decide that cohabitation and cooperation might be better than conflict. And now we’re surprised that there’s no peace in the Middle East? It was a high stakes gamble, a giant leap of faith, but boy did it ever pay off! We are indebted to these two risk-taking pioneers for everything from the majestic Redwood Forests to the teeming Gulf Stream Waters, for Mother Theresa, and for you. ‘Thank you’ doesn’t cover it. There is a powerful Theory of Everything (TOE) that fundamentally depends on non-Archimedean topology. No, it’s not some esoteric version of String Theory: it does not require a cosmos with 10…or 26 dimensions. Nor is it obscure. In fact, every reader of this article is, happily or not, quite familiar with it. It’s called Christianity . Let’s just state it outright: Christian cosmology is fundamentally non-Archimedean! Write that 100 times on Sister Mary Martha’s blackboard. But don’t stop there! Christianity not only rejects AP; it also rejects the Transitive Property (if a > b and b > c then a > c) and the Fundamental Properties of Arithmetic (Commutative, Associative, and Distributive). Basically, Christianity repeals 5 years of primary school education. Or not! There is a real domain in which all these traditional properties hold but that ‘local’ domain is embedded in a much broader ‘universal’ domain where they do not. Arithmetic is a subset of mathematics. The Archimedean domain is a sub-region of the broader non-Archimedean Universe. Just as the Newtonian Universe is embedded in the Einsteinian Universe, so physics is embedded in theology . The defining doctrine of orthodox Christianity is Incarnation. The 2 nd person of the Blessed Trinity, the logos through whom ‘all things were made’ has in fact become one of those things . (John 1: 2 – 5) Contrary to the Foundation Axiom of Set Theory, the set is a subset of itself. God is the all-encompassing plenum and an irreducible quantum within that plenum . The Son of God is God. According to the Nicene Creed, Jesus Christ is ‘true God ( plenum ) and true man ( quantum )’. The whole is contained in one of its parts . Cosmos as Fun House! The reciprocal reflections in the Hall of Mirrors extend to infinity. The very concept of scale, so crucial to our understanding of the world, vanishes. The Cosmos is a fractal; no matter where you look it looks the same. It is a pattern endlessly embedded in itself. Embedded, not conflated! The part does not become the whole, nor the whole the part. Call it the Pauline Exclusion Principle . According to Incarnation’s companion doctrine of Trinity, the plenum and the quantum remain distinct personae of the one Godhead. Perhaps the best description of this relationship is provided by Paul in his First Letter to Corinthians : “When everything is subjected to him (Son), then the Son himself will be subjected to the one (Father) who subjected everything to him (Son) so that God may be all in all.” (15: 28) ‘All in all’, Anaxagoras’ pan in panti , describes the fundamental architecture of our non-Archimedean Universe. And it is also the Foundational Principal (Incarnation) of Christianity . It is no wonder that we are rapidly becoming unchurched. We have made a fetish of science. (Science is good but fetishizing anything is not.) Unfortunately, many Christians have responded to the fetish by rejecting the science. But science is not the antithesis of Christianity; it is a subset of it. Once we have overcome the notion that the Universe is Archimedean throughout and properly understood the place of cosmology within metaphysics, we will suddenly find that science is not the enemy of religion but its most powerful engine. Truly, this is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius . “Come Holy Ghost!” *** Christ Pantocrator, 6th century, Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai. The icon mirrors our theme by depicting Christ as both infinite plenum and finite quantum, true God and true man, embodying the non-Archimedean logic at the heart of Christianity. 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< Back Size Doesn't Matter David Cowles Aug 24, 2025 “In less than 500 years, we’ve gone from a privileged species on a privileged planet at the center of the Universe to a speck on a speck on a speck.” We are obsessed with size. Bigger is better. Supersize me! Consider the Universe: from Planck scale to Cosmos - 60 orders of magnitude! You and I, dear reader, are about 25 orders of magnitude short of a Cosmos (I’ve been called worse). But that means we’re 35 orders of magnitude larger than Planck. From the perspective of a subatomic particle, the human body is approximately the size of the Cosmos. From the perspective of the Cosmos, you are the size of a subatomic particle. Feeling a bit ‘lost in space’? That’s how an electron ‘feels’ inside your body. In less than 500 years, we’ve gone from a privileged species on a privileged planet at the center of the Universe to a speck on a speck on a speck. It would take your breath away…if it were not all BS . Our notion of size is a function of our 4 linear dimensions. But these dimensions are simply axes on which events are conveniently arranged, like ornaments on a 4D Christmas tree. Theoretically, events could be arranged in any order whatsoever, or in no order at all, but most folks hang their larger, heavier balls on the tree’s lower limbs. To do otherwise would require a great deal more energy (kinetic and potential)…and it would look like Hell . Is Beauty negentropic? You bet it is! Events happen! They are sui generis . They are a response by what is not to what is in pursuit of what might be . Events happen by alternately inheriting and rejecting various elements from their environment before synthesizing the ‘survivors’ into a single Actual Entity ; that process (called ‘prehension’ by Alfred North Whitehead) generates entropy (heat). The synthesis of elements itself (i.e. ‘concrescence’) is negentropic: it creates an island of relative order in a sea of chaos. It is relatively beautiful (heavy ornaments are at the bottom). Because it is a ‘cool’ energy trough relative to its ‘hot’ environment, it is stable; it would require a significant input of energy from an external source to dislodge it. But where would that ‘new’ energy come from? “Heavy ornaments on the bottom!” my mother always said. We instinctively minimize the inexorable increase in entropy. Against a backdrop of ever encroaching disorder, the Whole attempts to conserve and curate order (e.g. Beauty, Truth, and Justice) wherever and whenever possible. That is the origin of process . We are the Universe reacting to itself. We are that reaction per se . Therefore, we are Recursion; we are Consciousness, period. Note : We are not organisms who happen to be