peter

Technology and the Century of the Modern Man

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Oct 052011

“technology cannot bring in the century of common man. It can merely reduce man to his lowest common denominator as a consuming animal. If technology is to minister to free men, men must struggle to acquire the practical disciplines related to speech as they have never struggled before. For in acquiring speech men acquire the heritage of our entire civilization.” And yet “demagogues rise up to speak the sickly and confused notions of their stunted spirits, and there are few to detect the fraud which they peddle.” And of course, they now inhabit and manage the halls of academia, “and there are few to detect the fraud which they peddle.

[…]

“When a triumphant technology croons the sickly boasts of the advertising men, when the great vaults and vistas of the human soul are obscured by images of silken glamor, and when it is plain that men live not by bread alone but by toothpaste also, then we need the answer of St. Thomas. It is the answer of moral and intellectual discipline and ardor.”

Marshall McLuhan

http://jp2forum.blogspot.com/2011/06/marshall-mcluhan-on-thomas-aquinas.html

Related Post: Economics and Human Dignity

Quick to Blame – The Knobe Effect

Philosophy Comments Off

Oct 052011

In many ways, Knobe is the closest thing experimental philosophy has to a rock star. Since last year, he’s been an essay contributor to the New York Times. An admirer from Australia maintains a Joshua Knobe fan page on Facebook. And a phenomenon bears his name: The Knobe Effect, derived from an experiment of his, is frequently cited to explain the effectiveness of negative political advertising.

Conducted in 2003, the experiment examined people’s perception of intentionality based on their opinions about two scenarios. In the first scenario, a business executive is told that a new product will increase profits but harm the environment. He responds that he doesn’t care about the environment, just profits. The program is implemented, profits go up and the environment suffers. When asked if the executive intentionally harmed the environment, 82 percent of respondents answered yes.

Scenario No. 2 is the same except for one key detail: The word “hurt” is replaced with “help.” Again, the executive says he doesn’t care about the environment. The program goes on, profits rise, and this time the environment benefits. But when asked if the executive intentionally helped the environment, only 23 percent of respondents said yes. So the Knobe Effect holds that people are more likely to assign blame for things that go wrong than to give credit for things that go right, a gap Knobe has spent the past eight years working to explain.

Why should the results of an action have a bearing on intentionality? And when it comes to questions of character, why do we tend to give more weight to negativity? Why does it sometimes happen that a single misdeed in a lifetime of otherwise exemplary behavior can destroy a reputation? (Think of how one racial slur can get someone branded a racist.)

http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=43991

Bell-State Quantum Eraser

Just Sayin', Physics Comments Off

Jun 282011

I believe the answer given by Paul Walorski here

http://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae86.cfm

is incorrect in the statement, “The polarization of the first observed photon can be interpreted as nothing more than the measurement of a characteristic that was established back at the time both photons were created.” If it were true that “nothing more” than this is happening, then nothing strange is happening whatsoever. Everything I have read about quantum entanglement seems to refute this explanation. The Bell-state quantum eraser would not work according to Walorski!

Desire Seeking the Present

Featured, Spirituality Comments Off

Jun 282011

“Our search for the ultimate meaning of our lives is not a matter of a particular intelligence, or some special effort, or even exceptional means. Rather, finding the ultimate truth is like discovering something beautiful along one’s path. One sees and recognizes it, if one is attentive. The issue then, is this attention.” Father Luigi Giussani

There was a sense in which knowledge, experience, and truth was bound up in a singular desire which burned within her. These three aspects of one hunger: to consume the sheer otherness of him; to know, and to experience the truth of him. Her desire was to make this otherness – to make him – fully and completely a part of her.

…

Who am I? I am desire seeking the present moment, which is eternal. I am the experiencing-of-the-real. I am the created, the destined recipient of creation.

Religious Awareness in Modern Man

Books, Philosophy, Spirituality Comments Off

Jun 282011

Religious Awareness in Modern Man

The Intuitive Foundations of Bias

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Jun 282011

The Intuitive Foundations of Bias

Computers That Read Your Mind

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Jun 282011

Computers That Read Your Mind

Who’s Asking

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Jun 282011

Philosophy student to professor: Can you prove that I exist?

Professor to philosophy student: Who’s asking?

I heard Rev. Kevin O’Neil of the Washington Theological Union gave a talk titled, “What am I Free For? Moral Theology in the Catholic Tradition.” The second point of his talk was in identifying “three questions to encompass the moral life and the concern of moral theology.” The first question was, “Who am I?”

I kept the paper and my notes because I was very interested that he brought up Alasdair MacIntyre here. In my notes from this first question I wrote: “Alasdair MacIntyre: if I answer question 1 differently than you, do we then have 2 different, but valid moralities?”

In other words, if my answer is that I am a creation, then I have a purpose given to me by my creator and this will inform my morality. If I answer that I am a random accident of the universe which is also a random accident, then my moral universe will be quite different.

In the opening chapter of MacIntyre’s book, “After Virtue” he presents three moral questions and opposing answers to each which conflict with one another. He shows that each of the answers to each of the moral questions are valid arguments that result from virtuous principles. Since each argument is valid according to its premises, and since each premise is based on virtuous principles, we cannot determine which answer is correct without determining which principles were the appropriate ones to begin with. He goes on then to ask, how are we to decide, then, which virtuous principles to begin our argumnent with, as the starting point determines the ending point. Should we start with mercy, for example, or justice? Liberty, or equality?

In order to answer such questions, Rev. O’neil seemed to be suggesting that we must first ask who it is that is asking – who do we say we are?

This is one way in which we find ourselves in moral debates that seem irreconcilable. We simply disagree about who we are.

The Beauty of the Ethical

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Jun 282011

They judge their moral success always by the fate of the world and never by the fate of their marriage.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/03/the-beauty-of-the-ethical

Tree of Contemplation

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Jun 282011

Tree of Contemplation

Secular Critique of the New Atheists

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Jun 282011

A secular-relativists Critique of the New Atheists ala Sam Harris

http://www.thenation.com/article/160236/same-old-new-atheism-sam-harris?page=full

“More a habit of mind than a rigorous philosophy, positivism depends on the reductionist belief that the entire universe, including all human conduct, can be explained with reference to precisely measurable, deterministic physical processes. (This strain of positivism is not to be confused with that of the French sociologist Auguste Comte.) The decades between the Civil War and World War I were positivism’s golden age. Positivists boasted that science was on the brink of producing a total explanation of the nature of things, which would consign all other explanations to the dustbin of mythology. Scientific research was like an Easter egg hunt: once the eggs were gathered the game would be over, the complexities of the cosmos reduced to natural law. Science was the only repository of truth, a sovereign entity floating above the vicissitudes of history and power. Science was science.”

positivists assumed that science was also the only sure guide to morality, and the only firm basis for civilization. As their critics began to realize, positivists had abandoned the provisionality of science’s experimental outlook by transforming science from a method into a metaphysic, a source of absolute certainty. Positivist assumptions provided the epistemological foundations for Social Darwinism and pop-evolutionary notions of progress, as well as for scientific racism and imperialism. These tendencies coalesced in eugenics, the doctrine that human well-being could be improved and eventually perfected through the selective breeding of the “fit” and the sterilization or elimination of the “unfit.”

