Undersea http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/ en-us Nucleus CMS v3.51 © Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea//nucleus/nucleus2.gif Undersea http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/ Moving sale http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=40 another location. I probably will not be updating Undersea anymore. It was a fun experiment, but its day is over.

In time I will probably migrate anything interesting (read: non-ranting) over to the new blog. Then, ultimately, I will shut this one down.]]> Notes http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=40 Mon, 11 Jul 2011 14:43:37 -0500 Bona Fide Matrix Discussion http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=39 linky. I don't agree with some points being made, such as the Merovingian being the First One. The Architect's lines in the control room don't support that position. A kind of predecessor, to be sure, but not really part of the Neo lineage. I think a tenable assertion is that the Merovingian was the basis of the Neo Code, i.e., that things about the Merovingian were transferred into the Third Matrix to be the foundation of how Neo interacts with it. That I can buy.

Anyway, I'm surprised that I am still linked from the Wikipedia article on Revolutions. I thought I'd have got totally bumped off in favor of professional movie reviewers by now.

And no, I didn't post in that topic. I threw some upvotes around, but that's it.]]> Notes http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=39 Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:45:57 -0500 Warjacks and Dollhouses http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=38
I never stopped being puzzled by the hysteria. I think I might have it figured out now, though.

Before I advance that thesis I want to round out the playing field a bit. There is a set of people who dedicate themselves to the making of exquisite dollhouses. That is their hobby. In addition, there is a set of people who collect and paint miniatures. You know, like Andy in The 40 Year Old Virgin. I have dabbled in the miniatures arena myself, agonizing over the blends and highlights of a Space Marine Librarian. What I want to focus on is that all the while that these miniatures are converted and painted, and all the while a dollhouse is being fashioned and lavishly decorated, we're constructing simulations in our heads. Imagination races with the exploits of the Cygnar Charger under the brush. The tiny napkins in the breakfast nook inspire fantasies of mid-morning coffee with the neighbors. There's a whole make-believe universe for which the dollhouse or the warjack is a prop.

So it's not just role-playing games. More generally, I would label it as simulation-spacing. This is what kids do when they play, although they usually involve themselves much more actively in their simulations than adults do. I am always amazed at how detailed the simulations are that my kids invent. But it doesn't stop at childhood; it's something we do all the time, and it's a very enjoyable activity. We run simulations. Reading a novel is creating a simulation space. Watching a movie is creating a simulation space. (In the craft of fiction it's common to talk about "suspension of disbelief." This is equivalent to saying "Don't break the simulation.")

These days I am not much of a consumer of religious or para-religious texts. From time to time, however, a friend, acquaintance, or relative will give me something to read. I usually read it out of respect, and because the principle behind book-lending is that the person wants to share an idea or an experience they value with me, and I appreciate that. Anyway, while reading one of these books recently I encountered a concept that I had nearly forgotten. Apparently there are people who think imagination is dangerous. Now what they mean by imagination is really creating simulation spaces. I admit I dimly remembered this sort of attitude from my early years, when I would regularly get the family smackdown for wanting to read and write stories. You can guess their horror-slash-derision when I went to college to study literature, which was just about as useless a pursuit as they could imagine. And you know who else reads books? Communists. That's right. Keep reading books and you'll be lured into evil commie godlessness.

Set aside the fact that I did, in fact, turn out to be an evil godless commie. As I read this book, I was struck by remembering that there is a bunch of people who think this way, and they are all fanatically religious as far as I can tell. That is usually the grounds for objecting to simulation-spacing, at any rate. They see creating simulation spaces as a direct threat to one's religious standing. The author took it as a foregone conclusion that this was true. Why would that be?

Well maybe the answer is simple. Maybe it's because religion itself is a simulation-spacing game. The more I thought about this, the more sense this made. It's nothing more than competition for brain cycles. Taken with the Dawkins-like hypothesis that religion is a viral meme, this really has legs. When you run non-religious simulations, you're crowding out the religious ones.