conscious; we the Consciousness itself. This is not necessarily what we mean by terms like ‘mind, spirit, soul’, etc. We are talking about pure recursion, pure process . “I seem to be a verb.” (Buckminster Fuller) The negentropic process of concrescence does not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Looked at globally, entropy still increases. Local increases in order are more than offset by the global increase in entropy. The so-called order of events is the arrangement that corresponds to variations in global entropy. Spacetime orders events along the path of lower to higher entropy; we call that path, time . The concepts ‘big’ and ‘little’ have no fixed meaning. Their sense is entirely relational. The fundamental structure of the Universe is fractal; it is self-similar across all scales. Big and little have no fixed denotative meaning. A 4 year old is called a ‘big boy’ in certain contexts while his 8 year old brother may be referred to as a ‘little boy’ in others. Both characterizations are true . Each is true relative to its context. However, neither is true relative to the other. Think about it: calling a 4 year old ‘little’ and an 8 year old ‘big’ conveys zero information; plus it’s demeaning...to both. Sidebar : The relationship of a 4 year old and an 8 year old within a family (or other social unit) is an example of non-Archimedean geometry at work in everyday life. Each child must be measured on its own terms, with its own metric, in its own context. They cannot be compared, one to the other. There is no common metric, e.g. calendar age, to relate them. That metric exists but it applies only at the meta-level, i.e. only to the family unit. In the family’s terms the ‘big boy’ is only half as old as the ‘little boy’ but that is not relevant to either boy’s subjective experience of himself. Switching back to an Archimedean (Euclidean) framework, events can be represented by spacetime coordinates (i.e. a common metric). To the extent that those coordinates define a contiguous region, we refer to the measure of that region as the ‘size’ of the event (its domain, range, depth, duration, volume, etc.). The coordinates themselves encode information as pattern , and we can compare children based on their ‘size’ (above). From spatiotemporal coordinates we calculate size. But size has no absolute significance. Big is only ‘big’ relative to ‘little’. Our 4 year old is ‘big’ compared to a toddler but our 8 year old is ‘little’ compared to a tween. The 4 year old bestrides Nursery School like a colossus; the 8 year old cowers in the corner of his K-8 Primary School. Sidebar : IRL 4 year olds and 8 year olds are rarely compared; they’re perceived to have nothing much in common. Exception: when dad yells at the elder, “Stop acting like a 4 year old.” – a high compliment, but probably neither meant nor understood as such . Events create spacetime; they are not made of spacetime. Events are holistic. As Richard Feynman demonstrated, spacetime breaks down at the event’s horizon . In this sense, every event is like a black hole - minus the massive gravitational attraction. Patterns scale! Spacetime configurations are stackable. While every event is unique, patterns tend to repeat…like Russian nesting dolls. In 10 th grade geometry we called this ‘congruence’: the Bohr model of the atom is roughly congruent with the Copernican model of the solar system, etc. While scientists search for causal sequences , philosophers search for congruent patterns . Congruence (pattern) is just another way of encoding order. But what about those causal sequences ? We say that ‘A causes B’ to the extent that the transition from A to B is ‘the least dirty shirt’ (i.e. the event that would generate the least entropy). Causation minimizes information. It collapses the wave function at its apex (most probable value). Congruence , on the other hand, preserves the wave function (and all its potential values). Causation : Congruence :: Atari : Quantum Computing. In a fully determined world, events would convey zero information. In fact, there would be no discrete events at all. Subsequent states would simply be encoded in prior states. Pierre-Simon Laplace (c. 1800 CE) believed that everything is caused by something else; his contemporary, William Blake, maintained that everything is congruent with everything else: “To see a world in a grain of sand…and eternity in an hour.” Information is ‘difference’ and differences are the raw material of pattern. Sentences are patterns; music and art depend on patterns; software is a pattern; DNA forms a pattern. Even molecules are ‘patterns’ of elements. As spacetime is an ordering of events, the fractal structure is a way of conserving that order by stacking those events on top of one another based on ‘self-similarity’ ( aka pattern). It’s a bit like zipping up a computer file. Everything works toward one goal: the conservation of pattern encoded information. The Universe has a Prime Directive: Minimize incremental entropy by maximizing Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Spacetime, scale and pattern are tools we use to fulfill that mandate. Size, on the other hand, doesn’t matter! *** Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, oil on linen, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Malevich’s stark reduction of form to a single square reflects the essay’s claim that “size” has no absolute meaning, only relational context, and that true order emerges from pattern rather than scale. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Imago Dei David Cowles Oct 12, 2023 “…Knowing I am made in God’s image tells me exactly 'nothing'. Or does it?” According to Judeo-Christian theology, we are all made in the image and likeness of God. This is usually cited as a way of understanding human nature ; but does it help? It works only if ab initio we know all there is to know about God and nothing about ourselves. In that case, knowing that we are Imago Dei would tell us a great deal about ourselves; but that is not reality. IRL, ‘all we know on earth’ begins…and ends…with self-knowledge . We know ourselves alone. Whatever else we may claim to know is known only through personal experience (sensory, emotional, intuitive), including what we learn, formally and informally, from others. We may stand on the shoulders of giants, but it is we who are standing. On the other hand, it is safe to say that we know nothing, or next to nothing, about God. We’ve been told, “God is ineffable. God is a mystery. God overflows our powers of comprehension.” Then knowing I am made in God’s image tells me nothing . Or does it? What if we stand the paradigm on its head? What if we use our ‘image-status’ as a way to acquire knowledge of God? After all, if we are