Every schoolkid knows about what happened next: the catastrophic twentieth century. Two world wars, the systematic slaughter of innocents on an unprecedented scale, the proliferation of unimaginably destructive weapons, brushfire wars on the periphery of empire—all these events involved, in various degrees, the application of scientific research to advanced technology. All showed that science could not be elevated above the agendas of the nation-state: the best scientists were as corruptible by money, power or ideology as anyone else, and their research could as easily be bent toward mass murder as toward the progress of humankind. Science was not merely science. The crowning irony was that eugenics, far from “perfecting the race,” as some American progressives had hoped early in the twentieth century, was used by the Nazis to eliminate those they deemed undesirable. Eugenics had become another tool in the hands of unrestrained state power. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued near the end of World War II in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the rise of scientific racism betrayed the demonic undercurrents of the positivist faith in progress. Zygmunt Bauman refined the argument forty-two years later in Modernity and the Holocaust: the detached positivist worldview could be pressed into the service of mass extermination. The dream of reason bred real monsters.

As ethical guides, scientists had proved to be no more reliable than anyone else. Apart from a few Strangelovian thinkers (the physicist Edward Teller comes to mind), scientists retreated from making ethical or political pronouncements in the name of science.

Ich-Du

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Jun 282011

Martin Buber was a Jewish theologian. He famously distinguishes between what he calls the Ich-Du (I-Thou or I-You) relationship and the Ich-Es (I-It) relationship, and ultimately uses this as a way of describing authentic and non-authentic encounters with God.

From wikipedia:

Ich-Du is a relationship that stresses the mutual, holistic existence of two beings. It is a concrete encounter, because these beings meet one another in their authentic existence, without any qualification or objectification of one another. Even imagination and ideas do not play a role in this relation. In an I-Thou encounter, infinity and universality are made actual (rather than being merely concepts).

A variety of examples are used to illustrate Ich-Du relationships in daily life – two lovers, an observer and a cat, the author and a tree, and two strangers on a train. Common English words used to describe the Ich-Du relationship include encounter, meeting, dialogue, mutuality, and exchange.

One key Ich-Du relationship Buber identified was that which can exist between a human being and God. Buber argued that this is the only way in which it is possible to interact with God, and that an Ich-Du relationship with anything or anyone connects in some way with the eternal relation to God.

To create this I-Thou relationship with God, a person has to be open to the idea of such a relationship, but not actively pursue it. The pursuit of such a relation creates qualities associated with It-ness, and so would prevent an I-You relation, limiting it to I-It. Buber claims that by being open to the I-Thou, God eventually comes to us in response to our welcome. Also, because the God Buber describes is completely devoid of qualities, this I-Thou relation lasts as long as the individual wills it. When the individual finally returns to the I-It, they act as a pillar of deeper relation and community.

Whereas in Ich-Du the two beings encounter one another, in an Ich-Es relationship the beings do not actually meet. Instead, the “I” confronts and qualifies an idea, or conceptualization, of the being in its presence and treats that being as an object. All such objects are considered merely mental representations, created and sustained by the individual mind. This is based partly on Kant’s theory of phenomenon, in that these objects reside in the cognitive agent’s mind, existing only as thoughts. Therefore, the Ich-Es relationship is in fact a relationship with oneself; it is not a dialogue, but a monologue.

In the Ich-Es relationship, an individual treats other things, people, etc., as objects to be used and experienced. Essentially, this form of objectivity relates to the world in terms of the self – how an object can serve the individual’s interest.

Buber argued that human life consists of an oscillation between Ich-Du and Ich-Es, and that in fact Ich-Du experiences are rather few and far between. In diagnosing the various perceived ills of modernity (e.g. isolation, dehumanization, etc.), Buber believed that the expansion of a purely analytic, material view of existence was at heart an advocation of Ich-Es relations – even between human beings. Buber argued that this paradigm devalued not only existents, but the meaning of all existence.

Heidegger and Postmodernism

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Jun 282011

Heidegger and postmodernism [EP]

Master Eckhart’s comments on seeing angels as devils when you die comes to mind when reading the conclusions Heidegger comes to. Even if his metaphysics and epistemology are correct, does the dread and anxiety necessarily follow? The following conclusions are taken up by postmodern nihilists, but are also very reminiscent of Eastern Buddhist thinking, which does not cast about in such a negative mood about it. Similarly, there is a long line of religious mysticism that might agree with much of this, without seeing any connection to the negative moodiness that Heidegger and his followers adhere to.

1. Conflict and contradiction are the deepest truths of reality;

2. Reason is subjective and impotent to reach truths about reality;

3. Reason’s elements—words and concepts—are obstacles that must be un-crusted, subjected to Destruktion, or otherwise unmasked;

4. Logical contradiction is neither a sign of failure nor of anything particularly significant at all;

5. Feelings, especially morbid feelings of anxiety and dread, are a deeper guide than reason;

6. The entire Western tradition of philosophy—whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Lockean, or Cartesian—based as it is on the law of non-contradiction and the subject/object distinction, is the enemy to be overcome.

Lonergan on Authenticity

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Jun 282011

Lonergan, Bernard

…there are four questions, as it were, that GEM (generalized empirical method) proposes for anyone seeking to ground the methods of any discipline. (1) A cognitional theory asks, “What do I do when I know?” It encompasses what occurs in our judgments of fact and value. (2) An epistemology asks, “Why is doing that knowing?” It demonstrates how these occurrences may appropriately be called “objective.” (3) A metaphysics asks “What do I know when I do it?” It identifies corresponding structures of the realities we know and value. (4) A methodology asks, “What therefore should we do?” It lays out a framework for collaboration, based on the answers to the first three questions.

GEM’s goal of a theory of cognition, therefore, is not a set of pictures. It is a set of insights into the data of cognitive activities, followed by a personal verification of those insights. In disciplines that study humans, GEM incorporates the moral dimension by addressing how we know values that lead to moral decisions. So, in GEM’s model of the thinking and choosing person, consciousness has four levels – experience of data, understanding the data, judgment that one’s understanding is correct, and decision to act on the resulting knowledge. These are referred to as levels of self-transcendence, meaning that they are the principal set of operations by which we transcend the solitary self and deal with the world beyond ourselves through our wonder and care.

GEM builds on these realizations by the further personal discovery of certain innate norms at each of the four levels. On the level of experience, our attention is prepatterned, shifting our focus, often desultorily, among at least seven areas of interest – biological, sexual, practical, dramatic, aesthetic, intellectual, and mystical. On the level of understanding, our intellects pursue answers to questions of why and how and what for, excluding irrelevant data and half-baked ideas. On the level of judgment, our reason tests that our understanding makes sense of experience. On the level of decision, our consciences make value judgments and will bother us until we conform our actions to these judgments. Lonergan names these four innate norming processes “transcendental precepts.” Briefly expressed, they are: Be attentive, Be Intelligent, Be reasonable, and Be responsible. But these expressions are not meant as formulated rules; they are English words that point to the internal operating norms by which anyone transcends himself or herself to live in reality. GEM uses the term authenticity to refer to the quality in persons who follow these norms.

