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Written by David Cowles, Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today magazine and explores short, profound thoughts and discoveries about theology, science, philosophy, literature, the arts, society, and prayer. Subscribe today for FREE! Enter your email address here: Subscribe now! Thanks for submitting! Feb 23, 2026 Number 9 “Aletheia Today decoded the Beatles’ Revolution 9… (and) we speculated on the Beatles’ choice of #9 to symbolize their revolutionary ideology. Why 9?” Read More Feb 22, 2026 “If I only had a Brain” So lamented the loveable Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.” Read More Feb 22, 2026 Supercomputer vs. Slime Mold “Deep Blue has almost limitless intelligence but no wisdom. Slime Mold’s intellect is limited…but it enjoys the wisdom of Solomon.” Read More Feb 22, 2026 Plato and Slime What’s so good about being slime? Well, how about the intelligence of Deep Blue, the wisdom of Solomon, (and) the virtue of Mother Theresa…” Read More Feb 14, 2026 Ovid & Identity “The self is the absence of all forms, the negation of ‘form’ per se. Alternatively, self is what all forms have in common.” Read More Feb 14, 2026 Slime! “We’ve come a long way, baby! From little less than angels we have been reduced to little more than bacteria.” Read More Feb 9, 2026 Parmenides and Time Crystals “Our earliest model of Being reappears as the latest in a string of recent cosmological breakthroughs that began with Relativity.” Read More Feb 5, 2026 God, Christians, and… Aliens Exploring the Edges of Faith with an Inquiring Mind Read More Feb 3, 2026 The Power of Prayer “May what is potential become actual and what is transient, eternal.” Read More Feb 2, 2026 St. John’s Time Crystal “Order and freedom can and do coexist in a single entity.” Read More Jan 26, 2026 Healthcare & The Titanic “We have the technology to transform healthcare…we just need the will to deploy it and we will begin to build that will only once we stop moving furniture.” Read More Jan 26, 2026 George Washington Carver “I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour if we will only tune in.” Read More Thoughts While Shaving 38 Page 1

< Back Number 9 David Cowles Feb 23, 2026 “Aletheia Today decoded the Beatles’ Revolution 9… (and) we speculated on the Beatles’ choice of #9 to symbolize their revolutionary ideology. Why 9?” 1,500 words; 7 minute read In an earlier post, Aletheia Today decoded the Beatles’ Revolution 9 from their White Album (1968). At the end of that article we speculated on the Beatles’ choice of #9 to symbolize their revolutionary ideology. Why 9 and not 42…or 67? We noted that 9 is 3², the third member of the sequence 3^n, where n is a positive whole number. We also noted that the universe seems to be organized as a fractal , i.e. self-similar at all scales. If you accept that the universe is organized around the number 3 (e.g. Triangles in Plato’s Timaeus, Trinity in the Gospel of John ), then the idea that other orders of reality might be described using exponents of 3 (e.g. 3²) makes perfect sense. Sidebar : The best known 20 th century advocate of this ‘triangles all the way down’ theory, Buckminster Fuller, famously wrote: “Universe is plural and at minimum two.” He was wrong! Every 2 (x, y) is implicitly 3: (x, y, and xRy - the relationship between x and y, provided x ≠ y.) A universe consisting of two inert terms (x, y) is somewhere between impossible and meaningless. If x and y are part of the same universe, and not identical, then that universe must also include xRy which by definition cannot be reduced to either x or y (since x ≠ y); so Universe is plural and at minimum 3 (Council of Nicaea, 325 CE): Speaking of Nicaea, in Trinitarian theology, the Relationship between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is one of God’s three ‘persons’, along with the Father and the Son. In Marxist ontology, every thesis (x) is accompanied by an antithesis (y) and a synthesis (xRy). In Jewish spirituality, Kabbalah consists of 9 sefirot or aspects of Being, plus Keter (crown), the ineffable Godhead encompassing and grounding the 9 sefirot. The paradigm of Christian spirituality, the Lord’s Prayer , consists of three stanzas of three verses each: 3 x 3 = 9. Finally, the Christian spiritual practice known as Enneagram ( ennea = nine), outlined by Evagrius the Solitary toward the end of the 4 th century CE and refined by Jesuits in the latter half of the 20 th century, is based on an inner triangle (3,6,9) and an outer hexagon (1,4,2,8,5,7). Each of its 9 ‘sefirot’ corresponds to a different human personality type. Intriguingly, the repeating decimal 0.142857… is precisely equal to 1/7. However, the high priest of the Number 9 is a virtually unknown philosopher/theologian (c. 1300 CE), Ramon Lull. As above, Lull’s ontology is fractal, but his underlying pattern is 9-fold. His life’s work is a detailed and complex ‘map’ of the universe with the number 9 as its unifying concept. Lull begins with 9 letters of the alphabet (B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K) arranged as nodes of a 9-gram. ‘A’ is the center of the circle, the ineffable El , Keter in Kabbalah (and there is no ‘J’ in the Roman alphabet). According to Lull’s scheme, A unfolds into 9 Avatars, each corresponding to one of nine core ‘subjects’ (substance), one of nine core ‘predicates’ (quality), and one of nine core ‘modifiers’ (adverb): A A A B God Goodness Whether C Angel Greatness What D Heaven Eternity Which E Human Power Why F Imaginative Wisdom How Much/Many G Sensitive Will What H Vegetative Virtue When I Elemental Truth Where K Instrumental Glory (Efficacy) How/With What Some of these associations are self-explanatory. For example, Human/Power/Why seems obvious. Likewise, Instrumental/Efficacious/How. Others are a stretch, but I think we can get there: God/Goodness/Whether (Cosmogenesis), Heaven/Eternity/Which (Judgment). And still others, to this head at least, seem impenetrable: Vegetative/Virtue/When. Lull’s Map of Nines expands, presumably indefinitely. Initially, each of his 9 core Subjects (above) expands into its own 9 pointed map, recapitulating the original map but at scale . For example, C, Angel, expands to the 9 Angelic orders; and E, Human, expands to the 9 classes/castes in the social hierarchy: God Angel Heaven Human B Mind Seraphim Premum Mobile Priests C Intellect Cherubim Stars Princes D Love Thrones Saturn Magistrates E Competence Powers Jupiter Doctors F Presence Virtues Mars Soldiers G Knowledge Dominions Sun Merchants H Providence Principalities Venus Craftsmen I Judgment Archangels Mercury Farmers K Justice Angels Moon Servants Imaginative Sensitive Vegetative B Reminiscence Memory Procreation C Argument Forethought Growth D Natural Arts Imagination Elimination E Proportionality Sense (Common) Digestion F Locality Sight Attraction G Caution Hearing Drive H Sexuality Smell Appetite I Acculturation Taste Knowing K Education Touch Life Elemental Instrumental B Orientation Pride/ Humility /Contempt C Generation Lust/ Chastity /Frigidity D Alteration Gluttony/ Sobriety /Asceticism E Generalizable Lying/ Honesty /Vain Speech F Alterable Obstinacy/ Constancy /Fickleness G Divisible Nosiness/ Caring /Sloth H Differentiable Envy/ Satisfaction /Emulation I Potential Wrath/ Forbearance /Obliviousness K Existential Frugality/ Generosity /Avarice The ‘Instrumental’ is the realm of the accidental continuum (Parmenides’ Doxa ). Therefore, it is not only necessary to designate the core Virtue in each category but also to mention the negative consequences of deviation, in either direction, from that ideal. Importantly, Lull rejects the Good vs. Evil paradigm of Gnosticism. Instead he follows the Augustinian tradition of Degrees of Goodness. Imperfection is a privation of perfection; evil is a privation of Good. The ineffable (A) manifests as 9 ‘core subjects’ etc. Each of these core subjects in turn unfolds in 9 different ways (e.g. angels as their ranks, society as its classes). Presumably, this process of 9-fold elaboration continues all up and down the ontological ladder. Lull’s universe may be best described in terms of origami, the folding and unfolding of paper, creating worlds. He is in good company. Parmenides , the father of Western philosophy, grounded his cosmology on Aletheia , the uncovering or unfolding of Truth. We can only scratch the surface of Lull’s system in this article. Like the 4 bases that make up DNA, Lull’s 9 ‘bases’ can be combined in myriad ways (genes) with complex and unexpected results. Of course, Lull’s system is only one attempt to develop a simple but heuristic model of the World, based on fractals. One immediately thinks of I Ching, Kabballah, Totem, Tarot, and the Standard Model of Particle Physics. All of which provokes a fundamental question: Can the World be meaningfully modeled via a classification scheme based on qualia ? Estimates vary but there are about 8 billion human beings alive on Planet Earth today. Another 100 billion have lived and died. Now imagine a public opinion poll: Q: Can the world be modeled based on qualia ? A: (living souls) 72% say No A: (dearly departed) 84% say Yes We happen to live at a peculiar time in the Intellectual History of Planet Earth. Since 1600 CE, especially in the North Atlantic Community, causality has replaced correlation as the explanatory principle of choice. Prior to Newton and Leibniz, folks took it for granted that things that looked alike, sounded alike, smelled alike, and behaved alike were in fact alike. Now we take it for granted that we live in an alienated world: Paraphrasing St. Paul, ‘what I wish to do I do not do and what I wish not to do I do’. Machiavelli heralded this new age when he separated ends from means. Ends can justify means only if they are essentially alienated from those means. Otherwise, what’s to justify? Without alienation, there is no separation between ends and means. No one ever asked Mother Theresa to justify her means by their ends; her means were her ends. They were of one cloth. Justification is only meaningful in the context of alienation. Models based on causality have produced huge