my thoughts during the race

I’m currently working at DG doing web-application programming, which is great. It’s in my favorite language using my favorite web-application framework, and I’m working with some great people. I still occasionally go crazy though, and I assume that getting my mind off of work sometimes to read my Bible and blog about it will be helpful. I’ll be doing something intellectually stimulating that nonetheless has almost nothing to do with Ruby programming. That said, I’ll probably end up blogging something about Ruby and Rails once I get excited about them again.

I’ve also decided to just skip the month or so that I got behind in some of the bookmarks of my Bible reading plan. The fact that I was so far behind in difficult books (Revelation, Job, Psalms) actually made it less likely that I would read my Bible, so I hope this sets things back on track again.

That and the change in atmosphere might keep me sane, and I may even get some rest before school starts up again in about three weeks.

From Isaiah 55

This is what John the Baptist was preaching in the wilderness – repentance leading to forgiveness – an early gospel.

Look how beautiful it is, with God’s plea for us to forsake eating dirt and come to him for real, satisfying food.

Look at his plea for us to seek him while there’s still time.

“Let the wicked forsake his way, … FOR my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. Interesting.

His word will be like rain scattered on the earth that brings up plants!

Some really weird and awesome stuff will be happening when we’re led out by Jesus – mountains and hills and trees singing and clapping…

Definitely a million short posts, because thinking of it that way is misleading. There are more than two options. If I consciously opt for the one long post, I will unconsciously be opting for the third option of “no posts ever.”

I”m writing this now because, as I often mention, I get reset every morning. Regardless of what went on the day before, I always wake up a new person – sometimes happy, usually neutral leaning towards cynical, and sometimes nasty. I want tomorrow to be different, because today was so good. Today I know God is real and working out a grand plan.

Today it started with music. There’s an amazing song arranged by Jon Schmidt called “Love Story meets Viva la Vida” because it’s Jon on the Piano and some other guy on the cello first playing Taylor Swift’s Love Story and then transitioning seamlessly into Viva la Vida. It stirs my soul, and alters my mood for the better, casting a generally deep and intriguing atmosphere over all of my thoughts. The song seems to subliminally encourage me to look deeper into thoughts, feelings and events, and I actually listened to it while I got caught up in my Bible reading.

The day before I had received The Weight of Glory, by C.S. Lewis, and started reading the title essay before going to sleep.  I got about a third of the way through, and a couple of concepts hit me. I was affected most deeply by the idea that longing and the apprehension of beauty are very closely related, if not the same emotion. The concept resonates with the core of me for two reasons.

First, as Lewis mentions, that fact is good evidence that there is a Heaven, and that God is there. We experience longing when we see something beautiful because we have a sort of residual understanding, unmarred by the fall, that there is a place we haven’t yet been, that we have been searching for all our lives; that there is something (Someone), some source, from which all the beauty we see with our eyes comes, and to which all that beauty points. This is far better to me than any alternate explanation of our feelings of beauty and longing in response to the beautiful, which is important for my peace of mind.

I am also gripped by the concept because it seems so very real. I have been consciously keeping an eye out for months for something that I could hold onto – something that would be sufficiently ubiquitous in my daily experience to hold me close to God even when I didn’t directly feel his presence. The fact that beauty is longing screams to me that there is a whole other class of beauty out there somewhere, of which the earthly beauty I see everywhere is but a mere suggestion.

C.S. Lewis also elaborates on the nature of that longing. When I listen to my beautiful music, I want to just dive into it. I want to eat it, become one with it, swish my feet around in it and then slide my whole body in. When I see a beautiful sunset, or the aftermath on a berry-bush of an ice storm, or the red and yellow autumn leaves, contrary to all worldly reason I desire –  so badly it hurts – to join myself to that glory. Those desires are not satisfiable in this world, so why are they there?

God loves us, and created us to worship him with our whole being forever. This is the greatest satisfaction we can attain, and is far more satisfying than anything we have ever yet experienced. And now one huge piece of evidence for it is felt in my bones, and surrounds me on every side.

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”

What follows is a short paper I wrote for Introduction to Cognitive Science. It is mostly a reflection on a short story we read for that class which I was able to find online here. You will have to read it to understand what I’m talking about. We were allowed to write about anything, and I wrote on this particular topic to make my readers feel the horror of the prevailing philosophical worldview of our day: that non-deterministic consciousness leading to moral capacity is an illusion.

In the supplementary reading The Seventh Sally or How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good, by Stanisław Lem, Lem creates a world apparently much like our own, but with a uniquely skilled individual named Trurl. Trurl possesses a powerful ability to create, and he uses this ability to create a perfect model of a civilization. The inhabitants of this model are described in detail as being exactly like the inhabitants of real civilizations: they love, they hate, they are traitors and heroes and conspirators and ordinary folk, and are purportedly fully human to Trurl, except that they are very small, and understood by him. The apparent moral dilemma, which comprises the main thrust of the story, comes when Trurl tells his friend Klapaucious what he has done, and Klapaucious explains that there is no difference between a perfect simulation of people and the real thing.

What surprised me is that Trurl then rushes to their aid. This behavior seems completely inappropriate given his new understanding of the nature of consciousness. I contend that if he has truly created a whole civilization of beings capable of the same feelings of which he is capable, he has no moral obligation to them at all. In fact, I would go so far as to contend that in such a case, neither moral obligation nor morals themselves exist.

In support of this, consider the fact that purely deterministic matter and energy cannot (by the definition of determinism), be arranged into a being with free, non-deterministic feelings. If Trurl, in his extravagant act, truly created beings sufficiently like himself emotionally for him to be convinced that they feel suffering just like he does, he would have shown that his own suffering was just as illusory as theirs, not the other way around.

Further, consider the fact that for Trurl to create his artificial civilization, he must understand how it works (and in fact, his dialog with Klapaucious suggests this). This implies at least some level of understanding about the way his own mind works (remember, Trurl was able to say that his creations truly felt), or in other words, he effectively knew the general algorithm for his own consciousness. Trurl thus knew he was a machine without freedom, bound in slavery to the algorithm of his consciousness.

The fatal assumption seems to be that humans are moral agents, which at least in the story is contradicted by the evidence. The story says that since humans are moral agents, anything that thinks and feels as we do must also be a moral agent, and may induce in other moral agents moral obligations. If the facts of the story are taken at face-value, however, without this ungrounded assumption, we must reach a different conclusion: If we can demonstrate that there are beings following merely deterministic principles (and are thus amoral agents), and that those beings nonetheless think and feel just as we humans do, then in all probability, humans are not moral agents either.