As I pointed out in the previous post, we are evolved primarily to run simulations. That is what we do. That's why we like games. Now in particular, role-playing games are games that have rules specifically for building simulation spaces, like blueprints for how to run a whole bunch of ongoing simulations. From the point of view of someone who invests their simulation with eternal consequences, you can start to see why they would view Dungeons & Dragons as threatening. It's still an awful reaction, but at least I can see how they got there.

What to me is more important is this classification of religion as a game. If our brains evolved to excel at running simulations, this helps explain why religious simulations exist and spread. And, honestly, what is more important than that is to know that gaming is fundamental to our nature. So pass the D20 and roll for initiative.]]> Belief http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=38 Wed, 23 Feb 2011 11:06:18 -0600 Europa Off the Jersey Shore http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=37 free iTunes link) that I have been playing with lately. This is the kind of thing that I can get really worked up about. As of this writing it reports 526 exoplanets. The three-dee galaxy has me practically bouncing around like a kid.And there's new news about the mission to Jupiter's moons (linky), which only emphasizes that in addition to the dozens of potential Earth-twin planets that have been found - those roughly Earth-sized and in the habitable zone - there are potentially thousands of moons around the Jupiter-sized worlds we've already catalogued. It seems reasonable to guess that we will get our first look at extraterrestrial life in the immediate future. The first time ever in the history of...everything, as far as we know. The momentousness of that discovery is almost paralyzing.

Yet no one that I show the Exoplanet App to has any interest. Did you hear about Charlie Sheen? He's back in detox, you know. And those skanks on Jerseylicious? Don't get me started.

Now I'm not growling about how "people" just aren't elite enough to appreciate my geeky science interests. Not at all. It is, on the contrary, quite fascinating. (You have to imagine me saying that while lifting one eyebrow in Spock fashion.) It demonstrates how overwhelmingly powerful our social mind is and what our social mind prefers to focus on.

By "social mind" I mean the part of our mental engine responsible for interpreting and responding to human social stimuli. If there was a cartoon bubble above my head showing a human head enlarged in proportion to all the social processing we do, it would be a grotesque sight. A tiny, feeble body topped by a stupendous melon. Sure, there are other social creatures on the planet, but we homo sapiens take the cake for social sophistication. We devote vast amounts of time (which is opportunity cost) and calories (which is also opportunity cost) to running social simulations in our heads. To be entirely clear, these are scenarios that aren't really happening, and may not have any possibility of happening, potentially involving collections of people that are unlikely to be collectively engaged, and perhaps over a subject that hardly warrants so much attention. We'll fuss and fuss over whether Joe thinks Mary doesn't trust Mathilda any more.

But what is most utterly astounding is that we'll do this even if we don't know Joe or Mary or Mathilda. We'll even do it if all three of them are fictional characters.

The chances of spending real-world resources on imaginary social statuses goes way, way up if the details are gossip-worthy. Anthropologists call this strategic information: the stuff that, if known, modifies the social fabric. Joe filling his Volkswagon at the station doesn't interest anyone. Mathilda getting caught stealing money from her workplace - now that is worth gossiping about! How about if she's stealing because she has a gambling addiction? Maybe her forlorn daughter has taken to hiding her shame under tattoos, cigarettes, and bad company. What a bad mother. Oh, we'll talk about this all day!

I don't have a particular point to make here, at least not yet. I only want to establish that our love of strategic gossip outshines everything else, no matter how objectively grand or amazing. There are a few subjects I'll attempt in follow-up posts that use this as a foundation, with one in particular eating up my mental attention: gaming.
]]> Science http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=37 Sun, 6 Feb 2011 08:16:29 -0600 Chasm Crosser http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=36
It's not much of a choice, is it? Think about it honestly. 