Any particular rules or principles or priorities or criteria we formulate about moral living stem ultimately from these unformulated, but pressing internal criteria for better and worse. Whether our formulations of moral stances are objectively good, honestly mistaken, or malevolently distorted, there are no more fundamental criteria by which we make moral judgments. Maxims, such as “Treat others as you want to be treated,” cannot be ultimately fundamental, since it is not on any super-maxim that we selected this one. Nor do authorities provide us with our ultimate values, since there is no super-authority to name the authorities we ought to follow. Rather, we rely on the normative criteria of being attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible; howsoever they may have matured in us, by which we select all maxims and authorities.

GEM includes many other elements in this analysis, including the roles of belief and inherited values, the dynamics of feelings and our inner symbolic worlds, the workings of bias, the rejection of true value in favor of mere satisfaction, and the commitment to love rather than hate.

The Biology of Choice

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Jun 282011

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-brain-on-trial/8520/2/

As with Tourette’s sufferers, split-brain patients, and those with choreic movements, Kenneth’s case illustrates that high-level behaviors can take place in the absence of free will. Like your heartbeat, breathing, blinking, and swallowing, even your mental machinery can run on autopilot. The crux of the question is whether all of your actions are fundamentally on autopilot or whether some little bit of you is “free” to choose, independent of the rules of biology.

This has always been the sticking point for philosophers and scientists alike. After all, there is no spot in the brain that is not densely interconnected with—and driven by—other brain parts. And that suggests that no part is independent and therefore “free.” In modern science, it is difficult to find the gap into which to slip free will—the uncaused causer—because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.

I am not comfortable with the idea of free will defined as an uncaused causer. I think it is more subtle than that. My choices have reasons, and thus causes, but this does not imply my choices are not free. Perhaps I did X instead of Y because X was more consistent with the values I hold, with the way I want to see myself. It is the metaphor of “machinery” in the above paragraph where we have gone off the rails. Brain activity is too complex to be thought of in mechanical terms. Chaos theory is in play here. From the exact same starting point, or boundary conditions, or determining factors, we get different results. These determining factors may limit the range of these results, but they do not actually determine the results in a classical sense.

However, the author goes on to say…

Free will may exist (it may simply be beyond our current science), but one thing seems clear: if free will does exist, it has little room in which to operate. It can at best be a small factor riding on top of vast neural networks shaped by genes and environment. In fact, free will may end up being so small that we eventually think about bad decision-making in the same way we think about any physical process, such as diabetes or lung disease.

Small, perhaps, but important and significant nevertheless. Let’s not confuse quantitative and qualitative measures. The “size” of our free will is not what is important.

—-

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Biology-of-Ethics/127789/

When Patricia describes the farmer that does not consult a rule book, she seems to forget the Dear Abby industry, which exists on rule-book checking behavior. I live in Washington DC and there are plenty of rule-book checkers here. Why aren’t these specimens under Patricia’s spy-glass? Or is this behavior to be ignored since it does not fit the narrative?

Sure, prairie cats respond to oxytocin and people respond to oxytocin, but people also respond to principles. We must always remember, whatever wonderful science – and I do think it is wonderful – Patricia and her colleagues are onto, we know that giving people oxytocin will not end divorce. This is a point worth pausing to consider and hold in mind, you Dr.s of the Brave New World.

The rationalist project of reducing people into robot animals, mechanically responding to chemical impulses, sounds just as naive today as it has always sounded. The science is great, but the philosophy is flawed.

There are reasons and there are causes. When I raise my arm, the biochemical reactions are the cause of my arm being raised, not the reason. If consciousness is an emergent property of biology, it is complex enough to defy reductive explanations.

The human brain is the most complex feature of the universe. Remember, even in physics, we cannot solve for the three-body problem. In the hardest of the hard sciences, mathematics, we now know that we must live with chaos and complexity and indeterminacy.

Just because our thoughts arise from chemicals does not mean chemicals explain our thoughts. Thoughts transcend chemicals just as persons transcend biology. Morality is more than a feeling, even if it begins with feelings. That is what my moral receptors tell me, at least.

Look, I love the science, but let us not lose our souls when we try turning it into philosophy. Biology is one tool in the bag that we can use. It is not the only one, however. We all know how the world appears to the carpenter whose only tool is a hammer.

Justice vs. Freedom?

Philosophy Comments Off

Jun 282011

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=139221

Interesting topic. I used to think that Freedom trumps Justice, but now I think that Freedom is a part of Justice. It is upon the ground of Justice itself that Freedom rests. Freedom, therefore, must be measured against Justice to be authentic. There is no Absolute Freedom, separate from Justice. I am not free to murder you, in other words. This so-called “freedom” on my part is not authentic because it is not justified.

The Freedom vs Justice paradigm falls prey to all the old problems of dualistic thinking. You cannot separate out Freedom from Justice in the first place. To speak of Absolute Freedom as if to break it off from Justice is to make a fundamental error of abstraction. It is like dividing by zero; it is undefined; unthinkable; unreal.

What Camus seems to have in mind can be better articulated perhaps as the good of the individual vs the good of the community. In politics we see examples of this played out in taxation programs designed to give aid to the poor. Libertarians in America often argue against taxation programs from the perspective of Absolute Freedom, denying that Freedom is founded upon Justice at all. I think this is an error, as I have stated. The question remains, however, to the justice of taxation. To what extent is the state justified to redistribute the money of individuals? This is a very difficult question. I am not sure I am satisfied with any general answer. If Justice is like an equilibrium, then we must find the balance between the individual and the community such that each gains from the other. This is the closest I have come in my own thinking to understanding in general terms how freedom and justice are related.

Reading The Lightness of Being by Frank Wilczek

Books, Physics Comments Off

Mar 242011

An electron is a physical condensation of the electromagnetic field that permeates all of spacetime. Thus every electron has the same source. The electron is like the morning dew, appearing from and returning to “the thin air.”

—

Photons are not massless in a superconductor. They are heavy. Electromagnetic radiation does not penetrate superconductors. If the universe were a type of superconductor it could explain mass very well.. Mass could be the result of the type of superconductor we call empty space. This superconductor would require a new kind of particle… The Higgs condensate. Normal supereconductors conduct electrons. This new superconductor would conduct Higgs particles.

Put it this way: if we lived in a Higgs Superconductor we would have trouble finding the Higgs particle that causes Mass.

—

Dark energy is the discovery that space has an intrinsic density. The grid, the field, weighs. There is a constant pressure everywhere in space and for all time. This pressure is caused by the density of the grid, or field (the ether?). It is the weight of the universe.

—

Could the universe be a like a virtual photon that has condensed out of some more fundamental material? The explosiion that we call virtual particle creation, or quark-antiquark creation, might well be described as a “small bang.” Could the big bang be a small bang of some greater world’s particles?

—

Its from bits. In each 10^-24 seconds a proton computes data equivalent to what our fastest supercomputers compute in months. That is, if you took a supercomputer that could do a million million, or trillion (10^12) floating point operations (flops) per second for several months, this would approximate how much the proton calculates in each second. The quantum computer could, an analogue of the proton, could calculate in mere seconds what supercomputers could never finish within the lifetime of the universe.