material advances. Pragmatically, they have succeeded in predicting and duplicating a wide range of physical phenomena, but at the cost of massive alienation. I leave it to you, my dear readers, to consider whether they have been equally successful in helping us find deeper meaning in our lives. Are there unique phenomena, one-offs that can’t be predicted or reproduced? Are such phenomena related to one another by pathways outside the realm of physical causality, e.g. via their qualia ? What role, if any, do such phenomena play in our lives? Imagine you are standing on the floor of a forest. Beneath all the flora is the Wood Wide Web of roots and fungi that supports them. But look up. Foliage, the canopy of the forest, also plays a critical role in the evolution of events on the floor. The roots are analogous to causality, the foliage to correlation. Perhaps we would do well to pay renewed attention to patterns in the qualia we experience; they may contain keys to the meaning we’ve been missing for 400 years. And where better to begin than with Ramon Lull, the Beatles, and the number nine. *** Gustav Klimt’s Birch Wood is a masterclass in sensory immersion , utilizing a flattened, tapestry-like perspective that pulls the viewer directly into the dense verticality of the forest floor. By cutting off the treetops and focusing on the rhythmic patterns of the bark and fallen autumn leaves, Klimt emphasizes the tactile and atmospheric qualia of the woods over a traditional landscape view. The painting’s shimmering, mosaic-like application of oil on canvas transforms a natural scene into a meditative, near-abstract study of color and light. 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 Ecclesiastes – One Book or Two? David Cowles Jul 9, 2024 “It seems that we are not only permitted to dance in the face of death, but that God expects us to do so.” We do not expect our philosophers to be right, but we do wish they’d at least try to be consistent. Unfortunately, that’s a wish often unfulfilled IRL…nowhere more so than in the Old Testament book of wisdom known as Ecclesiastes . A friend of mine decided it was time for him to undertake the Christian equivalent of the Haj . One summer, he committed to reading the Bible from cover to cover. When he was done, I asked him, somewhat foolishly, which book was his ‘favorite’. To my surprise, he said, “ Ecclesiastes , of course.” Ecclesiastes ? Maybe. Of course? No way! But I shouldn’t have been surprised. Like me, my friend was a child of the ‘60s and even in that anti-clerical era, Ecclesiastes had its fans ( The Byrds ). Plus, Ecclesiastes is crammed full of jaw-dropping insights into the human predicament. So, what’s not to love? These realizations might have originated in virtually any corner of the world at virtually any time in its cultural history. Some of the ideas sound like they come from the Vedas or even the Tao Te Ching . Some look like they were lifted off of a 20 th century hand-out for a survey course on Existentialism. Still, the book sometimes reads as though it was an amalgamation of two texts culled from two very different traditions. On the one hand, Ecclesiastes offers a searing indictment of the human condition - vintage existentialism, full of angst and anxiety. In the spirit of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Camus, the emphasis is on the futility and absurdity of life. The mood is dark, the language strident! But on the other hand, there is a quietist thread running perpendicular throughout the text; it’s a blend of Epicurus, Voltaire, and Norman Vincent Peale. There is little doubt that Ecclesiastes is the work of more than one hand. Verses have almost certainly been added to the original text. That said, it would be a bridge too far to suggest that Ecclesiastes is really two books edited into a single text. We will need to find another way to resolve this dilemma. So, let’s consult the text: “Emptiness, emptiness…all is empty. (‘Emptiness’ is one translation of an Aramaic word that also denotes ‘absurdity, futility, vanity’.) “All things are wearisome… There is nothing new under the sun… I have seen all the deeds that are done here under the sun; they are all emptiness and a chase after wind… “The wise man is remembered no longer than the fool…all will be forgotten. Alas, wise men and fools die the same death!... Everything is the same for everybody; the same lot for the just and for the wicked…there is one lot for all… Men have no advantage over beasts, for everything is emptiness…all came from the dust and to the dust all return… “Better the end of anything than its beginning…The day of death is better than the day of birth. Better to visit the house of mourning than the house of feasting. “Time (entropy, mortality) and chance (quantum uncertainty) govern all.” Cheery stuff! Koheleth (the Speaker), once thought to be King Solomon himself, has taken us down an ontological path from which there is no logical escape. At this point, who could imagine that the book would end with everyone singing ‘Kumbya’ and dancing around a May Pole? And yet… Ecclesiastes has the temerity to suggest just that: “I know that there is nothing good for man except to be happy and live the best life he can while he is alive. Moreover, that a man should eat and drink and enjoy himself in return for all his labors is a gift of God… “Go to it then, eat your food and enjoy it, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart; for already God has accepted what you have done… Whatever task lies to your hand, do it with all your might.” Here Ecclesiastes dips into a Biblical thread suggesting that God has pre-ordained a specific set of tasks for each of us to complete. We see it in Jeremiah and the prophets, but it is most clearly summarized in Ephesians 2:10 : “For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance that we should live in them.” In this view, we do not create our lives, we step into them (or not). We are invited to do the Will of God , to participate in universal salvation. Of course, God marches on, with or without our cooperation. We can jump on the bandwagon and play our scripted role in salvation history, or we can stand off to one side. We can let life pass us by…literally. “It is good and proper for a man to eat and drink and enjoy himself… He will not dwell overmuch on the passing years because God has filled his time with joy of heart.” Et voila - a full-throated endorsement of bad faith? Joie de vivre is intended by God to distract us from our existential predicament? Faith really is the opiate of the people after all! It seems that we are not only permitted to dance in the face of death, but that God expects us to do so. “Living well is the best revenge!” ( The Great Gatsby , BCE edition) Such an interpretation is rooted in what, I believe, is a misreading of Judeo-Christian theology. Contrary to popular opinion, salvation does not require us to thread a needle: “Every breath you take and every move you make…I’ll be watching you” ( The Police ) …not! As stated in Ephesians (above), God does not dictate a plan; rather, he lays out a smorgasbord of options: “Pick a path, any path; they all lead home. Just stay out of the brambles.” To whatever extent we do not directly oppose God’s values (Beauty, Truth, Justice), we participate in eternity. God is infinitely merciful and he created the cosmos so that everything in it might be saved. It is his intent that events in the spatiotemporal, entropic world should participate in eternity…and God will out. Only that which explicitly rejects salvation will be expunged at the end of time. Everything we do, whether we realize it or not, is motivated by our appetite for God as he is manifest to us, i.e. as the Good, as Beauty, Truth, Justice, et al. To whatever extent our actions resonate with those values, they are eternal. Only the destruction of God’s ‘goods’ (above) cannot, by definition, be saved. Clear? Well, when all else fails… I turn to symbolic logic to compound my confusion: B є A for all B, provided B ≠ -A. In other words, everything (B, events) is part of A (eternity) except -A. -A, the negation of A, cannot be an element of A. And how do we know -A when we meet him? Fortunately, we can turn to the Bible, or better yet Dante ( Inferno ) & Milton ( Paradise Lost ), for a paradigm: Satan! Imagine Robert Frost ( The Road Less Traveled ) and Hugh Everett ( Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics ) had babies: We’d be they! 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 Plato and Slime David Cowles Feb 22, 2026 What’s so good about being slime? Well, how about the intelligence of Deep Blue, the wisdom of Solomon, (and) the virtue of Mother Theresa…” 1200 words, 6 minute read Ok, yes, we do have our issues with Plato and we haven’t been shy about sharing them on this site. But associating Plato with ‘slime’ is way over the top! Except it isn’t, because as we’ll soon see, ‘to be slimed’ is a very high honor indeed! Take a look at the Epilogue Plato attached to his best known Dialogue, The Republic . It tells the story of Er , a mythical character who returns to life. Plato presents a complex theory of reincarnation. It includes everything you’d expect from a box office blockbuster: cross species metempsychosis, karma, free will, chance, necessity, and fate. But Plato’s doctrine includes one feature that, if not unique, is at least less common. Souls get to choose how they will be reincarnated. One’s ‘reincarnation destination’ is not a reward or punishment or the fruit of one’s spiritual accomplishments. It is simply a choice, not an unrestricted choice, as we’ll see shortly, but a choice. “No daemon will cast lots for you; rather you shall choose your own daemon (fate).” This choice has its special conditions. Before you choose, God conducts a lottery to determine the selection order. God has prepared a variety of destinations (e.g. human, pig, tree, cell) for the reincarnating souls; and within each general ‘destination’, no two specific ‘situations’ will be the same. You have elected to be reincarnated as an owl…but in which tree in which forest and with what attributes? You can’t design your destiny, but you can