Now suppose that the monk claims his prayers are always answered. I don't know about you, but I would still cross on the engineer's bridge. ]]> Science http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=36 Tue, 1 Feb 2011 10:36:40 -0600 Hammurabi's Muse http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=35 basically sound but mistaken to some degree. Whereas the nonreligious person is completely, dangerously off the moral map.I have already expounded on this subject a fair bit in other posts. Essentially, there is every reason to expect social animals to have social rules. It just makes sense - without a social contract, you don't have a society. Human beings are social animals, and so of course we have a social contract. What religious people claim is that the social contract is the product of and dependent upon a divine contract - i.e., the relationship between humans and one or more supernatural agents. Knock out the divine contract and whoops! you've got no social contract either. That means an unbeliever would rightly be viewed as, well, not quite human, capable of who knows what atrocities.

That does all hang together relatively well, and I completely understand the reaction. But what I want to ask is: Does it make sense to assume the social contract is predicated on a divine one? I submit that it dies not, for the following reasons.

  • The interpretation of divine moral instruction changes over time. If this really was a supernatural constant, there wouldn't be any observable variation. In the very recent past, it was widely thought morally right to beat wives and children, and religious texts were interpreted to support this practice. Hardly anyone believes that today, although the religious texts haven't changed. This divergence should be impossible if the divine contract hypothesis was correct.

  • A corollary to changing interpretation is the experimental evidence that shows people revise God's opinions to match their own. So when the social contract changes to say, "Do not beat your wives and children" everyone revises their idea of what God commands. That is, the observable evidence is that the divine contract follows the social contract, not the other way around as the believers assert.

  • Having a divine contract as the basis of morality means that all morality is reduced to fear of divine reprisal. You might want to claim that it is a carrot system and not a stick system, but my reply is that denial of a reward is just another way of punishing. And this is a wholly unworkable basis for morality.

The social contract entails things like trust attestation, which means that I perform actions to establish that you can trust that I will act fairly. I help friends in need, I share nicely, and I protect those who cannot protect themselves. Pretty much any society on the planet considers these to be good actions. Morally right. And certainly you feel better about trusting someone in the future who displays these characteristics regularly. Furthermore, you will have your antennae out trying to ascertain whether these trust attestations are faked, because fake demonstrations of trustability are useless: they don't establish trust.

So when the only reason I'm behaving in a trustworthy fashion is so that God doesn't punish me, my actions are, in fact, faked. Useless! I am correctly labeled as "not yet trustworthy," with no way of improving my status (but many ways of making it worse). To go one further, suppose this is the norm for all people. Society would be impossible.

I must apologize for bringing to bear that kind of imperitivism, though. I forget if there is any real connection, but I feel like Kant echoes Anselm in many ways, partly because both of them were such bullies with their ideas, and I am kind of doing that here too. Obviously human society does not operate under an uncompromising slippery-slopism, where I tell one lie, and then everyone starts lying, and all the way down to nuclear holocaust. So I don't mean to suggest that fake expressions of trustworthiness don't happen - they do - and I won't even dare suggest that these fakes as far as we observe them corrode society. They probably do, but I don't know that. There could be some unknown benefit for a minority of people to fake things like this. I mean only that if all trust attestations were necessarily faked then cooperative society would be impossible.

A believer might still try to salvage this by admitting all attestations between people are faked, and only done to avoid being punished by God, but this is still an acceptable way to run society if we all have a shared understanding of being watched all the time by the same God. The unfakeable trust is our shared dread of assured justice; the trust between society and its God is authentic.

To answer that, I want to look at the concrete example of real people who commit real crimes. I don't purport to know why people commit crimes, but we know that they do. We also know that the prison population in the United States is dramatically more inclined to religion than society at large. This a real puzzle. Presumably criminals do some kind of "crime math" and figure the value of the payoff against the risk of getting caught by the police. Yet the risk of getting caught by God is 100%, so why doesn't that deter them from the crime? Now if the police suddenly vanished from the planet, I do not for one moment doubt that the crime rate would rise. We know that implicitly; that's why we sustain a police force in the first place. The deep mystery is why a police force is required at all. Surely religious belief ought to be sufficient, but the fact that we have set up significant structures in our society to handle misbehavior betrays our conviction that supernatural forces don't deter anyone from anything.

