…for what it's worth

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.

This is more or less the theme for my blog: get it out of my head and on the “page”, and maybe more thoughts will fill its empty place.

My Catharsis, by Dan Bull

I'll get in my submarine
Set sail to somewhere remote
I'll wait until World War III is over
Then go and live with the victors and

Sing
Sing
My catharsis

Look, never again will I put down my pen
The best method I know to let stuff out my head
Yes, I'm aware of the notion I must sound a bit dense
But I'm just letting you know there's nothing round to contend
When stressed then I focus on jotting down a lament
Introspectively composing what comes out from within
Whenever you feel hopeless, down, depressed
I suggest getting a note book out and venting
Whether wrecked or sober muck round with the text
Get depression focused, confront the doubt and dread
Instead of letting them roam or shutting them out your head
Don't ever repress emotions, push them down, pretending
You never noticed them sucking you down to death
You could suffer a thousand deaths together alone
Getting ever more low 'til you couldn't get up out of bed
So yes, my best weapon's prose, and I'll love sound to def

My catharsis

Sometimes you need to sit and vent your heart
Even if there's a fair chance some prick'll tear it apart
But I don't care, it's a farce
So I'm wearing my heart on my sleeve eager to share it with half
Of the people that care when I start with my speech
Harp through my teeth
About seemingly meaningless things mithering me
And I mean it's difficult to say what's really on your brain
Without thinking what friends think of your frame of mind
cos they might think you're a little bit insane
But if you wanna break from the cycle of pain
Then you might wanna change up your mind and its frame
You're neither to blame nor liable for saying
Any lines on a page that's inscribed with your name
They're right when they say pen's mightier than sword
So remember that fact then write and record

My catharsis

I’ve only got a few minutes before I go to class and no time to do this later, so I’ll be brief (or at least direct).

Whenever I think that to myself (“stupid Pharisees”), I have to pause and make sure I don’t do the same things they do. That reflection usually ends with the need for my own repentance.

Today’s reading in Luke was mostly chapter 18, in which Jesus is just owning the Pharisees, scribes and Sadducees in arguments. The Jewish leaders are so sneaky in these stories, and Jesus is so not fooled.

They ask him by what authority he (violently) kicks people out of the temple, and he responds with a question about where John’s (the baptizer) authority came from. Of course they can’t say yes or no, or they’ll either be convicted of ignoring God or of rejecting someone the people have already decided is a prophet, so they take counsel together and decide to say ‘maybe’. I read that and get so mad at them. I hate it when people do that – answer an honest question with whatever will be most to their advantage… He tells them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.” Go Jesus! Get ‘em!

He tells them a parable, essentially about how Israel has rejected the prophets God has been sending them and will reject even God’s son, and the Pharisees are shocked and offended. “Surely not!”

“But he looked directly at them and said,

What then is this that is written:

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone”?

Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken in pieces, and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.

At this point I’m thinking, “Yeah! Preach it!”

“… So they watched him and sent spies, who pretended to be sincere, that they might catch him in something he said, so as to deliver him up to the authority and jurisdiction of the governor. ”

Shoot…

An example of that is given, when they ask him if they should pay taxes to Caesar or not. He asks him whose picture is on the coins. They say Caesar’s. He says, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Nice sidestep. They don’t ask him any more questions.

Now the Sadducees come to him, and Luke makes sure that his readers know they don’t believe in the resurrection. They propose to him a supposed problem for people who do believe in the resurrection. More or less, a woman has seven husbands in this life, one after another, and each one dies. Whose husband will she be in the “next life”, nudge-nudge, wink-wink?

Jesus essentially says, “There’s no marriage in Heaven, and by the way, if there’s no resurrection, how come Moses, in the passage about the bush, calls God ‘the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob’? God is not the God of the dead.”

The Sadducees essentially say, “Touche.” I essentially say, in my head, “GOTCHA!”

Jesus then finishes my reading for today by asking them one more question:

41 But he said to them, “How can they say that the Christ is David’s son?

42 For David himself says in the Book of Psalms, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand,

43 until I make your enemies your footstool.’

44 David thus calls him Lord, so how is he his son?

As a little side-node, notice that Jesus is reasoning with them out of the Scriptures. Reasoning, and especially being able to reason from the Scriptures is important, and biblical.

OK. My point, which I don’t have time to dance around, is that I’m ragging on the opponents of Jesus for things I do, and these stories are in the Bible for my (our) instruction, not merely so we can get a thrill out of divine butt-kicking.

1. I muddle the issue sometimes in an argument so I won’t have to be wrong. Do you?
2. I read the biblical pronouncements of judgement and get excited that the guy who just made fun of me for being a Christian is going to get toasted, without spending any thought on how my own sin should get me toasted. How forgetful. Apart from the grace of God, I would definitely have been among the throng taunting Jesus on his way to the cross.
3. I don’t have my own spies, but I do try to trip my opponents up in their speech so I don’t have to go to the hard work of really, lovingly, gently convincing them. It’s so much easier to just make them feel stupid and move on.
4. I intellectualize the gospel, intellectualize the reality of sin, intellectualize the understanding and conveyance of doctrine. Not to say that we ought not to think hard about these things. It’s essential that we do. But frequently, it’s all just one big game, and I hope I win today. Forget truth, I just want to be right.

I’m out of time. There’s more to this passage I’m leaving out. Praise God for the living Word!