We have already made the simplest of these quantum computers.

Know this: no one alive can possibly dream of the changes that such a computer would bring to the world.

—

In physics, a grad student is he who knows everything about nothing and a professor is he who knows nothing about everything. That is to say, grad students study equations; professors understand them. If, after solving the equation you are surprised at the result, then you are far away from any understanding. Now, with regards to current science, which equations are still surprising us? Well, the solution of the equations that tell us what mass is, they output mass from an input of non-mass. It seems we get something from nothing. The search for the Higgs particle is a search to understand why this is. It is a quest to understand mass and inertia, the most fundamental property we are aware of in the universe.

This is to acknowledge that here we have reached the very bottom of what is explainable in the universe, for everything is explained in terms of something else but we still have no deeper explanation of mass and inertia; we simply observe their effects. To this day, their explanation – their cause – remains a complete and total mystery, surpassed only perhaps by the mystery of the nature of God.

—

Mass is the sound of space vibrating. Our fingers can hear this vibration and send the data to our brain, which creates a map of this data. This map, we call mass. We have other maps made through sight, sound, taste, smell. Each of these senses feel certain vibrations of the universe and send the data to our brain. These maps converge in the mind to create what we call reality.

—

When you have an apparent contradiction, this means appearances are wrong. The question then becomes, why? This is the lesson of all paradox. We are faced with discovering some flaw in appearances.

—

Supersymmetry:

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Spin in quantum terms can be thought of as layers of dimensions such that as a particle moves from one layer, one dimension, to another, it changes spin. This at first looked like different particles. They had different masses. But supersymmetry sees these particles of different spin and different mass as the same particle as it moves from one quantum dimension to another.

—

According to physics, gravity is fundamental. It can’t be explained in terms of anything simpler. It is what it is. It could be that the explanation of gravity is due to a phenomema beyond the perimeter of our universe.

—

Mass is derived from the energy of quarks and gluons, moving at the speed of light, huddling together to shield one another from the force of the grid from which they precipitated.

—

Vagaries of Perception

Philosophy, Spirituality Comments Off

Mar 162011

Why, Mr. Anderson? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you’re fighting for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Yes? No? Could it be for love?

Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. The temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can’t win. It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?

This is the heart of the subtext of the movie, The Matrix, which comes to a head in part three, a few minutes from the end.

The Matrix is a movie where machines have conquered and enslaved humankind. The twist is that humans do not realize that they have been enslaved. They experience the lives we are familiar with, the world we know. But this world is not “real.” It is a computer simulation, a program that is fed to human consciousness through a wire attached to the back of their heads while they sleep.

Most people in the movie live their lives without ever questioning the world they experience. But some people sense that something is wrong. And some of those people wake up to the “really real” (noumenal – Kant, are you listening?) world, which is an apocalyptic, dark world where humans are at war with the machines, because the machines want to use humans as an energy source (batteries).

There is a metaphysical question that is established in the first movie, which was perhaps first articulated by Plato, and fully developed by David Hume’s skepticism. The question has two parts, one metaphysical, the other epistemological:

What is real and how do we know it?

These are large questions. But these questions are only important because of the next question, which depends on the first two: what is the meaning of life and what should we do? This is the question that underscores all of moral philosophy. It is THE moral question: what should we do?

This is the larger moral issue that runs through the movie, summed up in this speech by Mr. Smith, just before he kills Neo in the Matrix. If everything is an illusion (including love); if everything is just neurons firing in the brain; if everything we do, as the evolutionary psychologists tell us, is nothing more than the urge to reproduce; if morality is nothing more than a complex scheme to support this very same urge that began in the first cellular-based life, then what are we to do? Or more specifically, how are we to justify moral law?

Just as in Huckleberry Finn, where we see the world through a child’s eyes so that we can discern from where the revelation of universal human rights is born, so in The Matrix, we see the world through the eyes of a computer program, and a human who has never really seen the world, so that we can discern the source of the answer to the moral question.

The answer the movie gives us is this: moral law (love) is not a product of being human, but of a certain level of consciousness. In the end, even some of the programs in the Matrix learn to love. Yes, programs love! But not Smith. Smith cannot understand this. He is not “evolved” enough. But Neo realized that if the programs could love, peace could be brokered with the machines. In the scene above, Neo has come back to the Matrix in the form of a Trojan Horse to infect Smith so that the Source can delete him. This is what Neo negotiates with the Source. Neo realizes that he can negotiate with the Source because of the young girl Neo meets in the train station earlier in part 3. (The train station is a version of the mythical river Styx that forms the border between earth and hell).

Her parents are programs, the girl was born in the Matrix [what did the prophecy say about The One being born in the Matrix? Was Neo born in the Matrix? Is Neo really the One?], which of course, means she is a program too. But there is this bridge between the program world and the “real world.” The girl’s parents have brokered a deal to transport the girl to this “real world” (where she can be free) but they cannot go with her. That is part of the deal. To send her away is to lose her forever. They do this, they make this enormous personal sacrifice, because they love her.

The idea that a program could love in this profound way (agape) is the most provocative statement, and the key revelation, of the entire series. This is how the mystery of moral law, or love, is reconciled in the movie. It is not an illusion, or some evolutionary urge that arises from the division of the cell. There is something more than a simple evolutionary process going on. It is consciousness, not merely cellular life, from which the moral question is answered.

Smith cannot understand, simply because he is not conscious enough to understand. And moreover, he is wrong. It is not “only a human mind” that can conceive of love. This is the revelation that leads Neo to the solution to ending the war. It is a revelation that has not occurred to anyone else.

–

Reflections on the Matrix PART 2

–

But the first mystery in the movie is the Matrix itself. If the Matrix is just a convincing simulation, how do we know that the “real world” is not part of this simulation? If the programs in the Matrix are as susceptible to the vagaries of perception described by Smith above (love, for example), what does that say, if anything, about the nature of reality?

In other words, what does this add to the problem presented by Hume’s skepticism?

Nothing. We are still skeptical. That Smith is able to “transcend” into the real world, that Neo has supernatural powers in the real world, is enough to lead us to reasonably conclude that the “real world” is also some kind of simulation, similar to the Matrix itself.

The inescapable, inevitable issue that this leads to is fundamentally a moral one: If certain knowledge of objective reality is impossible to possess, by what means are we to discern what is right and wrong? In other words, how are we to know how to live our lives?

This is what Smith cannot understand. He is a simple program, with a singular task and purpose. It is beyond his ability to conceive of the meaning and purpose of the more complex beings he is programmed to kill. He does not understand freedom, or choice.

[I have to add that on the topic of freedom and choice, my personal favorite piece of writing on this is the Grand Inquisitor by Dostoevsky. Make time for it!]

And while we may have a more intuitive understanding of the nature of this freedom and choice, we struggle with the responsibility it bears upon us. How should we live? What should we do? Moreover, in an age of skepticism and relativism where our secular understanding of all emotion (including love) is exactly as Smith has described – neurons firing in our brains, a survival habit whose purpose is like every other purpose of cellular-based organisms: reproduction – then what are we to make of agape?