About the only counterargument I can think of from the religious side is to apply the No True Scotsman fallacy and claim that religious criminals aren't legitimate believers. This is a very weak position to take. I don't know of any evidence to back up such a claim, and there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. The reasonable conclusion, really, is that fear of divine reprisal does not guide morality.

Having therefore shown that a divine contract does not govern the social contract, we have to ask what role it plays in controlling morality, and the answer to that is: None. Since the supernatural plays no part here, we then must ask whether there is any difference between a moral code in which a divine entity plays no part and a moral code in the absence of divine entities. The answer again is: None.]]> Good and Evil http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=35 Sun, 23 Jan 2011 09:58:33 -0600 The Crone's Illusion http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=34
I have a mighty respect for Roger Ebert, who has a keen critical mind, but when he calls Agora "a drama based on the ancient war between science and superstition" I must wonder whether he is being intentionally understated. That's kind of like saying World War II was based on the habit of nations to disagree about borders. It's true but is about as bland as you can get. I think I would prefer to say that Agora is the parable of the dark stepmother of religious belief.Religion is not an efficient schema. It doesn't tell us anything useful about how the world works. It doesn't help us survive. In fact the tremendous expenditure of effort on religious projects is a detriment to survival. It's the peacock's tail of the consensual hallucination that is human society. But it obviously does something, although what in particular is currently under debate. I have a two-part hypothesis, actually. The first part is that we didn't evolve for the kind of life we now live. Millions of years of adaptation to the hunter-gatherer model, and ten thousand out of it. The changeover must have been apocalyptic.

We survived, obviously, and prospered. And I think religion had much to do with that. What allows humans to be so very successful in a huge variety of physical environments is our massively advanced social ability. We can pass memes as well as genes. This is a whole other topic, and I won't go too far into it here. The jist is that religion is the Good Mother that allows us to straddle both the life we are biologically bound to (hunter-gatherer) and the life we sociologically compelled toward (agri-urban). That's the second part of my hypothesis, that this Two World Problem is the root of human mythic psychology, the ultimate source of Middle Earth, the story of being human.

Myths tell us what being human is all about. There is another figure in myth, a complement to the Good Mother, and that is the Wicked Stepmother. It's the sick, stunted side of mother energy, luring children into the oven, or poisoning them so that they will remain frozen in time, children forever. The witchy stepmother does some horrifying things to consolidate her maternal authority over her offspring. The witchy stepmother part of religion that I want to focus on is the cost of defection.

In the early part of Agora we are shown debate. There is the debate of the believers and the debate of the skeptics, and the characteristics of each scene are informative. We also ought to immediately comprehend the meaning of the film's title. The "open marketplace" here is the marketplace of ideas.

First we have the believers' debate. It is colored with violence and a shocking lack of empathy, true zealotry, but it is still a debate. They attempt to show evidence and draw a conclusion. The smart observer sees that their evidence is an illusionist's trick, which proves nothing except that audiences can be dazzled by illusionists. In addition, even if walking on coals was not a trick, there is absolutely no logical connection to any particular supernatural force or agency. It's entirely fallacious. Nevertheless, it stands in contrast to what comes later.

Now the debate of the skeptics. Evidence is presented and conclusions advanced. Here there is no threat of reprisal. Their intellectual sparring does not even seem to result in any perceptible change in social status among them. Hypatia is openly challenged, and she freely admits what is beyond the limits of her current knowledge, while at the same time being convinced of nothing. That is, a failure to explain is not itself evidence, and it is not assumed that an alternative supernatural explanation is therefore automatically vindicated (i.e., the mistake in reasoning committed in the believers' debate).