choose it from a wide variety on offer…unless, of course, you’re the last to choose. “Let him to whom the first lot falls pick first the life to which he shall be chained. Virtue is not relevant here; each soul will share in virtue according to how it values it. All blame belongs to him who chooses; God is blameless.” Note : Everyone wants to be #1 but getting the #1 pick in God’s version of the NFL draft is not necessarily an advantage; the temptation to choose ‘beauty, wealth and power’ over ‘wisdom, virtue and humility’ often proves irresistible. A spot somewhere in the middle is probably best. But what if you’re at the end of the line? *** God could not have been nicer…or more apologetic. Yes, I was last in line and, yes, I was terrified. What fate could be so horrible that millions of souls passed over it on their way back to Earth? “There’s only one option left. I’m afraid you’re going to have to live out your next lifetime as Slime Mold.” I don’t know how much you know about slime but, spoiler alert , I could not have been more thrilled! If I couldn’t be the next Einstein, or Salk, or Joyce, or Matisse, I could be very happy being slime. I gave God a parting hug and a heartfelt ‘Thank you’. You should have seen the look on his face. (I guess he was used to souls screaming and writhing, hoping against hope that they might avoid the inevitable.) It’s not everybody who gets to surprise God! Even his famous omniscience failed him in this instance. So that was a double red letter day for me! I get to live out my next lifetime as slime and I got to put one over on the ‘Maker of Heaven and Earth’. God’s serving but I’m up ‘love 30’. *** Anyway, what’s so good about being slime? Well, how about the intelligence of Deep Blue, the wisdom of Solomon, the virtue (potentially) of Mother Theresa, and a lifetime pass to Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth? Are you in? Slime Mold is a single celled organism. Unlike most unicellulars, it can have a diameter of as much as a foot and is often easily visible to the naked eye. As Slime Mold, my life – like your life now, dear reader - centers around the Gastronomic Imperative: Eat as much healthy food as possible, avoid environmental toxins (e.g. salt, sunlight), and minimize the expenditure of precious energy. Randomly, I explore my environment. When I encounter a food source, I build a conduit to that spot and I mark it in my ‘memory’ for future reference. Gradually, I map the food sources in my neighborhood and weight them according to their ‘resource density’. As I’m mapping, I’m also building my network. I need my network to deliver the most food in the shortest period of time with the least possible expenditure of energy. In just a few hours, I’m done, and my network is operating at 91% to 96% efficiency. My orienteering skills are second to none. I can build a map of neighborhood food sources as fast or faster than any supercomputer, balancing all the relevant variables. However, the computer generated network will be 100% efficient; the best I can do is 96%. Bummer? We’ll see about that… Example : If there are 25 food sources in my neighborhood, and I (slime) have to optimize my result across several variables (e.g. volume of food, distance from center, energy cost), I will need a few hours to complete the task. It will take a Supercomputer at least as long (it has to sort through 10^32 possible configurations). Of course, the computer’s result will be as much as 10% (100/91 = 110%) more efficient than mine. Can we turn vice into a virtue? My tolerance of deviations from optimum of up to 9% allows me to adapt much more quickly to future changes in the neighborhood (gentrification). When change does occur, no matter how slight or how temporary, the computer has to perform its multi-hour calculation all over again, from scratch, every time. The energy burden alone is unsustainable. I, on the other hand, can usually make any necessary adjustments in a matter of minutes. I never start from scratch…ever. I always build on what I’ve built. Change is almost never ‘catastrophic’ – why should adjustments be? A modern supercomputer may be smarter than me, but I am much, much wiser. Slime carefully conserves the past and builds on it; computers have no past to build on. Ok, intelligence, check; wisdom; check. What about the potential for virtue and the promise of perpetual youth? According to Karen Alim, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University: “Slime molds…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…” Check. “They also prefer to approach young individuals… (when they) fuse with a younger individual, it’s as if they’re young again.” Check. Peer pressure can be a terrible thing. When your friends are all coming back as entrepreneurs and celebrities, artists and dictators, peregrine falcons and killer whales, you’re embarrassed to tell them you’ll be slime. That’s ok, be humble, don’t gloat, even though you and I know that you will be smarter, wiser, more virtuous, and more youthful than any of them. *** The Jungle (1942–43) by Wifredo Lam depicts elongated, mask-like human figures fused with sugarcane, leaves, and animal forms, creating a dense, claustrophobic tropical environment. The bodies appear neither fully human nor fully plant, suggesting spiritual transformation and the inseparability of identity from landscape. Philosophically, the painting reflects on colonial history, Afro-Caribbean spirituality, and the tension between exploitation and cultural resilience, presenting nature as both witness and participant in human experience. 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 “If I only had a Brain” David Cowles Feb 22, 2026 So lamented the loveable Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.” Scarecrow can be forgiven! We have developed a fetish for the grey matter inside our skulls. We know that when we think, we utilize intercellular processes in our brains. It is easy to see why we (or Scarecrow) might think that those brains were an essential precondition of thought itself. But turns out, brains are overrated! Consciousness is opportunistic: it co-opts physical structures as it finds them and retrofits them for its purposes. The neural structure of the human brain seems ideally suited: “Oh, the things I could do with this !” The long held hypothesis of ‘human exceptionalism’ seems justified. There are, however, three potentially serious problems with an anthropocentric model like this. First, there are abundant signs of consciousness throughout the animal kingdom, and there are reasons to believe (see below) that consciousness may also occur in other ‘kingdoms’, e.g. among plants (forests), fungi (the Wood Wide Web), and, yes, even bacteria and other unicellular organisms (slime mold). Second, we need a model of consciousness that can account for the possibility of intelligent, extra-terrestrial life that may use an entirely different chemistry as its substratum. And third, we need to be able to account for signs of consciousness, now or in the future, as they arise in silicon based AI. In the February 2026 Issue of New Scientist , Conor Feehly quoted Tom Froese (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology): “The origins of agency (consciousness) coincide with the origins of life (itself).” I am… therefore I think. Feehly also noted: “Theoretical biologist Michael Levin and his colleagues at Tufts University in Massachusetts recently applied cognitive tools to systems far simpler than even basic, single-celled organisms ...” In a previous post on this site we explored Michael Levin’s study of the cognitive abilities of Slime Mold . Unlike most unicellular organisms, a slime cell can be visible to the naked eye, growing to as much as a foot in diameter. But here Feehly went further: “Surprisingly, even simple networks of biomolecules appear to display some degree of a self… In 2022, complexity scientist Stuart Bartlett at the California Institute of Technology and David Louapre at Ubisoft Entertainment in Paris, France, found that simple ‘autocatalytic’ chemical systems, which react together to replicate themselves, could also learn by association. “In autocatalysis, one chemical is fed into the system as fuel, while another chemical is produced by consuming that fuel. The pair found that the reaction rate between these two chemicals is influenced by previous patterns in the concentration of available fuel – a behavior that Bartlett describes as a ‘primitive form of learning’.” In our previous post (above) we explored the cognitive abilities of Slime Mold. We compared the performance of slime with that of a supercomputer and the results surprised even me. Think Achilles and a certain tortoise! A recent article in Knowable Magazine (2/11/2026) spelled 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 (in just a few hours) the efficient transport connections between them that humans had taken years to develop.” Nakagaki compared the achievements of Slime Mold with those of a supercomputer, based on the 25 nodes (stations) that constitute the Tokyo area railway system. Both were asked to optimize routes balancing several different variables simultaneously, understanding that there could be more than one ‘right answer’ (a ‘Pareto Frontier’). The supercomputer solved the problem in several hours with 100% accuracy. The Slime Mold solved the problem in the same (or less) time but achieved only 91% – 96% accuracy. However, because it was more fault tolerant, mold came up with attractive solutions (i.e. points near the Pareto Frontier) that the ‘perfect’ computer had to rule out. So a draw? Not bad for slime! But there’s more to the story: Suppose Tokyo decides to open a new station or close an existing one. Every time a change is made, even to just one node and even just temporarily, our supercomputer must solve the problem from scratch. Think GPS : Every time you make a wrong turn, it recalculates your entire route; sometimes the new route barely intersects the old one. Apply that to Tokyo Rail. Imagine if they closed one station only to have AI tell them that now they have to reconnect all the stations in the system. Talk about dysfunctional! Being