the image of God then we should be able to learn a lot about God simply by paying attention to ourselves. We are God’s reflection and that enables us to reflect on what’s being reflected, i.e., on the nature of God. This is a gorgeous morning, sunny and warm, and the air is dry and pollution free; I think I’ll pay a visit St. Ives (Cornwall, England). But I have a wee problem. British Rail is now requiring us to declare the total number of living organisms ‘in my party’. So before I left for the train station, I took inventory. My body consists of approximately 30 trillion (3*10^13) eucaryotic cells (cells with nuclei), linked together by various inorganic molecules (e.g. water) to form a massive ‘society’, aka ‘my body’. Each such cell is an independent organism, a unicellular animal; in turn, e ach eucaryotic cell is home, on average, to 1,000 mitochondria, prokaryotic cells (cells without nuclei, e.g., bacteria) that have chosen to live and reproduce inside a eukaryotic host. This means that 3*10^16 cells are traveling with me to St. Ives. In addition my ‘body’ houses about 100 trillion uninvited, but mostly welcome symbionts (bacteria), each of course with its own DNA as well. Fortunately, however, ‘the man’ in the ticket booth tells me that there’s no need to count these ‘fellow travelers’. I am more concerned that the ‘ticket master’ accept my admittedly rough count. But today is my lucky day! He waves me through, and I prepare to pay for the 3*10^16 organisms in my party, when he reminds me: “That’s 3*10^16 + 1” (me). Considering that all of us are societies of cells, and nothing else, it’s a bit surprising that most of us know so little about them. We think of them as though they were fundamental particles, quanta, black boxes or ball bearings; if we’re posh-educated, we might understand cells as sacks of fluid enclosing a DNA filled nucleus protected by inner and outer membranes. If that’s your understanding of a cell, your posh parents wasted their money. Cells are independent life forms. They are the direct descendants of ‘animals’ that once lived on their own in the primal ooze. They eat, they breathe, they reproduce, they self-propel, they respond to environmental stimuli, and they communicate with one another. Together they form a social organization, a ‘society’, … aka the United States of You. Note : There are 3*10^8 people living in the USA today. So my traveling party is 8 orders of magnitude bigger than the entire country. Stunning, don’t you think? Let’s be clear. You are nothing other than the cells that form your body; but you are not any one of these cells, nor are you a cell yourself, nor are you the sum of the behaviors of these cells. You are something altogether different. You are an ‘emergent ontological phenomenon’ (an ‘EOP’) and, oh by the way, you are also the image and likeness of God. Again, let’s be clear. You did not create your cells, you did not organize them, you are not responsible for their behavior. They are what they are, and they do what they do, somewhat like your teenaged offspring. But in every sense of the word you ‘transcend’ the society of cells. You are neither cells nor a ‘product’ of cells. You are an independent phenomenon, emergent from the network of cells you call your ‘body’. For you, there was never a moment when there was not a ‘you’; you are coterminal with time itself. You and the society of cells that constitute you are complementary. You utterly transcend , yet perfectly template , each another. So back to the beginning, if you are an EOP and the image and likeness of God, may we not at least conjecture that God too is an EOP, a transcendent ‘emergent ontological phenomenon’ whose templated substructure is Universe? This is not pantheism; it’s not even panentheism. God remains entirely transcendent even as he is entirely immanent – hmm, sounds a bit like Judeo-Christianity, doesn’t it? An idea this radical must be brand new, right? It must be an original contribution of Aletheia Today to theology. Or not so much! The idea of God as an EOP templating Universe was first proposed a few years back, c. 1450 CE in fact, by a prominent Christian philosopher and bishop, Nicholas of Cusa. Oh well, next issue! Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc David Cowles Jul 20, 2023 “Thank God we don’t really live in a world like that! Fortunately, it’s all just a bad dream, a media special effect, a trick of language. Now…if only I could just wake up!” We are mesmerized by the concept of causality. I cry - and someone feeds me, or changes me, or hugs me. Cool beans! Later, I learn that causality has a downside as well. “If you touch the stove, you get burned.” Not so cool after all. It seems as though everything has a cause and everything in turn causes something else, so perhaps we can be forgiven for concluding that there must be a causal link between what has been, what is now, and what will come to be. If B comes after A, then surely we’re entitled to infer that A causes B. We are content; the world makes sense. Then, sometime during high school, middle school if you’re ‘posh’, we are introduced to a memorable Latin phrase: Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Translation: After that - therefore because of that. (Everything sounds better in Latin, doesn’t it?) Perfect. Our intuition is validated! Except it’s not! ‘Post hoc ergo propter hoc ’ is introduced to us, not as a logical premise but as a logical fallacy : just because something comes after something else doesn’t mean that it was caused by that ‘something else’…or so we’re told. I shot Cock Robin, but I didn’t cause his death. He died months later from smoke inhalation as he tried to warn the family about a kitchen fire. I am not responsible! So, if we’re planning to continue our love affair with causality, we’ll need to find a more specific link between events than mere sequence, but that turns out to be more difficult than it seems…so difficult in fact that eminent Scottish philosopher, David Hume, threw up his hands in frustration. He denied the doctrine of causality per se , at least as it is conventionally presented. Instead, Hume developed an account of ‘perceived regularities’ that relies on concepts like repetition, memory, habit, consistency, coincidence, conjunction, and correlation. Unfortunately, Hume was ‘slightly ahead of his time’. He needed Chaos Theory to complete his model, but he died 100 years before Henri Poincare formulated the earliest version, 150 years before Alfred North Whitehead systematized it, 200 years before Benoit Mandelbrot elaborated it, and 250 years before ‘New Agers’ popularized it. Were Hume alive today, he would be in his glory. In 1964, John Bell proved that events with no possible causal connection could