The characteristics here are plurality, openness, debate, challenge, and inquiry. There is a lack of fear at probing the edges of understanding. The unexplored country is a wonder to chart and not a wilderness to avoid. The crowds gathered to hear the priests argue look interested in seeing and weighing multiple choices before coming to a conclusion. Why else would they be there, and why else would the priests make their public demonstrations? The students of Hypatia gather to hear and analyze a variety of claims and ideas. Why else would they attend? The essential thrust of the whole first portion of the movie is to get across this idea of a marketplace of ideas in which people are evaluating and selecting.

Going back to the cost of defection: this is the social, economic, or physical price paid for departure (or simple deviance) from the in-group. Among the skeptics, there isn't an in-group to speak of. The character of Hypatia is the metaphor for all of them. There is no room for the hunter-gatherer games of clique-forming, alpha-male posturing, or mate-claiming. It's pure research, pure knowledge. The only religion is the religion of doubt. If for no reason other than that Hypatia is the protagonist in this story, this is the ideal we are mean to aim for. (As I watched Agora with my wife, she at one point turned to me and said knowingly, "I bet you really like her, don't you." It wasn't a comment on Rachel Weisz. Although she is stunning, it was the on-screen portrayal of the character that had my rapt attention.) This is the freest possible marketplace of ideas. Pristine intellectual capitalism. Each idea stands completely on its own merits. If you want your idea to gain worth, make it a better idea.

In the religious debate, however, we see the beginnings of something else. Punishment comes to those who disagree. The pagan priests gloomily predict the wrath of the gods. Of course, as the Christians point out, their statues remain inert. This is telling. The gods are impotent. It's pretty clear literally, but I think metaphorically this is a big deal. The premise that I introduced is that religion helps us bridge our two inner worlds. In other words, it's a tool. The priests are its vendors. Now the question is: how do you choose among vendors of religion? You go into the marketplace of religious ideas, evaluate them, and pick one, which is exactly what we see the crowds doing at the beginning of the story.

I hesitate to drive this point too strenuously, but let's return to the evidence presented by the various priests. The Christians perform an illusion. They know this. The Christians also know that the pagan priests don't know how to perform the trick, and that it will go badly for them if they are put on the coals. Likewise, the pagan priests know perfectly well that their statues don't ever come to life and do things. Nobody has any real evidence of anything. So the fact of the matter is that as long as a religion fulfills its role as a psychological tool to solve the Two World Problem, there's no particular reason to choose one over another. This is very bad news for religious professionals (i.e., the priests), because it means religious ideas can't actually compete in the marketplace. Not fairly, anyway. The priests of one religion must engage in a duplicitous marketing campaign to gain idea-value over the priests of a competing religion: enter parlor tricks and logical fallacies.

Clever presentation is not enough, though. Acquisition is one thing; retention is quite another. For this the priests must have a cost of defection. It's a little bit persuasive to potential buyers, but its real target is those who have already purchased. Microsoft knows that unless they build up barriers to keep you from leaving, they will have a much harder time retaining your loyalty. From this idea we get things like the punishment of heretics.

The progression of Agora into its second half is the transition to religious monopoly. The Christians gain control of the city. Their first motive is to eliminate competitors from the marketplace of ideas. The library is sacked and the scrolls are burned. The pagan priests are driven off or killed. Jews are murdered. Among the Christians themselves a single sect, the Parabolani, brutally rises to prominence and seeks to silence all competing voices.

The ignorance and cruelty displayed by the Christians isn't supposed to mean that Christians embody these qualities more than other religions - if the pagans had established such total control of Alexandria they would have acted the same way. It's the natural outcome of religious monopoly. Inquiry has to be wrong, because inquiry breeds new, ever-more-competitive ideas. A willful lack of curiosity becomes labeled a virtue. And the cruelty is for fear. It is easily imagined that the terror of violent reprisal makes would-be dissenters pretend alignment with the top dogs. To where does a monopoly grow? It can't, so it turns inward and dwells obsessively on preventing defection. Examples must be made of the terrible punishment that will befall those who stray. The violence of religious fanatics isn't for conversion, it's for prohibiting deconversion.