Are we delusional?

A clue to the answer lies in the first movie. It is what Bernard Lonergan describes as a moral conversion:

There is no spoon.

It might be thought that the point of the spoon lesson merely establishes the problem that the external world is not real and that this does not hint at the solution to the moral problem of how to live.

But it does.

The lesson is that you cannot change the world unless you change yourself. It is not the spoon that bends, it is you. When you are stuck in a traffic jam, do you curse and spit, or whistle and sing? Is it possible to bend a traffic jam from some awful tragedy into something that is actually enjoyable?

Yes. You do so by changing yourself. Marcus Aurelius and the stoic philosophers stressed this: My house has burned down. Whether this is a terrible tragedy, only history can judge. For this is not the only interpretation and I am not obliged to accept it. I may be a good deal better off if I decline to do so.

Likewise, Bernard Lonergan offers insight on the matter. The three conversions that Bernard Lonergan speaks of:

There is an intellectual conversion by which a person has personally met the challenges of a cognitional theory, an epistemology, a metaphysics, and a methodology.

There is a moral conversion by which a person is committed to values above mere satisfactions.

And there is an affective conversion by which a person relies on the love of neighbor, community, and God to heal bias and prioritize values.

These are the changes that change the world. They are internal. It is us that bends, not the spoon. This is the lesson we are to learn. This is what we are to do. This is what redemption is, the conversion described above. This is the meaning behind it all: as Pope Benedict says, “the meaning of life is to love, and be loved in return.”

This is not a lesson learned from logical deduction. This is not a conclusion that arises from axioms, like Euclid’s Elements. Rather, it is the very axiom from which everything else arises.

Notes on Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Books, Philosophy Comments Off

Mar 152011

Maintain a constant mildness of temper and a tranquility of mind in all things
Remain abstinent from mean and evil thoughts
Refrain from fault-finding
Practice a constant benevolence in nature
Look carefully after the interests of friends
Do not esteem yourself too highly; skill in expounding philosophical principles is the smallest of merits
Do not be opinionated
Tolerate ignorant persons
Be accommodating without false flattery
Never show anger or any passion
Be affectionate
Give to others readily
Cherish good hopes
Listen generously
Do not criticize
Be ready to forgive
Seek an agreeable humor
Avoid sarcasm and cynicism and all ironies
Nurture a love of labor and vigorous action
Perseverance against arrogance, pedantry, sophistry and pride
Be satisfied in all occasions, and cheerful

Throw away thy books; no longer distract thyself… cast away the thirst after books, that thou mayest not die murmuring, but cheerfully, truly, and from thy heart thankful to God.

consider thus: Thou art an old man; no longer let this be a slave, no longer be pulled by the strings like a puppet to unsocial movements, no longer either be dissatisfied with thy present lot, or shrink from the future.

a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return.

Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice; and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts.

the offences which are committed through desire are more blameable than those which are committed through anger.

How much worse are the consequences of anger than their causes.

Miracles

Books Comments Off

Mar 152011

“The state of affairs in which ordinary people can discover the Supernatural only by abstruse reasoning is recent and, by historical standards, abnormal. All over the world, until quite modern times, the direct insight of the mystics and the reasonings of the philosophers percolated to the mass of the people by authority and tradition; they could be received by those who were no great reasoners themselves in the concrete form of myth and ritual and the whole pattern of life. In the conditions produced by a century or so of Naturalism, plain men are being forced to bear burdens which plain men were never expected to bear before. We must get the truth for ourselves or go without it. There may be two explanations for this. It might be that humanity, in rebelling against tradition and authority, has made a ghastly mistake; a mistake which will not be the less fatal because the corruptions of those in authority rendered it very excusable. On the other hand, it may be the Power which rules our species is at this moment carrying out a daring experiment. Could it be intended that the whole mass of the people should now move forward and occupy for themselves those heights which were once reserved only for the sages? Is the distinction between wise and simple to disappear because all are now expected to become wise? If so, our present blunderings would be but growing pains. But let us make no mistake about our necessities. If we are content to go back and become humble and plain men obeying a tradition, well. If we are ready to climb and struggle on till we become sages ourselves, better still. But the man who will neither obey wisdom in others nor adventure for her/himself is fatal. A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live: a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go; to stay here is death.”

From Chapter 6 of “Miracles” by C.S. Lewis

Print Me a Stradivarius and then Compose Me a Song

Muse Comments Off

Feb 172011

3D printing has long fascinated me. Maybe I am just naive but this kind of stuff never ceases to amaze me.

http://www.economist.com/node/18114327

–snip–
It works like this. First you call up a blueprint on your computer screen and tinker with its shape and colour where necessary. Then you press print. A machine nearby whirrs into life and builds up the object gradually, either by depositing material from a nozzle, or by selectively solidifying a thin layer of plastic or metal dust using tiny drops of glue or a tightly focused beam.
–snip–

And then you take your instrument (in this case) out of the printer and play it!

I for one, am impressed.

Speaking of musical instruments and computers, since no one seems to think it amazing that a computer can answer Jeopardy questions (because, of course, computers can do anything) what about creating music? If the advance of Artificial Intelligence is so taken for granted that its historic first steps come to us with the little more than a postmodern yawn, perhaps Musical Intelligence will raise some eyebrows:

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/09/virtual-composer-makes-beautiful-musicand-stirs-controversy.ars

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Tech/2010/0617/How-a-computer-program-became-classical-music-s-hot-new-composer

Yes? No? Just once, can someone agree that at least some of the technological advances we have witnessed in our lifetime are at least mildly interesting and worth being excited about? I for one remain in constant awe. Do I really stand alone in amazement with all of this?

Compassion and Pity

Philosophy Comments Off

Jan 192011

From the book, Pathology of the Elites by Michael Knox Beran:

For compassion, to be stricken with the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious, and pity, to be sorry without being touched in the flesh, are not only not the same, they may not even be related. Compassion, by its very nature cannot be touched off by the sufferings of a whole class or a people, or, least of all, mankind as a whole. It cannot reach out farther than what is suffered by one person and still remain what it is supposed to be, co-suffering. Its strength hinges on the strength of passion itself, which, in contrast to reason, can comprehend only the particular, but has no notion of the general and no capacity for generalizations. The sin of the Grand Inquisitor was like Robespierre, was “attracted toward les hommes faibles,” not only because such attraction was indistinguishable from lust for power, but also because he had depersonlized the sufferers, lumped them together into an aggregate – the people, etc. To Doesteyevsky, the sign of Jesus’ divinity clearly was his ability to have compassion with all men in their singularity, that is, without lumping themtogether into some such entity as one suffering mankind. The greatness of the story, apart from its theological implications lies in that we are made to feel how false the idealistic, high-flown phrases of the most exquisite pity sound the moment they are confronted with compassion. – Hannah Arendt

Pity, Arendt argued, is a concern for the misery of another unprompted by intimacy with, or love for, the sufferer. Compassion, by contrast, is a love directed “towards specific suffering” and concentrates on “particular persons.” It can be exercised only by individuals or small groups, not by agencies or bureaus. Pity, Arendt wrote, “may be the perversion of compassion.” Because the pitieris not stricken in the flesh,” because he keeps his “sentimental distance,” he has often shown “a greater capacity for cruelty” than the confessedly cruel.