nonetheless be correlated. Today, we believe that correlation is a more general feature of nature than causality, the latter being at most a special case of the former. Of course, that leaves open the question of whether it is useful or meaningful to retain causality even as a concept. Today, we are all either full-Hume or ¾-Hume. Per Whitehead (above), when any event occurs, it occurs in the context of a World (W) that it inherits. That World begins as mere Multiplicity (M), a ‘jumble’ (that’s a technical term in physics) of all prior events in Universe, unordered. The upsurge of an event can only take place in the context of an ordered inherited World (W); but since M is, by definition, entirely disordered, it is the emerging event itself that must inject that order. Of course, this is a reversal of how we conventionally understand ‘process’; but as we’ll see below, the conventional understanding of process is actually a misunderstanding based on bias embedded in our language. For now, it is sufficient just to note that a revised notion of process is a necessary consequence of our contention that all events are sui generis . That said, every event incorporates influences from every event in the Multiplicity (M). In M, events relate to one another chaotically. There are no gradations of relevance. An entity’s transformation of Multiplicity into World injects a logos of graded relevance into M: every W forms a crystalline endoskeleton, which enables novelty and order to co-exist. The cause of any B (to the extent that we even wish to retain the concept of ‘causality’) is never any one ‘thing’ (A) or any selective group of things; it is always the entirety of things in M as those things are ordered in W. Every W is a unique expression of M and every event is a unique expression of W. In the end it’s ‘one world, one event; one event, one world’! So determinism? No, anti-determinism! Remember, it is the emerging event that confers order (W) onto chaos (M), not the other way around as Laplace would have had it. The process by which an event forms and uploads its World is organic, never mechanical (determined). It’s hard to talk about, isn’t it? That’s because of that darned Tower of Babel (a Biblical metaphor for linguistic dysfunction)! It is only possible to model ‘the process of becoming’ using verbs in the Middle Voice , but that voice that is no longer functional in most modern Indo-European languages. Middle Voice is the voice of reciprocity, of co-evolution, of granting others ‘reck’, of respecting lebensraum , of wishing ‘Shalom’, but we are forced to work just with verbs in the Active or Passive Voice – these are the voices of traditional causality…and of war, imperialism, tyranny, persecution, you name it… Thank God we don’t really live in a world like that! Fortunately, it’s all just a bad dream, a media special effect, a trick of language. Now…if only I could just wake up! Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Ethics and the Works of Mercy David Cowles Nov 7, 2023 “The Past is what it is, the Future will be what will be. We are just here, now!” Rule of thumb : Any 10 philosophers on the head of a pin = 18 different ethical systems! Most of us cling to a childhood confidence that ethics can be reduced to a series of commandments, a list of dos and don'ts, and the convergence of the 4 P’s: priest, parent, pedagogue , and police . Since 1500 CE, we have eagerly shifted our ethical focus away from the concrete act per se and onto the imputed ‘intentions’ behind the act (psychology) and/or its mythical ‘consequences’ (political science). “Act? What act?” The Future is nothing but a mirror image of the Past: New chairs, same deck! From Machiavelli (‘ends justify means’) to Mill (‘greatest good for the greatest number’) to Marx (‘dictatorship of the proletariat’) to Malcolm (‘by any means necessary’), we have made a pact to suppress the Present (action) and amplify the Past (intention) and the Future (consequence). We have deceived ourselves into believing that modern pragmatism is a smooth continuation of an ethical heritage that traces back to Moses and Socrates. It’s not! Moses did not lead the Exodus because he wanted to experiment with a new social contract or because he dreamed of enjoying a more lavish lifestyle in the ‘Land of Milk and Honey’, Canaan. Moses did it because Liberation per se is an ethical imperative. As we’ll see (below), it is one of the Works of Mercy , albeit writ large. The ethics of Moses, Socrates, Jesus, and Marcus Aurelius are consistent with their cosmologies. Our ethics…not so much! Example: Chaos Theory renders any ‘consequence-based’ morality untenable. No event ‘causes’ any other event; therefore, no event is to blame for any other event. On the other hand, every event is responsible for itself; it is its own intention and its own consequence. According to the ‘standard model’, an Event is simply the Past acting through the Present to secure the Future (Darwin, Freud, Trotsky, Skinner, Derrida, et al.). I am the accidental battlefield on which various cosmic forces contend: Michael vs. Lucifer, God vs. Satan, Arjuna vs. his kinsmen. According to this ontology, ‘to do’ is active voice in form only; in fact, it can have only one voice: the passive voice. I am the passive product of my Past projecting its ‘image’ onto my Future. Our morality, therefore, contradicts our ontology. It requires us to take full responsibility for events over which we have no control and to shun all responsibility for events over which we have total control. We’ve stood the Serenity Prayer on its head: “God grant me the serenity to accept things I could have changed but didn’t, and the courage to change things that can’t be altered.” According to contemporary ethics, “the devil made me so it…or it was an accident; I inherited bad genes…or bad Karma; I grew up poor…or posh; I was abused…or neglected, and of course, I was under the influence of alcohol and drugs.” This contradiction is crystallized in the structure of most modern Indo-European languages: noun (subject) → verb (active voice) → noun (object). Past (noun) → Present (verb) → Future (noun). The active/passive voice is well suited to describe the transition from Past (subject) to Future (object): I dig a hole in the ground so that I can pour concrete. Most of us assume without reflection that this formula describes something that is a substructural feature of being itself: intention → action → consequence; I mean, how else could it be? Well, instead of Past (subject) → Present (verb) → Future (object), try Past (co-subject) → Present (verb) ← Future (co-subject) or Past (co-object) ← Present (verb) → Future (co-object). The difference appears subtle, but in fact, it is tectonic…to the extent that