The wicked, twisted stepmother poisons the daughter to keep her from leaving. The princess is imprisoned in her tower, never to grow up. The Good Mother of religion is also the Dark Mother who commands slavish obedience, thwarts the flower of knowledge, and stones infidels.

The zoom-outs to show a view from space are symbolically excellent. Some commentators have fully missed the boat and suggested this is to indicate how small, petty, and insignificant the events of the film are. Exactly the opposite! The view from space means first that Hypatia is right and the religious fanatics are wrong. We are literally shown the truth, which of course matches what she and her students are discovering. It means second that there are global implications to this story. The prevalence of revelation over investigation, of ignorance over insight, of violence over discussion, means something on a worldwide scale. The implication is entirely modern.]]> Belief http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=34 Sat, 8 Jan 2011 12:04:06 -0600 Escaping the Maze (Part 2) http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=32 "The heroes of all time have gone before us - the labyrinth is thoroughly known." -Joseph Campbell

Welcome nagging both internal and external has kept Inception well in my thoughts these weeks. It's past time that I press on with my study. I'm going to take it as solved from Part 1 that Cobb wakes up at the end, and therefore the film can be taken at face value, and that the film is not some sort of meta-comment on the acts of making and watching films (and might I add what an utterly boring premise for a story that is). Now I intend to focus on the subject of time, or subjective time, either way.I heard it said that Ayn Rand's prose could stop a train. I don't know if that's a real quote or what. (Scratch that. It's definitely a real quote, because someone I know said it. I meant that maybe he was quoting a famous someone else.) But I tell you the truth that Rand has got nothing on Dallas Willard, who never passes up the chance to say with sixty words what could be said eloquently in six. I am almost ashamed to admit having tried Willard at all; I never got past the first quarter of one book before giving up. Anyway, he loves best to abscond regular words and concepts and redefine them in upside-down ways, and not a few people think this is required in order to advance his thesis. I have another opinion. He could have read some Joseph Campbell, who made many of the same points yet didn't need to redo the English language to get there.

The point of this, aside from treating you to a review-within-a-review, is to bring up a concept I like to call the simultaneity of eternity, which is a concept that Campbell dealt with a lot, and which Willard also tries to awkwardly grapple with. Rand I threw in there for the bricky writing. Well simultaneity of eternity is a real mouthful. It's also hard to explain. In Campbell's words, "Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out." What it means is that we have (or can have) a brush-up with the infinite in our everyday experience. A thing or event pulls me out of the normal passage of time and all of a sudden I have an amazing feeling of one-ness. It happens to me regularly when I run: after a few miles I'm right in tune with every two-legged ancestor who chased down an antelope. It's communion, and it steps outside of time. Contemplating most high-end physics gets me there as well, or deep meditation.

Mythologically this is "it" - the me without motive, without compulsion or fear. Everything is suspended for an eternal moment at the top of a parabolic arc. It's hang time. The universe is as it should be, and I can feel myself a part of that. There is total unity. I simply am.

I don't think this is elevated. It's just another view on human experience. It's a mistake to translate eternity as better or higher. In fact, complete abandonment to eternity is a sick state of being, just as much as letting one's instincts run rampant is a sick state of being. The proper course of human life is to vary between these two ways of viewing: the eternal view and the field-of-time view, going out and returning. Neither one is supposed to be a permanent condition.

In Inception, eternity is Limbo. This is where we find one-ness and resurrection. It is home to a central shrine of forbidden knowledge. The exit from Limbo is the taking of Morpheus' red pill, the eating of the red apple, or...the following of Ariadne's red thread. (Observe her red attire, which is sometimes as subtle as a red accessory. Quick parallel: Morpheus describes the red pill as a tracer program, which will help locate Neo's body in realspace.)