The type of compassion liberals claim as their own peculiar virtue is really a form of pity, milder perhaps than that which lies at the heart of the socialist orthodoxies, but dangerous in its own right. David Hume said that pity was a “counterfeited” love. It is the false compassion that results when men exercise their kindness by committee it is the look in the eyes of the welfare clerk or the public housing official. To be pitied by another man is to stand humilated before him; however well intentioned programs grounded in pity may be, they always end by laying low their intended beneficiaries. Pity does not lead to a flourishing in the pitied, though it may provke their resentment, even their rage; the act of pitying is always a kind of strength condescending to weakness. Love awakens, pity oppresses.

Laws Do Not Change Hearts and Minds

Just Sayin' Comments Off

Jan 042011

Laws do not change the hearts and minds of people. It took a moral conversion to stop slavery. It took Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and numerous other culture-changing influences to affect this conversion. The same thing must happen with abortion. Changing the laws will do little good if the hearts and minds remain fixed.

Changing hearts and minds is a bottom up campaign. Changing laws is a top down campaign. Top down campaigns serve the glory of the righteous, but often help souls little, if at all. This is why the drug war is unsuccessful and despite increasing costs we do not have enough clinics for drug addicts.

It is not that there is not enough money to provide for these clinics, but that the money is allocated elsewhere. Our policies are created to placate the sentiments of the righteous. We spend ten times the money on trying to stop a weed from growing than we spend on helping those whom that weed actually hurts. While the costs of the drug war grow and grow the percentage of those costs grow more and more out of whack. As we militarize the effort to enforce and militarize prohibition laws the actual victims of drug addiction are allocated paltry funds.

This is due to a common policy folly. It is born out of the top down fallacy. More and more laws, followed by more and more money, make politicians look like moral heroes but help souls little. Drug use in this country remains steady, despite the laws and money spent otherwise.

Meanwhile, teenage tobacco use is on the decline. Why? Did we enact some new law? Did some heroic politician finally divert enough money to teenage tobacco prohibition to change the nation’s behavior? We know the answer is no.

Teenage smoking is down because hearts and minds have begun to change. A conversion is taking place. An enlightenment. It is important to ask how this has happened, and to note that to the extent that it has happened, that the effect has come from the bottom up, not the top down.

That is not to say that leadership is not a crucial element in the equation. It simply indicates a method by which that leadership may prove most effective. We live in a free, pluralistic society. To the extent that any of us has the power to change such a society lies in our power to persuade because laws do not change the hearts and minds of people.

Antikythera Mechanism – Lego Style

History, Math, Muse Comments Off

Dec 102010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk&feature=player_embedded

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient mechanical computer designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was recovered in 1900–1901 from the Antikythera wreck. Its significance and complexity were not understood until decades later. Its time of construction is now estimated between 150 and 100 BC. Technological artifacts of similar complexity and workmanship did not reappear until the 14th century, when mechanical astronomical clocks were built in Europe.

The mechanism is the oldest known complex scientific calculator. It contains many gears, and is sometimes called the first known analog computer, although its flawless manufacturing suggests that it may have had a number of undiscovered predecessors during the Hellenistic Period. It appears to be constructed upon theories of astronomy and mathematics developed by Greek astronomers and it is estimated that it was made around 150-100 BC.

Art & Letters Daily RSS

RSS Feeds Comments Off

Oct 042010

HungryFEED can't get feed. Don't be mad at HungryFEED. SimplePie reported: A feed could not be found at http://www.aldaily.com/feed/. A feed with an invalid mime type may fall victim to this error, or SimplePie was unable to auto-discover it.. Use force_feed() if you are certain this URL is a real feed.

Spirituality in the Modern World

Spirituality Comments Off

Oct 012010

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/hive-of-nerves/

I think you will find comfort that there are people writing articles like this in publications like The American Scholar. I particularly like this article because it is the voice of a Christian speaking to a plurality of listeners – some of whom are people of faith, others not. The ability to speak – and of Christ, no less – and be heard in a pluralist setting is impressive.

This article reminds me of the spirituality of St Francis de Sales in many ways, one of which is the way the author makes use of art, music, poetry as vehicles of transcendence that bring us closer to God. Another Salesian trait I noticed in the article is the author’s focus on the small details of ordinary, everyday life as a source of contemplative, spiritual experience:

We are left with this paradox: only by hearing the furthest call of consciousness can we hear the call of ordinary life, but only by claiming the most mundane and jangling details of our lives can that rare and ulterior music of the soul merge with what Seamus Heaney calls “the music of what happens.”

The article is actually about the source of modern anxiety, something de Sales wrote about frequently. The author discusses the importance of allowing thoughts of God to enter into (break into the awareness of) the everyday moments of life.

(“inbreaking” is the theological term for Christ’s appearance in the world and in our lives—there is no coaxing it, no way to earn it, no way to prepare except to hone your capacity to respond, which is, finally, your capacity to experience life, and death).

I like this idea of capacity, and that our duty is to “hone” it.

The author also touches upon the pitfalls or limits of pure intellectualism, which reminds me of St. Bonaventure’s teachings, which I am learning about. Pope Benedict points out in that encyclical? you gave me on St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure, that St. Bonaventure placed a primacy on love, above knowledge. There is a line there about love seeing farther than reason, how it is love, not reason, that has sight in the dark night of the soul, where reason is blind. This is the idea that is most opposed to the metaphysics of the empirical scientists, and as such, this is the point at which so many have taken a wrong turn, or perhaps gone too far. It is not that reason is to be abandoned, but that we need to acknowledge that while reason is necessary, it alone is not sufficient.

I was reminded of this when the author of the article says,

There is a kind of seeing that, fusing attention and submission, becomes a kind of being.

In my own thoughts, I have considered the idea that being has primacy over knowledge and action, but as St. Bonaventure teaches, I see this mode of “being” as a “being-in-love.” Being transcends reason, sees beyond reason, and must be reason’s guide.

The author also speaks of how, in the Western intellectual culture, the concept of the “self” has replaced the concept of the “soul,” which I thought was enlightening. I found a lot of interesting comments and thoughts in the article.

Lonergan and Kant

Philosophy Comments Off

Oct 012010

Ontology is something I never quite got comfortable with. I have tried a few times to approach Heidegger (Being and Time) and I think I have had a couple of insights there, but I am starting to come across very interesting relationships between epistemology and ontology that I don’t quite understand yet and am curious to study it closer. Somehow, Lonergan, Kant, and Heidegger all move into ontology from epistemology, but I have not quite gotten there yet. Aquinas also has some very interesting things to say on this, pulling as always it seems, from Aristotle. Again, I am still digesting the basics of the ontological, however. I would love to take a course on some of this, as I am sure my understanding of the dividing lines of different schools of thought and where these thinkers fall on these issues is cloudy.