anything in philosophy can be ‘tectonic’. According to consensus, the contrast of Past and Future constitutes the Present. But according to our ‘alternative models’ (above), every Present determines its own Past and its own Future. It is easy to express an ethics based on intentions (Past) or consequences (Future), using active/passive verb forms. But how about an ethics divorced from any consideration of Past or Future, an ethics focused entirely on the Act per se , the Present? That would require an alternate voice: a Middle Voice , interactive and/or reflexive. Originally, Middle Voice may have been the dominant voice; today, it has disappeared or atrophied in most Indo-European languages. Now consider the Works of Mercy ! The first known reference to these Works, Corporal and Spiritual, comes from the theologian Pseudo-Isidore, a Frankish monk, writing around 550 CE. T he Works of Mercy focus on the material and spiritual needs of other creatures. They are consistent with the Great Commandment and the Golden Rule. They trace back to Chapter 25 of the Gospel of Matthew, but they are also mentioned in the Old Testament (Isaiah and Tobit): Feed the hungry. Water the thirsty. Clothe the naked. Shelter the homeless. Visit the sick. Liberate captives. Bury the dead. Instruct the ignorant. Counsel the doubtful. Admonish sinners. Bear wrongs patiently. Forgive offenses. Comfort the sorrowful. Pray for the living and the dead. These ‘new commandments’ make no reference to Past or Future, only Present. In fact, what makes these Works ethically imperative is precisely that they are divorced from motives and consequences. They just are! A recent Thoughts While Shaving mentioned Michael Kelly’s Holy Moments . His ‘Holy Moments’ are moments of kindness, of being there for others. In other words, performing the Works of Mercy ! The Past consists of ‘settled matters of fact’ – we can’t do anything about it. The Future is indeterminate; we can’t control it. We can only control the Present, the moment, the act. The Past is what it is, the Future will be what will be. We are just here, now! Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back The Myth of the Maze David Cowles Sep 3, 2024 “Have you ever found yourself in a small, brightly lit room?” It’s something out of science fiction…or a primetime network cop show. You’ve just awakened, but not in your comfortable bed in your familiar bedroom. Today, you find yourself naked in a small, brightly lit room…and then you notice: your memories have been wiped. Well, partially wiped: you have no ‘thetic’ memories, memories of who you are or what the world is like; but you’ve retained all your ‘non-thetic’ memories. If you could walk, talk, swim, or ride a bike, you still can. You may even be able to chew gum at the same time. But you can’t recite the alphabet, add a column of figures, or discuss the Fall of Rome. Bummer! Fortunately this room has a doorway that opens out onto a corridor. Instinctively, you begin to explore. One corridor leads to another and then to another. Corridors branch off from each other. You wander aimlessly, with no fixed direction. Soon you realize that there are other people in these corridors. They don’t threaten you; in fact, for the most part, they pretty much ignore you. Apparently, each person is pursuing a personal agenda – but what agenda? Exceptions prove the rule: every so often you meet someone who seems interested in you , who tries to engage with you. Should you trust these people? Or fear them? How should you respond? Then things start to get interesting. Up to now, it’s been just ‘another tequila Sunday’ (excuse me, a what?).The bare and empty corridors begin to fill-in. They are punctuated with ‘stations’: food stops, drink stops, stations with free VR headsets, music stations, movie stations, stations with video games, handball courts, etc. You’d be reminded of a casino complex in Vegas or luxury seating at an NFL event, if you knew what they were. You could get used to this! Time goes by. You’re comfortable…but perplexed. What is all this? What’s going on? Do these corridors lead anywhere? If so, where? And why? And who are these ‘other people’ anyway? Gradually, you build your ‘social map’. Each person you meet is unique. But they seem to cluster into 4 fairly distinct groups. You might think ‘middle school cliques’…if you had any idea what a ‘middle school’ was. One group is frantic; they’re fixated on one thing only: We’ve got to get out of this place…if it’s the last thing we ever do! (Where’d that come from?) “Where are they going?” you wonder. “What’s out there?” Another group seems in no hurry to leave; they just want to understand! What’s it all about, Alfie? (Who’s Alfie ?) Folks in the third group don’t seem to care where they’re going or why they’re here. They’re more than happy just to enjoy this world and all it has to offer. Why would anyone want to leave? Who cares what’s out there? Or why it’s there? Or why we’re here? Being here is a gift! Enjoy it, prolong it, be grateful for it. Our final group doesn’t seem to care about any of this. They are focused on each other. “How can I help? What can I do to make your time here better?” (Whatever ‘better’ is!) Like any prison, this one ‘encourages’ you to join one of the ‘gangs’; you probably don’t want to do your time here as a lone wolf. To survive, you’ll need to create an avatar…choose an identity…and then keep your head down! But which identity? What turns you on? What floats your boat? Are you motivated by accomplishment, by knowledge, by enjoyment, or by service? Who R U? Or better yet, who do you choose to be? Ok, it’s a nice fable. But what’s the point? I mean, have you ever found ‘yourself naked in a small, brightly lit room’? A room with ‘a doorway that opens out’ into a maze of unmarked corridors? Have you? If you did, who did you choose to be? Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Bucket List David Cowles Jul 2, 2024 “Kick the bucket…over. Recognize that every event is radically unique and enjoy it on its own terms… Every event is a Bucket Lister!” The first time I heard the term Bucket List , I cringed. Talk about ‘measuring out your life with coffee spoons’ (Eliot). But I’ve only recently begun to understand my instinctive aversion. Apparently, we have an inalienable right to ‘pursue happiness’. I’m not relying solely on the Declaration of Independence here. “I just want to be happy/don’t I have a right to be happy/whatever makes you happy/you don’t make me happy anymore” are phrases we hear every day. Pity the poor bartenders and beauticians who must earn a living by listening intently to these self-pitying memes, interjecting occasional sighs in appropriate spaces. ‘The pursuit of happiness’ is an oxymoron. Happiness is not a ‘thing’; it’s a ‘subjective form’ (Whitehead), an introspective state of mind. It can’t be pursued like a certain white whale. While external circumstances may, or may not, be more, or less, conducive to happiness, nothing makes us happy. Happiness is just one of many ‘forms’ we may give to events. There is no word, happyfication , in the English language. Intuitively we understand that nothing can ‘make’ anyone happy; but we promptly forget that and set off down our own ‘whale road’ ( Beowulf ). No wonder we’re miserable! We’re fishing from dawn to dusk in a post-apocalyptic puddle. Imagine one of the things on my Bucket List is to visit the Grand Canyon. Here I am at the iconic rim – breathtaking, and yes, I’m smiling. Good thing because I haven’t been smiling much over the past few days. There was the usual logistical stress, compounded by a flight delay. Oh, and our ‘luxury accommodations’ turned out to be luxurious in price alone! But I’m not complaining. I’m glad I got to see one of the world’s wonders. But was I happy ? Am I happy now? Maybe, maybe not, but either way, can I give full credit (or blame) to the Grand Canyon? “No, you don’t get it, the experience was fantastic. The hassles were a pin prick in comparison. I wouldn’t have sacrificed this experience for anything.” Ok, great. But are you happy now ? Happy that you saw it? Yes. Happy to cross another item off your list? Ok. But life is what fills the gaps between Bucket Listers and the ‘Bucket Kicker’. How happy are you now? There are a lot of things I do, not bucket list worthy, that I enjoy. I’m happy while I’m doing them. Dining on foie gras, sipping a vintage port, taking in a Giotto exhibit at the Met. I suppose my memories of these events are somewhat pleasant as well. But does any of this make me happy? Then? Now? Whenever I experience anything, I automatically notice imperfections and I immediately imagine how I might ‘improve the experience’…next time: what would I do differently? Rather than enjoying what is happening right now, I’m already thinking ahead. This is not the result of some character flaw; it’s human nature! It’s natural selection. When we do something pleasant, we seek ways to do it again, only better: “Next time… I’ll arrive earlier, dress more comfortably, and order a different bottle of wine.” Of course, that subverts the whole premise of a Bucket List: One and Done! No experience, no matter how extraordinary, is ever ‘perfect’. It can’t be, by nature! ‘Perfect moments’ (Sartre) are idealizations. In Euclid’s world, the angles of a perfect triangle always sum to exactly 180 degrees. IRL, not all triangles are ‘perfect’; in fact, none are! No real triangle has angles that add precisely to 180.0000000… degrees. There is an unbridgeable disconnect between the world of experience and the world of mathematics. Math deals only with ideal entities; IRL there are none . Robert Frost gets it ( The Road Not Taken ): Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could… Then took the other… Oh I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back… IRL there are no do-overs . Of course, you can try to correct your perceived mistakes but in the end it’s futile. For better or for worse, it’s one, done! The minute I say, to myself or others, “next time”, I’m guilty of bad faith . There are no ‘next times’, there are just those times and these times. “Oh time, it’s like a river… ain’t nothin’ but a river.” (Grayson Hugh) And what do we know about rivers? You can’t step into the same one twice. (Heraclitus) So how do you want to live your life? Diagramming future events which, if realized IRL, will always differ significantly and unpredictably from their diagrams, events that will be perceived as ‘imperfect’ but that can never be ‘done over’. Of course, you can go back to thr Grand Canyon as often as you like, but each time you go, it will be your ‘first time going there’. The world consists entirely of ‘events’ – what else could it consist of? Anything else would just be scaffolding. Events happen when objective values are applied to our experience of the Actual World. Each event is unique; comparisons are only derivatively real. Kick the bucket…over. Recognize that every event is radically unique and enjoy it on its own terms, without the baggage of anticipation, nostalgia, or comparison. Every event is a Bucket Lister! Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Keep the conversation going. 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 Viktor Frankel David Cowles Jan 27, 2022 “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” —— These words are attributed to Viktor Frankel, holocaust survivor, philosopher, and author. “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” —— These words are attributed to Viktor Frankel, holocaust survivor, philosopher, and author. It appears that Frankel is limiting this idea of a ‘space’ between cause and effect to human decisions; but there is no reason to be so restrictive. From Hasidic rabbis to modern philosophers (e.g., Alfred North Whitehead), there is an alternative view that inserts Frankel’s ‘space’ between every cause and every effect, whether ‘animal, vegetable or mineral’. Of course, this is a radical rejection of deterministic philosophies that assume effects follow directly, and inexorably, from their causes. Not so! Between every cause and its effect(s) there is always a ‘space’. In some cases that space is infinitesimal (e.g., when two billiard balls collide); in other cases, it can be considerable (e.g., when a human being consciously chooses one behavior out of a range of optional behaviors). In the case of the billiard balls, we can predict the momentum of the struck ball with enormous accuracy. The space between cause and effect is exceedingly small, so the ‘freedom factor’ can for all practical purposes be ignored. Not so, of course, with human behavior, and perhaps to a lesser extent, with the behavior of other living organisms. How do we experience this ‘space’? As physical space? As a period of time? Certainly not. There is no physical space between two colliding billiard balls; there is no period of time over which the balls exchange momentum. The very idea of a spatiotemporal separation between cause and effect seems absurd. Yet when we are agonizing over whether to order the steak or the lobster, the decision making process can seem interminable. But this confuses deliberation (the agony) with decision (the ecstasy). When we finally decide to order the sea bass, that decision may be instantaneous, no matter how long the deliberation lasted. In my view, Frankel’s ‘space’ is not to be found on the spatiotemporal continuum. It takes place outside of spacetime, in a dimension perpendicular to spacetime; we sometimes call this dimension ‘eternity’. Eternity is what’s left when you take space and time out of the equation. 