Slime Mold, on the other hand, means ‘never having to say you’re sorry’, never having to start over. Why would it? Slime modifies its existing model incrementally the same way Tokyo modifies its transit network; there’s no such thing as rebuilding from scratch in the real (organic) world. Modern Rome rests on Caesar’s ruins. Note : I am a direct descendant of Planet Earth’s first DNA equipped cell. So are you, dear cousin; and so is your pet goldfish. Slime Mold is a form of distributed intelligence, like blockchain; it compulsively preserves the past and builds off it. A supercomputer, on the other hand, is the paradigmatic central planner, periodically ‘starting over’ with a new and improved economic plan for the People’s Republic. A computer starts fast and achieves impressive early results. But when it comes to long term utility, central intelligence is a bust. Just as the people of Eastern Europe. A slime cell looks like a central blob from which a network of vein-like ‘tubes’ emanates — first larger tubes, then smaller tubes that fan out in the direction of food and retract in the vicinity of poison (e.g. salt) or another danger (e.g. sunlight). Inside those tubes, cytoplasmic fluid is rhythmically flowing back and forth… “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. “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.” So brains do not create consciousness; consciousness configures brains…and other ‘mind friendly’ patterns in the material medium. Author L. Frank Baum (1900) makes the point that Scarecrow had always been conscious and intelligent. Sadly, he was taken-in by society’s brain fetish and made to feel inferior. In the words of Alfred North Whitehead, he fell prey to the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness . Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Man, and therefore Baum, are early existential heroes. They are defined by their choices and their actions, not by their physical substrata. None of us is controlled by our Past; we each configure the past so that it supports our own immediate choices. We create our own causal pathways, our own destinies, our own pathologies. Alcoholic Anonymous is famous for its memes. One of the best: “Nothing changes if nothing changes.” In our context, we can interpret this as follows: We make our own changes Nothing changes us When we change, everything changes We are more mold than machine, Thank God. *** Paul Klee’s “Botanical Theatre” (1924) imagines plants as if they were performers on a stage, each form carrying a sense of personality and intention. With its delicate lines and playful abstraction, the painting suggests that plant life has its own quiet intelligence, unfolding in rhythm and structure like a choreographed act. 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 Supercomputer vs. Slime Mold David Cowles Feb 22, 2026 “Deep Blue has almost limitless intelligence but no wisdom. Slime Mold’s intellect is limited…but it enjoys the wisdom of Solomon.” When I was a pre-tween, my grandfather and I used to ride the Boston public transit system for fun. We had no reason to be anywhere specific, we just liked ‘riding the rails’, exploring what for me at least were new sections of my city. Caveat : Don’t try this today. Anyone riding Boston’s public transit for fun in this century would be locked up…and rightly so! Sometimes our outings would be ‘random walks’ across the city’s neighborhoods. Other times, we would map out our excursion in advance and in great detail. Either way, our objective was always the same: Visit as many interesting places as possible without ever retracing a single step. Fortunately, in those days Boston Transit (MTA/MBTA) had a robust system of transfers that enabled us to ride all day for just one nickel fare. (Remember ‘Charlie on the MTA’: He would ride forever ‘neath the streets of Boston.) There were virtually no islands: each station (node) connected directly to several other stations (nodes) making ‘return trips’ unnecessary. A led to B and B led to C, D, and E, at least one of which connected back to A without returning through B. Little did we know, Gampa and I were working to solve one of mathematics’ most daunting challenges: the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). According to TSP, a salesperson needed to visit a fixed list of cities and wanted to find the shortest possible route to touch all cities once but none more than once. Without realizing it, Gampa and I were doing graduate level math. *** The City of Tokyo is famous for its commuter rail service. Again without realizing it, their transportation planners had been working on TSP for decades: how to connect a given number of destinations (e.g. 25) in the most efficient possible way. Imagine doing that without a computer! Impossible IRT: a reasonable approximation was all that could be hoped for. Today’s supercomputers can design a perfectly optimal flow…but even the most powerful would need several hours to map the Tokyo rail network efficiently. There are 10^32 ways to connect Tokyo’s 25 transit stations. 10^32 – that’s 1 with 32 zeroes after it. Granted, most are absurd, but a computer has to try everyone. *** You fancy yourself a bit of a home chef and you pride yourself on a spotless kitchen. But one day, those darn grandkids spilled a box of cereal and left 25 bits of oat flakes scattered on the top of your ‘island’…along with a single cell of Slime Mold. Unlike you and me, Slime Mold lives to eat and eats to live; it obeys The Gastronomic Imperative . So our intrepid unicellular immediately sets to work on a plan to visit all 25 oat-nodes in the most efficient possible sequence. This is precisely the same problem that Tokyo’s supercomputer had to solve. And Slime Mold was also able to ‘solve’ it, also in just a few hours. One difference: the supercomputer’s solution is perfect, 100% optimal. Slime Mold’s solution is between 91% and 96% optimal. So if you happen to have a supercomputer like Deep Blue in your kitchen, it will outperform, marginally, that pesky mold you’ve been trying to get rid of since you bought the house. Or will it? Grandkids being the way they are, those oat flakes are likely to get moved around (but not cleaned up) several times in the course of a day. If you wanted your optimal map updated each time the configuration shifted, Deep Blue could give it to you…but it would require several hours run time…every time. Each time there is a change in the data points, no matter how slight, the supercomputer must start from scratch. Given the speed of grandchildren, it is likely that Deep Blue’s initial map will already be inaccurate by the time it’s ready. Slime intelligence works differently: it never has to start from scratch. Once it conducts its initial environmental mapping, it retains that map indefinitely in its ‘memory’ and, when the territory changes, Slime Mold changes its map only as much as necessary to accommodate that change. Most adjustments can be made in a matter of minutes keeping the map evergreen . Slime’s 4% - 9% fault tolerance creates the ‘wiggle room’ that allows it to arrive at a functional solution within a practical time frame. That wiggle room makes slime’s solution more flexible and therefore more adaptable to changes in underlying conditions. Example : Suppose Tokyo decided to close a station, a supercomputer would have to start from scratch; Slime Mold might not need to make any adjustment at all (to remain within its 91% fault tolerance), but if it did, it would require minimal time and energy. Slime builds on past experience; computers have no past. So Slime Mold can adjust to changes in a matter of minutes; Deep Blue will need several hours, every time . According to Karen Alim, a theoretical physicist at the Technical University of Munich, Slime Mold appears able to learn, remember and make decisions — all without a brain . Apparently, it uses variations in the flow of cytoplasm and configurations of its tubular network to record its experience. Consciousness is the ultimate opportunist. It will co-opt virtually any configuration of material to facilitate conscious experience: your neurons, Scarecrow’s straw, slime’s cytoplasm. Anywhere it can create a feedback loop, it will. It’s as though self-awareness was an Ontological Imperative: Know thyself! That said, consciousness manifests in different ways in different contexts. You are conscious (I hope); so is your pet goldfish. But you two have very different intellectual capacities and very different experiences of being-in-the-world. If your AI Bot now or later becomes conscious, it will bring its own unique skills to the party and it will experience being-in-the-world in its own unique way. Deep Blue has almost limitless intelligence but no wisdom. Slime Mold’s intellect is limited to just a few functions, but it has the wisdom of Solomon. *** Ernst Haeckel’s Plate 85, “Ascidiae” (1904) from Art Forms in Nature presents sea squirts with an almost architectural elegance, highlighting the intricate logic of their forms. His rendering makes these simple marine organisms feel like deliberate designs, revealing a quiet intelligence in the geometry of living structures. 