For example, I never read Hegel, but I came across an article that indicated that Lonergan was following Hegel and that Kant was an afterthought. So I started to read up on Hegel and indeed, I have found that characteristics of Lonergan’s structure jumped out at me, and right away.

I was always turned off to Hegel because of the Marx connection, but I am finding hints of great insights in his work, “The Phenomenology of Spirit.” The title invokes Kant (who divided the world into noumena and phenomena) and speaks to the fact that all thinkers after Kant had to deal with the power and force of his work. [This is just a part of the great tradition of thinkers that have contributed to this centuries-old dialogue. Kant was speaking directly to Hume and Locke, both giants; Aquinas stands on the shoulders of Aristotle; etc.

There are two things that I am focused on right now with the beginnings of Lonergan’s Insight. One is the transcendental structure (which does seem to come from Hegel, but is also tied to Kant, who brought in the transcendental, I believe) of higher and higher levels of consciousness and how consciousness of itself moves from one stage to another….

These “…different levels of consciousness and intentionality have to be distinguished.”

These levels of consciousness are:

1.   Empirical, which is the level of the sensual;
2.   Intellectual, which is the level of inquiry, understanding, and expression;
3.   Rational, which is the level of reflection and judgment upon the truth or falsity of a proposition; and
4.   Responsible, which is the level of applying what we know to ourselves and come to a decision about how we should then act, given what we know. As we progress through these levels of consciousness, we become aware of a fuller self, “…and the awareness itself is different.”

Thus, Lonergan’s transcendental method is summarized as

1) Be attentive
2) Be intelligent
3) Be reasonable
4) Be responsible

The second thing I am focused on, as mere intellectual curiosity, is this epistemological issue regarding the veil of perception, what I have come to call “The Matrix Problem.” How do we know that this world is not some virtual reality matrix? Are we to come to conclude that the words “real” and “knowledge” are valid only locally, like time and space, which only have meaning in a locally-defined frame of reference? This is the question David Hume asks us, and it is reminiscent of the shadows in Plato’s cave.

I am fairly certain that Lonergan’s answer to this is that if indeed we are in the Matrix, we cannot “know” this, simply because we can never have any experience of the world outside the Matrix. Within the confines of what we mean by “real” and “knowledge” the Matrix would be “real” to us in a local way that would not translate to the programmers who designed the Matrix. The end result of this view is that we are “limited” to saying that what we human beings consider “knowledge of the real” only applies to “our universe” – aka, the supposed Matrix.

On the one hand, this seems to admit defeat of our desire to know the “really real” but I believe that Lonergan and Kant calls into question that the concept of knowing this really real can have any meaning.

For example, Lonergan says

“there is no explicit contradiction in the content of the statement, We are under an illusion when we claim to know what really is. On the other hand, there is an explicit contradiction in the reflective statement: I am stating what really and truly is so when I state that we are under an illusion whenever we claim to know what really and truly is so.”

This is a huge insight. I have tried to come up with a way of articulating this as a concept, this map of a map, this abstraction on top of an abstraction, self-referential loop, or spiral… Wait, spiral? This is precisely what Hegel describes as the dialectic, and what Lonergan describes as we move from level 1 to level 2. This is why Lonergan begins Insight by talking about arithmetic (level 1), only to go to algebra (level 2) and show how in level 2 we have to re-investigate the concepts of level 1 from a new perspective, still looking at mathematics, but as mathematics looking at mathematics. And herein is why understanding is not “picturing” for we cannot “picture” everything that we can understand, like the fact that 0.999… is in fact equal to 1.

the symbol “0.999…” is a map of a map (level 2) while the symbol “1” is “just a map” (level 1). The symbol “1” is a map of an actual thing in the world: 1 apple, 1 car, 1 chair, etc. It is an abstraction one level above an actual object, a map of an object. The symbol “0.999…” however, is NOT a map of a physical object in the world. It is a map of a process. It is a map of a series of maps acting on one another in a process that never ends. It is NOT a number. But it is equivalent to a number! There is no one on this planet that can “picture” this, but we CAN understand it.

Level 1, level 2, abstractions of abstractions, self-referential ideas… this is the spiral of consciousness. Somehow this spiral transcends (I am still struggling with this part) to understand what must be so, even though it is not a property of the objects in the world. These are the Kantian categories: space, time, causality… etc. These are not properties of the objects in the world, but rather, the systhetic a-priori knowledge, or empirical residue, to use Lonergans phrase, which MUST be in order for experience to be possible. This is the transcendent, objective, sythetic knowledge that is so, must me so, objectively, before any empirical experience is possible at all.

In other words, if there is experience, in any universe whatsoever – ours OR the universe of the programmer who created the Matrix – it is only because time and space and causality are what they are. These categories are said to be transcendent categories of knowledge. The MUST be so, and moreover they make experience possible.

I have more learn about this, but I think that is roughly or approximately the case that is being made.

Now, quickly back to the statement

As I said before I got sidetracked, this is a huge insight. This is an example of evaluating an analytic statement (as opposed to a synthetic statement). We need not go out into the world to see whether it is true or false.

An easier analytic statement to parse, for example, is this one:

My father’s brother is my uncle.

This statement can be evaluated without investigating the world. It’s truth value can be analytically derived from the meaning of the word uncle. However, to say the following:

Jeff’s father’s brother is not Jeff’s uncle.

is to make a mis-statement. We can see on the face of it, via the analysis of the concepts, that is wrong. All we need to know is the meaning of the word uncle and brother to reject this statement as false. It is in this same way, Lonergan is saying, that we can see the wrongness of the statement,

I am stating what really and truly is so when I state that we are under an illusion whenever we claim to know what really and truly is so.

There is no basis for the claim, “I am stating what is really and truly so.” This is how Kant defeats Hume’s skepticism, and Lonergan is repeating it. Lonergan, however, is a better writer and gives us nuggets of insight to help illuminate what Kant laid out. For example, the above point is brilliantly illuminated by Lonergan with this phrase, which assimilates everything written above:

“It is not through true judgment that we reach knowledge of existence, it is through knowledge of existence that we know true judgment”

The person who made the claim,

I am stating what really and truly is so when I state that we are under an illusion whenever we claim to know what really and truly is so.

makes the claim through no empirical knowledge of the existence that the claim posits, it cannot possibly by true, except by coincidence, which fails the verification part of the process of cognition and understanding.

Kant and Lonergan are saying that we can have knowledge of objective reality, AND we may be in a virtual reality Matrix. In this case, the concept of “objective reality” is synonymous with the Matrix.

This makes us feel uncomfortable, perhaps. But it is nothing more that what science, and religion, tells us: The particular features of God cannot be known. The mind of God cannot be understood. What caused the Big Bang cannot be verified. The possibility of multiverses, and their number and nature cannot be investigated. Events that lie outside the light cone of our space-time environment remain forever inaccessible to us.

All of these statements present the same epistemological limitation as the Matrix paradox. Kant and Lonergan, therefore reduce knowledge of the really real (noumena) to knowledge of phenomena.