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 AI Validates Nietzsche David Cowles Aug 21, 2025 “Nihilist Nietzsche joining forces with Orthodox Theists and 21st century computer scientists…” “Who’d a thunk it?” ( Hairspray ) One of Nietzsche’s most controversial propositions has been validated by recent developments in the science of Artificial Intelligence. AI has graduated from Algorithm School and moved on to the Academy of Creative Design, finding novel solutions to novel problems. But this raises a more fundamental issue: True creativity cannot be reduced to the mere reshuffling of defined variables, the rearrangement of words on a page, for example. I arrange words on a page. So did Shakeseare. See the problem. To be useful, AI needs to be able to distinguish the melodious prose of David Cowles from the tortured poetry of William Shakespeare. You can do it…but can AI? To be clear, it is not just a matter of noticing a difference between Shakespearean poetry and my prose; it is a matter of assigning a ‘quality assessment’ to each. Cowles – A (of course); Shakespeare – C- (keep trying). A great grandchild finger paints. “Is this good, Boka?” Innately, she understands that all ‘arrangements’ (if I may use that word for it) of paint on paper are not of equal value . She knows she likes Sally’s painting more than Josh’s. But why? And what about her own painting? Is it as good as Sally’s? As bad as Josh’s? To confuse matters further, Josh says he really likes her painting while Sally just said, “Mine’s better!” But is it? Josh, Sally and my great grand all have an innate sense of Beauty. How they apply that sense IRL to actual paintings is another matter entirely. The concept of Beauty is universal and innate; the appreciation of Beauty is the work of an individual’s lifetime. ( Sidebar : According to the Baltimore Catechism, RCC, c. 1955, our existential purpose is to know , love , and serve God. We know God by pursuing Truth, we love God by curating Beauty, we serve God by behaving justly and demanding Justice for all. These values are universal and felt innately by each of us.) But where does this innate sense of Beauty come from? Is it a function of evolution? Is it a product of human physiology? Is it an electrochemical phenomenon? Here’s where Nietzsche weighs in: “…No one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself…The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be… “One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” ( Twilight of the Idols ) The fundamental unit (quantum) of Being is the Whole. The Whole is not an assemblage of Parts; there are no ‘parts’ per se . What we call ‘parts’ are just aspects of the Whole. In fact, “Nothing exists apart from the whole.” Therefore, there is nothing in position to judge the whole. Judgment implies a transcendent perspective and according to Nietzsche, there is no such thing as Transcendence. Everything is immanent, the world is ‘ontologically flat’, so nothing is objective and there can be no valid judgements. Of course, no one wants to be told that their ‘Dear Leader’ is naked. Even today, perhaps especially today, people (e.g. A. J. Ayer and Albert Camus , infrequent bed fellows as they may be) argue that objective judgement does not require a transcendent POV. Their bumper sticker of choice reads, “ Good without God .” So who’s right? Nietzsche or the Secular Humanists? A recent article by Rohit Kumar Thakur (7/27/2025), It’s Game Over , settles the score: Nietzsche – 1, Humanists – 0. First, Thakur asks the question, as old as Plato and as fresh as my great grand, “But How Does It Know What’s ‘Good’?” He elaborates: “How do you judge art? How do you judge creativity? ASI-ARCH’s creators knew that just chasing a high score on a benchmark would be a disaster. That leads to ‘reward hacking’, finding cheap tricks to boost a number without creating a genuinely better design.” If evaluative standards were hardwired, our non-linear creative impulses would be straightjacketed by arbitrary, linear ‘objective criteria’. Our so-called ‘evaluations’ would be nothing more than our subjective biases projected onto the material world. “So, they built a ‘Fitness Function’…They use a separate LLM to act as an expert judge . This ‘LLM-as-Judge’ looks at the new design and scores it on things like innovation, structural complexity, and elegance… So, an AI is literally judging another AI’s creativity.” But does that really solve the problem? Relatively, yes; absolutely, no! One ‘Fitness Function’ can be better than another where ‘better’ means ‘more independent’ vis a vis the system it is set to evaluate. In an Ideal Universe, the Evaluative Function would be 100% divorced from its subject; it would be truly transcendent. In a less perfect world, the Evaluation Function can be designed with an eye toward ‘relative’, albeit not ‘absolute’, autonomy. The further an Evaluative Function is removed from its subject, the more its judgements are free to identify true Beauty – and the less they are constrained by the opinions, tastes and biases of its engineers. The probability of any event occurring exactly as it does is miniscule, perhaps even infinitesimal, ε. Now build a second system just as fine tuned as the first and use that second system to evaluate the first. The probability of any one event-evaluation pairing is infinitely less than the infinitesimal probability of the event itself, i.e. ε². If we’re not there yet, we’re getting awfully close. It is frustrating to live anywhere other than in an Ideal World. It seems like we can approach anything but reach nothing. Take Absolute Zero for instance (0° Kelvin). We can get remarkably close, but we’ll never reach it. But in one respect, we do live in an Ideal World. Beauty, Truth, and Justice are Eternal Values that precede (logically and ontologically) the material world. Every Actual Entity (event) reflects in some way and to some degree these Eternal Values. Best of all, these Values are entirely Transcendent. There is no trace of personal bias. Only Beauty evaluates ‘beauty’, only Truth evaluates ‘truth’, and only Justice evaluates ‘justice’. Logically (not ontologically or temporally), the Eternal Values even ‘precede’ God. The Eternal Values absolutely transcend the material world. They constitute the Essence of God who by definition is perfectly and totally Transcendent. A transcendent God is the sole guarantee that the Eternal Values are objectively normative, that they qualify as a Categorical Imperative. Without transcendent values, judgements can only be ‘relatively valid’ and ‘provisionally normative’. Ayer, for example, identifies ‘kindness’ as his core value. He’s certainly entitled to live his life according to that value. But attractive as it might be to us, it is only Ayer’s opinion . I doubt that Nietzsche, for example, would agree. Nor does Ayer’s designation of ‘kindness’ as ‘core’ entitle him to prosecute someone alleged to be ‘serially unkind’. Bottom line : Ayer and Camus shop for values the way I shop for flavors at Baskin Robbins…and according to the law in Massachusetts at least, I am not entitled to impose my flavor choices on you. Bummer! The rapidly maturing science of AI clearly supports Nietzsche’s intuition that Judgement is valid only to the extent that it is independent of the matter being judged. Complete independence requires a transcendent POV – something not allowed in Nietzsche’s cosmology but hard wired into most ‘post-pagan’ theologies. So, who’d a thunk it indeed? Nihilist Nietzsche joining forces with Orthodox Theists (like Pope Leo XIII) and 21 st century computer scientists to combat the ‘humanist heresies’ of the 20 th century. Ain’t metaphysics marvelous! *** Artist Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio, 1855, oil on canvas, 361 × 598 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. This painting mirrors Nietzsche’s idea that judgments of creativity are never absolute but always shaped by perspective, context, and the interplay between individual and whole—just as AI’s evaluations of art reflect both independence and relational dependence. 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 AI and Marxism David Cowles Jul 27, 2023 “Marxism’s stated goal is to transfer ownership of the means of production to the producers. Dare I say, Mission Accomplished?” It is a fundamental tenet of Marxist philosophy that we form a dynamic template with our technological environment; but unlike passive templates, this one is not symmetrical. To borrow from Genesis , we shape technology in our image while technology forms us in its likeness. Since Alan Turing, the goal of AI has been to build a machine that can fool a trained and conscientious operator into believing that she is interacting with a human being. We build our technology to reflect our own image back at us. We even give our gadgets nicknames. But at the same time, less obviously, technology is shaping us , its operators. According to philosophers from Marx to McLuhan, we become extensions of our technology, but philosophers notwithstanding, no one demonstrated the impact of technology on its operators and beneficiaries better than Charlie Chaplin, especially in Modern Times (1936). I am tempted, of course, to find an analogy here with the Eucharist. I mean, who wouldn’t? Is it my Roman Catholic background, or the influence of James Joyce ( Ulysses is one long Eucharistic analogy), showing here? No matter, the image is the ‘bread and wine’; the likeness , the ‘body and blood’. The ‘image’ enables us to approach the Eucharist, to interact with it, to consume it, but it is the ‘likeness’ that works below the surface to transform us into members of Christ’s mystical body. The Eucharist appears to us in a form we easily recognize but changes us into something we would not recognize so readily. Have I gone too far this time? Maybe. But back to Marx! (From Mass?) Today, everyone is worried about the impact of AI on social inequality. Understandably so! Every new technology does favor the well-to-do…temporarily: Who could afford a car in 1915? A TV in 1950? Or a personal computer in 1985? Maybe the one-percenters . Today, the average American family has all these things, often several times over. Initially these technologies created new divisions between haves and have-nots ; ultimately those same technologies resolved those differences: we all became haves (ok, limited haves , but haves nonetheless). In my day, it was Ford vs. Foot, Chevy vs. Shank’s Mare, Deisel vs. Deez’ll; today it’s Lexus vs. Corolla. In 1960, access to transportation determined access to the ‘means of production’. Today, we all have access to the loci of wealth…but some of us get there in leather seats. Of course, this leveling doesn’t happen overnight. It took 50 years for the automobile to ‘democratize’, 15 years for the TV, and 10 years for the personal computer; but AI will be fully democratized in less than 5. Caveat : There is more to socio-economic inequality than the number of TVs in your home. Inequality has many causes and many manifestations that have little to do with technology. That said, most every new technology does temporarily widen economic gaps but later works to narrow them, and again, AI will be no exception. The future requires no crystal ball. We live in an information age, powered by an information economy. Soon wealth will be measured in ‘bits’ rather than ‘its’. (My father’s generation had a saying, “Whoever has the most toys wins.” Not so then, not so now!) Today, access to information is still correlated with economic advantage, but tomorrow , virtually every person on Planet Earth will enjoy the same access to the same information as everyone else. That’s the promise of AI. From Moses ( Leviticus ) to Matthew (Jesus) to Marx to modern Scandinavia, curbing socio-economic inequality has been on the agenda of social reformers. Marxism’s stated goal is to transfer ownership of the means of production to the producers. Dare I say, Mission accomplished ? As history has shown, this is difficult to accomplish in an agricultural or industrial economy where productive assets require massive amounts of capital. It is hard to imagine funding a profit making farm or factory with less than $1,000,000; and how many of us have a spare $1M on hand? Various Marxist theoreticians have proposed various solutions; I think it’s fair to say that none of them has worked…so far. But is it possible that we are growing our way out of Marx’s dilemma? The information superhighway is a toll road, to be sure, but the cost of entry is a $500 computer and a $50 internet connection. Well within reach of families with 2 cars and 3 TVs! Of course, inequality will persist, driven by race, education, gender, etc. But the biggest single driver of inequality, access to capital, is about to disappear. ChatGPT is the new SVB! Who needs venture capital if you have a smart phone, a laptop, and a highspeed internet connection? Capitalism and communism converge; who’d a thunk it? ( Hairspray ) Aletheia Today Magazine is devoting its entire Fall Issue (9/1/2023) to the philosophical, theological, cultural and/or spiritual implication of Artificial Intelligence. Do you have some ideas you’d like to share? We’d love to add you to our growing list of authors; check us out: https://www.aletheiatoday.com/submit . Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.