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 Dark Universe David Cowles Oct 20, 2025 “We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5%.” It’s straight out of MIT: We’re all in the dark ; well, 95% dark anyway. Now, thanks to the blunt edge philosophers at the world’s leading school of technology, the universe just got a tiny bit darker. Consider the following excerpt from the 5/19/2025 issue of the MIT Technology Review : “We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5% . That’s how much of what’s floating about in the cosmos is ordinary matter—planets and stars and galaxies and the dust and gas between them. The other 95% is dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious entities aptly named for our inability to shed light on their true nature... Cosmologists have cast dark matter as the hidden glue binding galaxies together. Dark energy plays an opposite role, ripping the fabric of space apart.” A brilliant piece of scientific discovery? Must be! It even earned a Nobel Prize (2011 in Physics): We stuck in a thumb and pulled out a plum and said, ‘Oh what a good boy (sic) am I’. Dark matter is the name given to a mysterious force that seems to be holding galaxies together. Dark energy, on the other hand, is the name given to the mysterious force that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the Universe, based on data showing that the Universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. These gravity/anti-gravity forces have been accepted as canonical by the astronomical community for about three decades. But now a new team of astronomers say their measurements show that the expansion of the Universe is actually slowing down, not speeding up. Oh my! So we have a ‘dark force’ (gravity) working to contract the universe and a ‘dark force’ (energy) working to expand it. By adjusting the values of these two competing forces I can build (or model) virtually any universe I wish to imagine. There is an old saw in Logic that states: “If I let A = -A, I can prove any proposition whatsoever!” By adjusting the values of dark matter and dark energy I can account for every possible empirical reading. It’s comforting to know that our work here is done: we no longer need to think about cosmology…to the everlasting relief of my readers. So how did we end up in this mess? Consider the original Dark Universe hypothesis (above). Now imagine this same paragraph written by a theist talking about ‘God’. It might go something like this: “We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5%. That’s how much of reality is knowable via our senses and reasoning faculties. The other 95% is what we call Mystery . Observation and reason alone are unable to shed light here. Only Revelation can enlighten us re what must otherwise remain dark . Theologians have cast God as the hidden glue binding all things together ( logos ) and as the force ( physis ) ripping things apart to make way for what is to come.” Public reaction would constitute a Tsunami. The Capitol itself would shake. Who knows, SCOTUS might even get involved. Does the 1st Amendment protect nonsense speech? Should it not be a felony to pollute the minds of our youth with such a superstitious clap trap? Is this not a crime against humanity? Perhaps we should skip SCOTUS and bring the matter directly to The Hague. After all, Socrates was sentenced to death on these very same grounds: corrupting the youth (of Athens). But as long as we cloak this god-of-the-gaps theology in the language of science, we can escape censure. ‘Dark matter/dark energy’ sounds a lot better to our anti-clerical ears than ‘God’. Whatever we don’t know, whatever we don’t understand, we can call science – as if that settles anything. Like preschoolers everywhere, we imagine that giving something a name (dark this/dark that) makes it real. This is the hypocrisy of secularism: Science has now replaced Catholicism as the self-proclaimed ‘one true religion’. Contrary to the US Constitution as amended, Science is ‘established’ to the sometimes brutal exclusion (or marginalization) of all other faiths. There is no gnosis , and therefore no salvation, outside of the Academy. Even to question one of its doctrines is tantamount to heresy. We are all now self-appointed Grand Inquisitors, reporting superannuated hippies, tie-dye wearing science skeptics, to the proper authorities. By the age of 8, we are already rooting out apostasy as pigs do truffles. Like Russian children in the days of Stalin, we are encouraged by our teachers to turn in non-conforming adults to the local ‘science police’; doing so can earn us a Fauci Medal (called the Hawking Medal in the UK), the highest honor a pre-teen can receive. As parents, we want our children to have every advantage. So…we encourage them to join science clubs at school, and we send them to science camp every summer. Bully! As a young boy, I joined the Scouts (ages 8 up). Had I lived in Russia in those days, I might have been a Little Octobrist (ages 7 – 9) and worn a star-shaped badge sporting the image of a young Lenin. Later, if I showed promise and commitment, I might have been invited to join the Pioneers (Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization); my parents would have been so proud to see me wearing the distinctive red scarf. Now please don’t misunderstand me: there’s nothing wrong with children receiving an education in the sciences (or wearing red scarves for that matter). In fact, the former is absolutely essential, especially in our contemporary culture. But there was also nothing wrong with my friends and I learning survival skills at scout camp; nor was there anything wrong with Russian children learning to campaign for what they believed was social justice. The problem comes when we substitute dogma (“rite words in rote order” - Joyce) for discovery. Dogmatism breeds intellectual laziness. It was dogmatism that condemned Galileo, not religion; it was dogmatism that undermined Glasnost , not justice; and it is dogmatism, not science, that’s placing the intellectual promise of the 21 st century at risk. Dogmatism encourages us to accept easy answers, even when those answers make no sense. We are no strangers to such dogmatics in the US. For 60 years, we lived under the spell of a race based ‘separate but equal’ education system ( de facto and de jure ). Then in the 1950’s a doctrine known as ‘my country right or wrong’ became part of our national identity. Today it’s ‘follow the science’. What’s interesting is that these dogmas all have something in common: they are not just moronic, they’re oxymoronic. How can two things be equal once you’ve invested even a quantum of energy to separate them? How can any country be right if it’s wrong? Worst of all, how can I trust something that I cannot verify? I can verify certain propositions within the scientific canon, but I cannot verify the canon itself. The essential nature of good science is to question everything and accept nothing solely on another’s authority: experimentation is to replace revelation. The only exception to this is Science itself. I hear you, dear reader: “You seem very sure of yourself. How can you be certain that the Dark Universe hypothesis won’t turn out to be true?” Ok, I’ll see your cynicism and raise you: “It will turn out to be true!” But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong either. Huh? How so? Scientists invented the Dark Universe hypothesis to give a name to things they don’t understand and can’t explain. Based on what we know, the Universe shouldn’t work. There’s not nearly enough mass to hold galaxies together. In fact, however, galaxies do exist, 100’s of billions of them with more forming ‘every day’. So something’s wrong and the Dark Universe hypothesis seems to solve the problem. Of course, it is merely ‘solving’ one unknown in terms of another. But the headlines are already in the can: “Dark matter confirmed!” It will be confirmed because any advance in our understanding of the Universe will now be labeled dark . And why not? ‘Dark Universe’ has no denotative meaning, nothing that might subject it to the risk of falsification. It’s a universal place holder for whatever we don’t know now but may discover later. Like ‘mystery’ is Christian theology. Once we learn something about the universe that we don’t already know, that will be what ‘dark’ is. It will define ‘dark’. Of course it will. We don’t know what Dark Matter is so whatever turns out to solve the paradox will be quite correctly labeled Dark , and we will say, “Of course that’s what Dark Matter is, we knew it all along.” Except of course, we didn’t. Do you doubt me? Don’t! It’s already happening. A recent article by Evan Gough in the February 09, 2026 issue of Universe Today suggests replacing the Black Hole hypothesis with…you guessed it, ‘dark matter’. According to Gough, it may be dark matter, not a black hole, that resides at the center of the Milky Way and holds the galaxy together. Bully! The Dark Matter hypothesis is living up to its potential. It can explain virtually everything. Now if it can just explain why my toast comes out burnt every morning, we’ll really have something to celebrate. *** Image: Odilon Redon — L’œil, comme un ballon bizarre, se dirige vers l’infini (1882) This haunting image shows a giant eye transformed into a balloon that floats upward into an empty, infinite space, blending human perception with cosmic ascent. The eye suggests consciousness itself—detached from the body and rising beyond physical limits toward mystery, knowledge, or the unknown. Redon’s work expresses the Symbolist idea that inner vision, imagination, and the soul can transcend material reality and move toward infinity. 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 Ovid vs. Plato David Cowled Sep 20, 2025 “Ovid freed us from the collective anonymity of Plato and prepared us for the intensely personal theology of Jesus.” At the age of 12, I first encountered Homer (in translation, of course – I’m no John Stuart Mill). To my credit, I immediately realized I had no idea what was going on. Judeo-Christianity has its challenges: burning bushes, parting seas, multiplying foodstuffs and my personal favorite, water that tastes, and intoxicates, like musty old vintage wine, 1er cru. That said, the Bible reads like a 20 th century tech manual compared to Greco-Roman mythology: Gods battling gods at every turn, incarnate every where, in humans, animals, plants, and even stones; in the phenomena of echo and reflection; in the rhythms of nature – the sunrise and the seasons; in love itself, and even in the realm of the dead (Hades). And what of these gods? Petty, vain, mischievous, jealous, vengeful, sibling rivals… I am no longer 12; I’m many multiples on…and then some. But I’m still baffled by Greco-Roman mythology, or at least I was until I rediscovered Ovid. (I’d read Ovid before and liked him…but that was in Latin class and our focus was on his use of language, not his metaphysics.) Today I am well described by Ben Johnson as one having “little Latin and no Greek” but I am still krazy ‘bout kosmology . Who would not wish to understand the metaphysics of Mount Olympus even if the behavior of the gods is reprehensible? (Perhaps you, dear reader…to your credit!) But as for me, I’m hooked. Of course, my friends and family have organized all the politically correct interventions, but to no avail. Imagine my excitement then when I realized that the Key-to-Rebecca had existed all along, for almost exactly 2000 years in fact. It was my Rosetta Stone moment. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is many things but none more important than the cypher, i.e. the code, needed to unravel the mysteries of Greco-Roman mythology. It is the Cliff’s Notes version of a millennial civilization… except that these Notes come in a spectacular epic poem. Like Europe’s A-List violin concerti, the Canon of great epic poems is quite limited: Iliad , Odyssey , Aeneid , of course, then Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost , and in the middle, acting as a fulcrum, Ovid’s Metamorphoses , bridging the gap between two civilizations (Classical and Christian), and in doing so, providing a key to both. As I said, a Rosetta Stone ! How does it work? The turn of the millennium Latin poet built a comprehensive cosmology around the concept of Identity and expressed it in glorious verse. In Metamorphoses , Ovid treats Identity as if it were a cosmic onion. The outermost layer, the skin, is the region we Platonists call Form . According to Plato, Form is substructural. First, X is a chair , then X is this chair; first X is a man, then X is me. Species > individual. My form is the cornerstone of my identity. “Not so!” according to Ovid. Form is infinitely variegated. Its vicissitudes are endless and entirely superficial…and therefore Form is ultimately meaningless. Ovid turns Plato on his head, much the same as Marx did Hegel 1850 years later. As the outer layers of the cosmic onion are peeled away, we drill ever deeper into the essence of the existent. We are dogged in our expectation of finding a pony at the bottom of this pile of excrement. But we are disappointed every time. Like Prospero, we are left empty handed: “Our revels now are ended. These, our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air; and—like the baseless fabric of this vision— the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on…” - The Tempest (Shakespeare) 100 years after Ovid but 1500 years before Shakespeare, John of Patmos had a similar ‘revelation’. His vision, which fills most of the final book of the Christian Bible, includes the systematic breaking of 7 seals, reminiscent of the layers of Ovid’s cosmic onion. But when the 7th seal is broken, John, like Shakespeare’s audience and Ovid, gets a stupefying surprise: Out of the organ grinder’s box pops ‘Jack’, Jean-Paul in fact, Sartre. Not the man himself, of course, but his singular contribution to the Intellectual History of the West, i.e. Le Neant. ( Being and Nothingness ) John watched (and listened) as the Lamb broke open each seal in turn. Each brought new and terrifying sights and sounds: a voice like thunder, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Death and Hell itself, the blood of martyrs. Then, with the breaking of the sixth seal, “there was a great earthquake, the sun turned as black and dark as sackcloth, and the whole moon became like blood. The stars in the sky fell to Earth like unripe figs shaken loose in a strong wind. Then the sky was divided, like a torn scroll…” (Like the curtain in the Temple at the hour of Christ’s crucifixion.) But even this is still just preparation for the great event yet to come, the breaking of the seventh seal, the fulcrum on which Revelation balances. Consider the Amen chorus at the end of Handel’s great oratorio, Messiah. Midway through this varied but bombastic summation of the ‘greatest story ever told,’ the orchestra and the chorus suddenly fall silent and stay silent for several measures. This is the pivotal musical moment corresponding to the breaking of the 7th Seal in salvation history as told in Revelation. The rest Handel placed in his Amen is one of the most profound moments in all of Western music. It links the final chorus of the world’s greatest oratorio with the final book of the Bible. If you’re lucky enough to be in the audience for a competent performance, then at that moment, you are John of Patmos! So, if Platonic Form is unrelated to identity ( per Ovid), what takes its place, what assumes that role? What survives formal changes, no matter how numerous or thorough? Sense of Self . According to Ovid, we retain our sense of being ourselves through all our ‘formal’ changes. I am always, ever, and only me , regardless of how I may appear. Memory ( Persistence of , Dali). We remember all our prior forms and some of our experiences under each, just as seniors remember events from childhood and middle age. Qualia . Although forms can change utterly in Ovid, basic qualities endure. A ‘beautiful’ girl becomes just as beautiful as a tree, heifer, or spring. Values . In a dramatic affirmation of Transcendent (eternal and universal) Values, so central to Judeo-Christian ethics, Ovid’s personalities retain their chosen values throughout their changes in form. Consider Daphne who begs her father to change her into a tree so she can preserve her chastity from Apollo…who continues to love her, even in her new form: “If you cannot be my wife, you will be my tree,” and everyday he wears her laurel leaves. Daphne’s chastity and Apollo’s lust will undoubtedly survive any future changes of form. Or Io, changed into a cow by Juno, continuing to follow her family, hoping for a gentle touch or a handful of grass. Unable to speak, she uses her hoof to write out in the sand the story of her dreadful change. Later, when she regains her human form, “no trace of heifer is left, except the lovely whiteness of her flesh…And now she is a celebrated goddess, revered by crowds clothed in white linen: Isis.” Io has been through it all but her sense of self never waivers, her memories persist throughout and her defining whiteness, acquired as a heifer, continues as a god. Identity is not a function of Form; in fact, they are entirely unrelated. Real identity lies in (1) our immanent and intuitive sense of self, i.e. consciousness, (2) our unique collection of historical experiences as they persist in Memory, and (3) the transcendental values we apply when judging our World and forming our Subjective Aim. Plato can be read as a critical meditation on the Homeric myths. Ovid freed us from the collective anonymity of Plato and prepared us for the intensely personal theology of Jesus, just one generation later. *** Ovid among the Scythians (painted twice by Eugène Delacroix in 1859 and 1862) imagines the Roman poet Ovid during his exile on the Black Sea, far from the cultured life of Rome. In the canvas, nomadic Scythians approach the seated poet with curiosity and a mix of reverence and hospitality, set within a vast, windswept steppe of muted blues and ochres. The work contrasts Ovid’s refined, contemplative presence with the rugged vitality of the Scythian world, creating a poetic meditation on exile, cultural encounter, and the enduring power of art and intellect. 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 Plato’s Contract David Cowles Dec 27, 2025 “Plato is addressing a question posed in the Book of Job: Why do good things happen to bad people?” 1200 words, 6 minute read Plato is notoriously mistreated on this website. He took the insightful but spare constructions of the pre-Socratics ( Parmenides , Heraclitus, et al.) and covered them over with ‘five and dime’ tinsel and grotesque ornaments. Yet in my view at least, he did not reach the depth of insight found in Saints John and Paul (or even George and Ringo). Sucks to be Plato! He’s a classic middle child wedged between Parmenides and Paul in the P-family genealogy. Still, there must be some reason we continue to read him. Take a look at the Epilogue Plato attached to his most popular Dialogue, The Republic . It tells the story of Er, a mythical character who returns to life after being dead for a short period of time. (Sound familiar?) Plato uses this forum to present a complex theory of reincarnation that includes cross species metempsychosis, karma, free will, chance, necessity, and fate. One stage of this reincarnation process involves God presenting each emigrating soul with a Contract (actually more of a Waiver of Liability ) to be agreed upon prior to the awarding of a new body: “Ephemeral souls - now is the beginning of another cycle where every birth is a harbinger of death. No daemon (guardian angel) shall cast lots for you; rather you shall choose your own daemon (fate). “Let him to whom the first lot falls pick first the life to which he shall be chained. Virtue is not relevant here; each soul will share in virtue according to how it values it. All blame belongs to him who chooses; God is blameless.” Let’s unpack. Each soul chooses (not ‘designs’) the circumstances into which it is born, i.e. her mis-en-scene , facticity (Sartre), Actual World (Whitehead). Souls choose from a pre-set inventory of available life situations (i.e. Forms), and they select in an order determined by the casting of lots. Form chosen constitutes the substructure of the soul’s identity. Caveat : Getting the #1 draft pick is not necessarily an advantage; the temptation to choose wealth and power often proves overwhelming. Sometimes the very last pick is best because it comes with the least risk of attachment. Nobody else wanted it; why should you? Blessed are the poor in spirit. Unlike Christian and Hindu eschatology, there is no connection here between virtue and one’s life circumstances. Effectively, Plato is addressing a question posed in the Book of Job : Why do good things happen to bad people? Answer : people choose their own lives ab initio . That choice determines their individual circumstances . And once the choice is made, it’s locked in…at least for this cycle of birth and death. What people do with these lives, to what extent they choose virtue over vice, is an individual decision unrelated to the vicissitudes of Hogwarts’ Sorting Hat ( Harry Potter ). That’s why we often see great piety among the disadvantaged and