Dom and Mal are classical paired creator gods in Limbo. Most religions have a pair of them, husband and wife, Zeus and Hera, Vishnu and Lakshmi, Shu and Tefnut. Male and female energies working together in creative union. This is the subject of the Kama Sutra, and the real basis of this kind of eternity is sexual. Also like many religions, creation in Limbo is an act of dreaming, the way Brahma's dream is the universe.

Because creation and destruction are a self-devouring and self-propelling cycle, the location where creation happens is really a place of rebirth. What is old gives rise to an eternal garden, and the garden is supposed to give way in turn. In this case, "old" means what was brought into Limbo from the waking world. Dom and Mal were full of ideas about the kind of perfect garden they wanted to create. But the garden isn't a home, it's a staging area. Witness the failure of the "home" Mal built in Limbo. Once the garden is made, the natural progress isn't to rest forever after, admiring your own handiwork. No, the natural progression is out. The field of time calls. After a while in eternity, we have to go back to the field of ordinary time. It isn't a pleasant journey. The first noble truth of Buddhism is that all life is suffering. The reason for this is that in the field of time, things pass, and our attachment to things (which includes people, events, emotions, everything) causes us pain when they go. No matter what you do, you cannot keep the present from becoming the past, and this is painful. Sometimes the pain is very great.

So the field of time is also the field of pain. Going from a place of no-time and no-pain into a place defined by pain is an awful passage, and this is why we need to take the red pill. The projections are an illustration of the problem of passage. Our minds are made up of a large number of engines, and most of these engines are not under conscious control. Without signposts or a guide to help us out of Limbo, our own mental engines, such as the one that avoids pain, stymie our escape and keep us prisoner in Limbo. I trust the connections here with Dom and Mal's shared pain are sufficiently obvious. Dom can't let go, and not because he doesn't want to.

I mentioned that resting after creation wasn't natural, and I meant that very intentionally. As Campbell says, the creator is not the chief god of the garden. The serpent rules there. The Oroboros, god of resurrection, encircles the World Tree. The Matrix does this too. It was built by the Architect but is ruled by the Merovingian. And what does the serpent do? He is the inventor god (or perhaps reinventor). He implants new ideas.

The natural order, then, is to turn over the reigns from the creator to the serpent. Dom leaves off being the Architect - a role he never returns to - and becomes the Inceptor, the serpent, the suggester. He gives Mal the idea to break the rules. The journey out, into the field of time, begins.]]> Belief http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=32 Wed, 29 Dec 2010 14:55:48 -0600 Collapsing the Wave Function http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=31
Maybe this is not precisely what Jerry Holkins had in mind when he wrote the Penny Arcade piece for 27 December 2010, but that's how it struck me.

"I quite purposefully obscure my actual beliefs here, unless I think that my actual beliefs will amuse you in some way, in which case I tart up some core pillar of my conscious mind and present it for your ridicule."


I must have read it five or eleven times. I try so hard to generate an imprecise derezzed quantum probability field, in which whatever your beliefs are, you see them reflected back at you. The measurement defining the particle. Yeah, I am pretty scared, and I wasn't even aware of it. As soon as I lock it down it defines a circle, and some people are in, and some people are out. Instantly unlikable, which is terrifying. So instead I opt for delay and continual obfuscation.

Hm.]]> Notes http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=31 Mon, 27 Dec 2010 23:27:13 -0600 Worried Wars over Stolen Relics http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=30 actual knowledge though. I should know better than to sputter loudly my fervent opinion on matters I haven't bothered to research.