Enter Hegel and his work, “The Phenomenology of Spirit.” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (a trustworthy source) says

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) is one of the greatest systematic thinkers in the history of Western philosophy. In addition to epitomizing German idealist philosophy, Hegel boldly claimed that his own system of philosophy represented an historical culmination of all previous philosophical thought.

The Phenomenology of Spirit (Die Phänomenologie des Geistes), published in 1807, is Hegel’s first major comprehensive philosophical work. Originally intended to be the first part of his comprehensive system of science (Wissenschaft) or philosophy, Hegel eventually considered it to be the introduction to his system. This work provides what can be called a “biography of spirit,” i.e., an account of the development of consciousness and self-consciousness in the context of some central epistemological, anthropological and cultural themes of human history. It has continuity with the works discussed above in examining the development of the human mind in relation to human experience but is more wide-ranging in also addressing fundamental questions about the meaning of perceiving, knowing, and other cognitive activities as well as of the nature of reason and reality.

Does this description sound familiar? It could be a description of Lonergan’s work in Insight!

I also like that, given the limitations of our situation inside the Matrix – what Percy describes as the “Island” – we have in fact been sent a message in a bottle – news of what is beyond the island, or Matrix – through revelation.

And this is the point at which we step from philosophy to theology. It turns out that we DO have data, in the form of news, about the world beyond the Matrix! Theology is precisely about this news. It uses the tools of philosophy to venture out into the world of the “programmer” who has sent us a message about his world!

Does that sound right?

At any rate, I am working my way in this direction. I can see what is coming. Soon Aquinas will guide me across the divide. I am working my way to him!

Non-differentiable continuous functions exist

Math Comments Off

Oct 012010

Translation: continuous curves do exist which have no tangent. I do believe men have been shot and killed for making less controversial statements.

This statement, if understood, should shock you out of your socks. It basically means that there are continuous curves that have no tangent! Can you imagine what such a curve looks like? Hint: are you good at fractions?

http://www.math.washington.edu/~conroy/general/weierstrass/weier.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weierstrass_function

http://www.math.cmu.edu/%7Ebobpego/21132/nowhdiff.pdf

Science and Religion

Spirituality Comments Off

Oct 012010

Dear NYTimes:

I am one of those who enjoys the study of both religion and science – as a lay person in both cases. I find great value in both of these, but as the author indicates, these values are of different sorts. Unlike some, I do not find conflict in these two studies.

In science, I learn about the beginnings of the universe and the structure of the nucleus of the atom. My Roman Catholic study teaches me that what is true is true. Religion cannot deny the truth of science. Pope John Paul, and Pope Benedict are adamant about this. I cringe when I hear people describe Christianity from the perspective of Fundamentalism. I hope people realize the difference.

As I said, I have learned a lot from science. What I have learned from religion, however, I feel is more important. From religion, I have learned to love and be loved, to forgive and be forgiven, to be an active member of a faith community working to make the world a better place by developing and nurturing relationships. In other words, from religion I learn to know my soul.

Before I was fully committed to religion, I was living what seemed to me to be a typical secular life. My values were to accumulate as many pleasures as I could, to seek my own self interested appetites and pretty much do whatever I felt like doing as long as I did not hurt anyone else in the process.

This quickly went nowhere. It was not my study of scientific truth, but my study of religious truth that led me to the realization that my life was on track for a dead end. It was not science, but religion where I found community, grace, and joy. And not religion in the abstract, but more specifically, in church, I found good people who teach me everyday by their example what it means to strive to live a certain kind of values-based, virtuous, spiritual life.

Does science contradict any of this? If so, I don’t see it. One of the priests in my parish is a molecular biologist at NIH. My spiritual adviser is a retired physicist from Berkeley. We talk about quantum mechanics, string theory and share a love for books like “The Lightness of Being” by Nobel Prize winner in physics Frank Wilczec as well as books like “No Man is an Island” by Thomas Merton, a Roman Catholic monk who sought to understand the truths of other religions from Suffism to Buddhism. The Dalai Lama visited his grave in Gethsemani and gave him credit for opening his eyes to the deep and meaningful value to be found in Christianity. It was the first time, said the Dalai Lama, that he realized that Tibet’s religion did not have a monopoly on truth. Merton, nor the Dalai Lama, are ignorant of science and both were well read in quantum mechanics – as much as any non-mathematican can be, that is.

In all of this, there is never a hint at a contradiction between religion and science. It saddens me, therefore, to read and hear the arrogant claims against the faithful as if we are ignorant, irrational, and intellectually irresponsible. I wonder when I hear these claims, how much time the claimants have spent reading – and trying to understand – Aquinas.

Perhaps it is a matter of grace in the end. I don’t think you can explain love to a being that has not experienced it. There are certain kinds of knowledge that transcend the mind, and must be experienced by a self. We are not merely minds, we are not merely intellect; we are beings who have experiences. For those who have not experienced God, and whose minds demand a satisfactory, Arisotelian, logically consistent, understandable vision, I will pray for you, for I was once one of you.

Dear Agnostics: if it is the big, full truth that you seek, pray for the supernatural and remember that the study of Nature will never reveal anything but Nature.

What I have learned, is that God is not a puzzle to be figured out through the process of logic, merely; rather, it is the heart, not the mind that ultimately bears witness to love and to God. The intellect reflects on what the heart witnesses and reason and logic and intelligence is applied, as they always are, after the fact. Understanding follows experience; there is no understanding without experience. To understand the supernatural, you must experience it.

Those looking for empirical data, therefore, must look in the one and only place it can be found – in their own hearts. This is not to say that God is sentimentality. Unfortunately, Hollywood has diluted our concept of heart, but what I mean when I say “heart” is the center of being, the essence of self.

Lastly, there is a saying that God loves an honest doubter. It is perfectly OK to pray to God and say that you are not going to turn your back on reason, logic, or science, and that you acknowledge that you may never fully understand or know God the way you would like, but that you will keep the door open, that you will listen, and wait. And if you remain open to the possibility, if you leave the door open for God and invite Him into your heart, you may be surprised. Or not. But you can be committed to this listening and waiting. And there is something in this, I think. Of course, we don’t know how to conjure God. Nothing we do can earn his love and nothing we do can win revelation or salvation. Rather, these are freely given. This grace is truly the greatest of gifts, and for all my brothers and sisters out there who are honest doubters, I pray especially for you that you may keep an open heart, even in your skepticism, that you may experience this grace and finally have a piece of the understanding for which you seek, but have not yet found.

How radiation transmits inertia from one body to another

Physics Comments Off

Sep 182010

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equivME/#1.1

Let us now consider two such gas samples S₁ and S₂ that are spaced some distance apart in a vacuum. Let us further suppose that all of the energy ΔE emitted by S₁ is absorbed by S₂. In this configuration, the mass M₁ of S₁ will decrease by an amount ΔE/c². As S₂ absorbs the amount of energy ΔE, its mass increases by an equal amount ΔE/c². There is a sense, then, in which it can be said that the radiation that “carried” the energy ΔE from S₁ to S₂ had the effect of transferring some of the inertial mass from S₁ to S₂, or as Einstein put it “If the theory agrees with the facts, then radiation transmits inertia between emitting and absorbing bodies” (1905b, p. 174).

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