debauchery among the favored few. This, however, raises some important issues not considered by Plato. We may wish to assume, for example, that virtue-loving parents are more likely to provide their offspring with a nurturing environment. Therefore, society’s collective level of virtue would play a differential role in quality of life for future generations…but there’s no one-to-one correlation. Still, in the end a rising tide does raise all boats, so we really are ‘all in this together’. No one is ‘saved’ until everyone is saved? Sidebar : Judeo-Christian theology (e.g. Jeremiah, Ephesians ) puts a little different spin on this. All life circumstances are intentionally prepared by God as opportunities for each of us to step in and make the most of them. But back to Plato : each soul makes two choices, one irrevocable, the other moment-by-moment: (1) Which of the remaining available life situations do I choose for my upcoming incarnation? (2) To what extent will I dedicate this life to the pursuit of Virtue? All ‘blame’ (if any) belongs to the one who chooses (i.e. us). God is blameless. If this is meant to be a theodicy, it certainly gets high marks for originality. I am envisioning a rewrite of Schopenhauer’s classic: The World as Chance (lots) , Necessity (circumstances) , and Free Will (virtue). I chose my own destiny (Form). From there, the moral quality of the universe is solely the product of the freely willed actions of its intentional agents. The Devil didn’t make you do it! But your Free Will operates within circumstances you chose but did not design. Adding another layer of complexity, your will, while 100% free, may be influenced by experiences from your past lives. You may wish to repeat comfortable patterns, or you may have learned to avoid those habits at all costs; either way, those experiences will likely influence your choice of birth parents and, perhaps, your day to day decisions after birth. Of course, those of us who believe in old fashioned biology, sociology, and psychology can account for exactly the same phenomena via a totally different pathway: A child inherits parental traits (DNA), imitates adult behavior (upbringing), absorbs society’s ambient norms and values (culture), and reacts in a unique way to the universal ‘whips and scorns’ of childhood (personality). To Plato’s credit, his model allows three apparently incompatible modes of being (Chance, Causality, Consciousness) to function harmoniously as parts of a single process. However, it’s not exactly an ‘Occam-friendly’ arrangement. Still, 2400 years later, there are important parallels between Plato’s model and today’s (post-1900) cosmological consensus. Chance is no longer a bit of chaos intruding on cherished order; it is an irreducible element in all quantum mechanical processes. And we now know that things separated by spacetime can nevertheless be linked by a phenomenon known as ‘Entanglement’. Plus, we no longer think of consciousness as something uniquely human. Most of us acknowledge consciousness in various primates and among certain sea mammals, and many see evidence of self-awareness and agency throughout the Animal Kingdom…and beyond (e.g. plants, fungi, even bacteria). And that’s just Team DNA . We need our model of consciousness to extend to non-carbon life forms as well (AI & SETI). Finally, it is increasingly clear that ‘the problem of consciousness’ is not going to find a solution within the realm of classical physics. Current theories speak of consciousness in terms of quantum processes, universe-spanning fields (panpsychism), recursive loops, differance (Derrida), and/or holography ( fractals ). Plato’s dialogs are full of stuff and nonsense…and profound insights! When we view the Platonic corpus through the lens of 20th century (sic) science and philosophy, it is easy to spot the gems and extract them from their withered husks. The recent (2025) discovery of a new state of matter, Rondeau Time Crystals (RTC), has provided Plato’s model with important confirmation. In an RTC each ‘quantum of process’ cycles endlessly through repeating phases that seem to align perfectly with Plato: chaos/chance, causality/necessity, and consciousness/free will. Perhaps the old guy was on to something after all. *** Apollo and the Continents is a dynamic 18th‑century oil sketch by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in which the sun god Apollo is placed at the center of a cosmic allegory, surrounded by planetary deities and personifications of the four continents to suggest a worldview of celestial harmony and worldly reach. 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 Plato, Socrates & Time Crystals David Cowles Nov 26, 2025 “The climax of the Phaedo is a debate between Socrates and Simmias on the nature of the soul… but now we know the answer!” In the 4 th century BCE, Plato, Athens’ leading philosopher, wrote a series of dialogs allegedly based on his first and second hand encounters with Socrates 25+ years earlier. (Gospels : Jesus :: Dialogs : Socrates?) Perhaps the most famous of those dialogs is known as the Phaedo : it recounts the last hours of Socrates’ life, spent in conversation with his devoted disciples. One is reminded of Jesus’ Farewell Discourses recorded in the Gospel of John . The climax of the Phaedo , however, is a debate between Socrates and Simmias on the nature of the soul. According to Plato, Socrates gets the better of his interlocutor (as always), but most philosophers feel that neither argument is totally persuasive. But now we know the answer! Simmias introduces the topic by proposing a popular model: soul : body :: attunement : lyre. A lyre, of course, is a musical instrument made of ‘wood and wire’. As such, the lyre has no significant use or value (except perhaps as an antique); but when the strings are ‘tuned’ in a particular way, the instrument ‘springs to life’ and suddenly acquires the potential to produce music (Beauty & Truth). Simmias suggests that the soul is similarly an ‘attunement’ but this time of the ‘blood and bones’ that constitute a body. When the components of our body are properly ‘tuned’, we say that the body has life ; that ‘attunement’ is what we mean by soul . Now this model is instinctively appealing, but it has a major drawback: once the lyre falls into disrepair, or even out of tune, it is no longer able to produce great music. According to this analogy, the soul survives only as long as the parts of the body remain properly aligned. Death is misalignment. That means that the soul is mortal and co-terminal with the body. This is something that Socrates, on the day of his impending execution, can understandably not accept. So he proceeds to develop a model that supports his preferred conclusion (immortality). Sartre would doubtless accuse Socrates of bad faith ; but we should be more charitable…at least until we’ve spent our own time on desolation row . (Dylan) Socrates begins his refutation of Simmias from the premise that the soul must be immortal because the contrary would imply that “the soul, though more divine and lovelier than the body, may still perish before it, being a kind of attunement.” Indeed, a lyre is likely to go out of tune before the instrument itself is physically destroyed. He also considered the status of ‘virtue’ under the attunement model . Are we to equate ‘the Good’ with a ‘finer attunement’ of the strings? All life is attunement; is what we call ‘evil’ nothing but a relative loss of tonal quality? “Do you believe in life after death?” That’s how we muggles artlessly introduce the subject of the soul. Prior to 2025 CE, we had no better answer to this question than those offered by Simmias and Socrates. But now we do! On October 14, 2025, Leo Joon Il Moon, et al. published a paper in Nature Physics detailing the discovery of a new phase of matter they’re calling Time Rondeau Crystals , aka Rondeau Time Crystals (RTC). You’re familiar with crystals. The rock on your finger is one. So is the hunk of quartz that’s holding down papers on your desk. And, of course, so is each flake of snow that is falling just now outside your window. We are surrounded by crystals, space crystals that is, and our lives are better for them. A space crystal is a pattern of molecules that endlessly repeats in an appropriate extensive medium. Imagine if we could create a time crystal , a pattern of events that endlessly repeats across time? Wait! I saw that movie, Groundhog Day . A beauty! And two dozen years later, Eureka! We found it – the first time crystal . Who says science doesn’t imitate art? Didn’t the Quantum Mechanics imitate the Cubists? But for all the hoopla , the discovery of time crystals wasn’t the breakthrough we’d hoped for. Process within a time crystal, i.e. the cycle of events, is 100% determined. Therefore, the time crystal was useless as a model for processes that include an element of indetermination, from mere randomization to conscious agency (free will). Until now! Discovery of Rondeau Time Crystals changes everything. The cycle of events in an RTC has three phases. The Alpha and Omega phases are fully determined, as above. However, they are separated by a third phase, I’m calling it Delta , that is entirely indeterminate, i.e. chaotic. Indetermination and determination are not incompatible after all. Free will does not preclude causality. Kaos does not undermine Logos : “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5) Rather, order propagates non-locally…and stochastically. Just as quanta remain entangled over vast stretches of (relatively) ‘empty’ space, so the ordered phases of an RTC exhibit entanglement across a chaotic gap. But it gets even better! First, the Omega state, though co-determined with the Alpha state, can be slightly skewed with respect to Alpha . Think of the inversion of an image along a Mobius Strip or of the aperiodic tiling of a surface: difference need not entail disorder. Second, the so-called Delta state, while incurably chaotic, can be ‘fine-tuned’ (there’s that phrase again) in a way that permits local islands of temporary order to emerge epiphenomenally without compromising Delta’s globally chaotic state. Think of the hammock in your backyard. Strung