It is my privilege to drive my kids to school in the morning. They are going to two different schools at present, and so after delivering the first one I make my way to the other, and on the path is a house with multiple "Keep Christ in Christmas" signs bannered all over the place. Why is one sign insufficient? It's not like you can miss any of them, the way they are displayed. Anyway, I get to thinking about it, every day, the same process of running down why this is a sign of uneducated buffoonery. It illustrates why revelation cannot supplant investigation. Maybe a better way to say this is that as soon as I think I have all the answers, that is the moment I am most apt to do something incredibly dumb.There is an abundance of rhetoric already written about how silly Christians are being when they froth on about the diluting of Christmas. Here is one. The style of that article is not much to my liking, but the points stand. It's not a "Christian" holiday at all. It's the winter solstice, which was celebrated for millenia before the advent of Christianty, Judaism, even monotheism, or - dare I say it? - the very conception of a god. (That's nearly a pun! A crappy one, yes, but come on.) Christianity was introduced to the winter solstice initially as a disguise. "Look, we're only celebrating the solstice like the rest of you." And later they outright absconded with it, stuck strips of masking tape over all the names, and wrote Christmas and Jesus with a Sharpie. The fact is there have been a staggering variety of holy figures who were all, by the most incredible coincidence, born on 25 December.

Do you suppose there were once pleadings to "keep Saturn in Saturnalia"? These bothersome Christians! They are taking a good, solid holiday with a grand tradition and turning it to the worship of their undead doomsday figure. Why don't they choose some other month to celebrate their wierd necromantic religion? I won't have it!

That might seem funny (or offensive), but I suspect there really were such outrages. Now, some centuries later, thieves bellow and wail that their stolen holidy is being stolen from them.

But the thing is, I wonder about this theft. I see no evidence of it. Everyone appears to be participating in Christmas essentially the same way I've always seem them do it. There are sparkly lights, decorated trees, wrapped presents, feasts, and the standard array of tunes on the radio. I can perceive no lessening of the number of times I hear "Silent Night." Speaking of tunes, one of the only holiday changes is the vanishing of the neighborhood carol-singer, although that was an endangered breed even when I was young. But I suspect that has little to do with a wish to censor Christmas, and much to do with the geography of suburban America.

The supposed smackdown on Christmas is...well, it isn't. Unless perhaps the hand-wringers mean something else. There is a strange, backhanded paranoia afoot that concludes by surreal, alien logic that nonparticipation is an attack. When the clerk at the toy store says "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" this is imagined to be a cutting wound. I guess it is if your basic premise is that otherness is wicked simply because it is other. I mean, if something like "Merry Ozzymas" was really catching on, and people everywhere began to substitute words in songs, so that the Little Drummer Boy was rocking an audition for Ozzy Osbourne, and we got "Oz Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," then, you know, it would be the same exact thing that Christianity did to all the holidays that came before it. Such an event, if it were to ever happen, would be to my way of thinking just desserts. Except honestly I can't summon up that level of emotion. I'll call it the inexorable cycle of civilization.

Only nothing of the sort is going on, not right now. There are some people trying to practice inclusivity, so that non-Christians can get swept up in the festivities. It's good economics, really. That is all. No dark design, no anti-Christian motive, no handbasket-shaped vehicle to the netherworld taking us. In the end all that's revealed is that many vocal Christians, in their self-assured righteousness, didn't bother to learn anything about the holiday they purport to defend against threats that they themselves dreamed up. I'd like to quip that these dreams occurred while dozing off in history class, but that's inaccurate. It's more like a sense of corporate worry, which goes hand-in-hand with a willful lack of education on the subject. It's necessary to keep rabidly crowding out potentially competing holiday concepts, because the truth is that, historically, Christmas is not special. It's just one in a series of nearly indistinguishable religious bolt-ons, each ripping off the previous one in an endless progression.

That makes some people very uncomfortable, and their response is to wall themselves off from knowing this with a blockade of yard signs, and, probably, to hope that the rest of us wall ourselves off from knowledge as well. I don't think I'll participate in that, yet my enjoyment of and engagement in Christmastime isn't diminished at all. Not being miraculously special doesn't mean Christmas has no value. It means it's part of a family.]]> Belief http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=30 Thu, 2 Dec 2010 13:35:55 -0600