between two trees, it assumes a catenary shape; that is its topology. It lets you nap in it. But that shape is not a function of the trees or of the hammock; it is a function of the entirety. Likewise, RTCs. Think Shakespeare’s Tempest : “… the baseless fabric of this vision— the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself…shall dissolve, and…leave not a rack behind.” “Leave not a rack behind” – so Simmias was right after all. The soul is an attunement of the body and it vanishes like scenery once the set is struck. Not so fast! An ephemeral pattern arising in the Delta phase may evoke a sympathetic (harmonic) response in the pluripotent and eternal Omega phase. In this way, freely formed but transient patterns in Delta may be eternalized in Omega . But there is a catch…ultimately, a happy catch. Each attunement is unique. It appears in indefinitely many media, but it is one and the same attunement in each. So, if Delta and Omega both manifest the same attunement, that one attunement must reconcile and exhibit the ontological features of both media. God is eternal presence . Because any pattern in Omega is eternal, it must be compatible with God’s essential nature ( Alpha ), i.e. the Good. Therefore, patterns arising in Delta only elicit an echo in Omega if and to the extent that they are ‘good’ as Good is manifest in Delta , i.e. as beauty, truth or justice. This disposes of Socrates’ second argument, i.e. that evil must be more, or less, than ‘poor tuning’. In fact, whatever is less than ‘good’ in Delta will find no resonance whatsoever in Omega ; it will die in Delta . And where does this leave you ? Your sense of self, your identity, your consciousness? British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead constructed a much more elaborate scheme and concluded that there was no place for personal identity in God’s Consequent ( Omega ) Nature. Whitehead was wrong! To whatever extent a pattern in Delta is reproduced in Omega , all aspects of that pattern will be conserved. If a pattern in Delta includes consciousness as part of its subjective form, there is no reason to suppose that it will lack consciousness in Omega . To argue otherwise would be to claim that consciousness per se is incompatible with God’s essential nature. So where does this leave us? Both Simmias and Socrates are wrong…and right! The soul (life itself) is an attunement and it does perish with the body. However, to the extent that the patterns generated in Delta are ‘good’, those patterns are eternally resurrected in Omega . This is the eschaton, the so-called ‘last things’, Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. Death is the loss of attunement; Judgement identifies those patterns in Delta that are consistent with God’s essential nature ( Alpha ). Those patterns enjoy ‘eternal life’ in Omega , i.e. Heaven ; other patterns evaporate without a trace. That’s Hell . *** Paulina Peavy’s I Am Alpha and Omega (c. 1937–1970s) blends mystical symbolism with visionary abstraction, presenting the cosmos as a living, spiritual continuum. The painting reflects Peavy’s belief in cyclical time and divine evolution, using layered forms and luminous color to evoke the eternal “beginning and end.” Through its fusion of text, sacred geometry, and celestial imagery, the work portrays Alpha and Omega as both a cosmic force and a guiding spiritual presence. 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 Ovid & Identity David Cowles Feb 14, 2026 “The self is the absence of all forms, the negation of ‘form’ per se. Alternatively, self is what all forms have in common.” When Jesus of Nazareth was still a boy, the Roman poet Ovid was putting the finishing touches on his “book of changes”, Metamorphoses. Long after Homer and Hesiod, but just one generation after Virgil, Ovid contributed the 4th and ‘final’ epic in the series of Greco-Roman origin stories…final that is until Joyce revived the genre (Ulysses) a century ago. Ovid consciously strings together mythical material from multiple sources to produce a coherent narrative. His esteemed predecessors used mythology to tell their stories, Ovid uses those stories to tell the uber-story of mythology itself. Admit it: the first 10 times you read Homer’s epics, you asked, “What did these people really think was going on in these stories?" Ovid sketches an answer. His artful retelling of the ancient myths reveals an ontological thread that gives consistency and significance to these myriad fables. Ultimately, he wrestles with the same questions we do, 2000 years later: “Who am I? What makes me, me ? How is it that I am me and not you ? (Am I me and not you ? Or am I both? Or neither?) What about me is essential and what accidental? How is it that I retain my identity irrespective of my form, and when (if ever) are accumulated changes of form sufficient to destroy that identity and/or to constitute a new one?” In another essay on this site, we talked about Ovid’s ontology using an onion as our model. We are required to systematically remove layer upon layer of ‘form’ to reach the ‘core’, the onion’s Identity. But an onion is not an apple (Vidalia’s ad campaigns notwithstanding); an onion has no tangible core. When all the layers of identity are peeled away, we’re left, appropriately, with nothing (Sartre’s Neant ). The self is not just ‘another form’; the self is the absence of all forms, the negation of ‘form’ per se ; the self is what is left when all forms have “dissolved into thin air” ( The Tempest ). Or the self is what all its forms have in common, the form of forms . When it comes to modeling our identity, apples and onions are apples and oranges . Let’s start with the easy stuff, the outermost layer: I am not what I seem. I am agnostic as to form. I can be male or maid, vegetable or beast, a tree, a grove, a waterfall, a heifer or a crow. In all these guises, I am ever and forever only me! This is Ovid’s bedrock insight. Ovid is no phenomenologist, much less a nihilist. He does not abandon the notion of identity. But for Ovid, identity lies below the superficial dichotomies of form: blond or brunette, animal or plant, animate or inorganic. Ovid throws down his marker early. His version of Genesis 3, the creation of human beings, makes his project crystal clear: “By the ‘great mother’, the earth is meant, and ‘bones’ I think mean stones…and they throw the stones behind them as they go, and yes…the stones began to lose their hardness; they softened slowly and in softening changed form…one could see the dim beginning of human forms…quite soon the stones the man had thrown were changed to men and those the woman cast took women’s forms.” (1: 18) Perhaps surprisingly, Norse mythology contains a similar version of human evolution: “Ymir lived on four rivers of milk that came from a cow who fed herself by licking the salty lime stones found in Ginnungagap . As she licked the stones, sculptor-like, she began to uncover a human form latent in the rime-stones…(soon) there was a complete man.” ( Prose Edda ) A generation after Ovid, Matthew the evangelist quotes Jesus: “Out of these stones, God can raise up children of Abraham.” (3: 9) Outside of the academy, there is a persistent anti-Platonic tradition: Identity > Form. The scope of Ovid’s metamorphoses is clear: Great Mother, Earth, bones, stones, men and women – all ‘just’ forms. As I transition among various Platonic forms, what if anything, survives? What are our essential qualities, if any? What constitutes my Identity? A subjective Sense of Self (Recursion) An objective, inherited, and shared Past (Memory - Freud, Facticity - Sartre) Qualities & Values (Free Will) These are what constitute Identity ( per Ovid), not forms, be they frozen or forever flowing! Understand Ovid is as the ‘anti-Plato’ . Philosophy’s 4 th BCE GOAT gave pride of place in his ontology to forms, i.e. species . Ovid regards form as the equivalent of costume . Finally…and ironically, Ovid’s full throated exposition of Greco-Roman polytheism may have ploughed intellectual furrows into which the seeds of a new Weltanschauung - I mean of course, Christianity - could fall, germinate, take root, and grow. By rejecting the arid rationalism of Plato and Aristotle (geniuses though they were), Ovid restored mutuality and personality to ontology and cosmology. The grandfather of Western philosophy, Anaximander (6th century BCE), grounded identity in dynamic mutuality; Plato grounds it in static form. Ovid grounds cosmology in naked identity. For Ovid, Identity is the universal substructure! For example, Ovid’s pantheon reserves a prominent place for Bacchus, a controversial, late breaking deity. Bacchus falls in the tradition of man-gods, mixing divine and human parentage. The ‘status’ of such demi-gods is a controversial topic in both the hearth and the forum. Like the coming Jesus, Bacchus is more humanly relatable than Jove or YHWH. The evolving notion of deity, from tyrant to fellow-traveler, is simultaneously evident on both sides of the Bosporus and in both Hellenic and Semitic cultures. Ovid merges these two great traditions. His gods are consequential; but at the same time, they are wholly relatable. If Jesus kicked off the Age of Pisces, then John the Baptist was his Semitic prophet and Ovid was John’s Greco-Roman avatar. *** Image: Stepping In by De Es Schwertberger depicts a humanoid figure whose body appears carved from fractured stone, emerging with quiet awareness and deliberate motion. The cracked, geological surface of the figure suggests that consciousness itself has arisen from the earth, as if the planet has formed a living being through time and pressure. The painting symbolizes awakening and transition—representing the moment when inert matter becomes aware, crossing the threshold from lifeless stone into conscious existence. 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.

Science and Technology Science delivers the raw material that becomes Philosophy and Theology; then it tests their propositions against data from ‘the real world’. 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…” Read More How to Build a Warp Drive “Buckle up! 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