Undersea http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/ en-us Nucleus CMS v3.24 © Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea//nucleus/nucleus2.gif Undersea http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/ Unraveling the problem http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=9 This is a good follow-up to my earlier post on the subject. To me, it is patently clear that some kinds of behavior should — I guess karmically — lead to bad consequences. In its mildest form, I think that behavior like mass deception for your private benefit deserves punishment. I wish nothing but harm on the portfolio managers that dupe thousands of people into bad deals. But, perhaps unexpectedly, I would rather take up such topics under the rubric of Science. For the time being, I would like to assume that there are no degrees of misbehavior. There is only...nonconformance.Before, I went on at some length about my own deviant behavior, and I could go on for quite a while longer. I didn't do that to glamorize my bad deeds. I did it to illustrate the thing that chafes against prescribed boundaries. As soon as I was told I was not to do something, as soon as the channel-walls of conformity rose up on all sides, directing me toward an allowable course, it was like dangling a red flag in front of a bull. It was cause enough for me to spend an irrational amount of energy thwarting these confinements merely for the sake of doing it. There was an internal vindication at having done it. There, I could say to myself, I cannot be controlled.

I mentioned reading Mere Christianity, and encountering Mr. Lewis' assertion of a primary and a secondary good. This mainly got me thinking about how disobedience could be a Big Theme.

There is another thread I need to draw into this: from the time I was quite young, I was unhappy with the story of Genesis. Well, not quite. I was unhappy with what adults told me the story meant. What they told me was that it is a story of how bad things happen to you when you disobey. The first humans disobeyed God, and the entire human race is cursed because of it. By the time I was seven or eight, I had begun to doubt this interpretation. By the time I was nine or ten, I stopped listening to what adults were telling me about this story.

They had to be wrong. Logic said so. I didn't know it at the time, but I had formulated a primitive version of the Epicurean problem of evil. I made up my own ideas about it until I finally had it formally explained to me in a university philosophy class. The Problem goes:

Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked.

I added my own extra twist to this proposition — something probably not on the mind of Epicurus, because he was not thinking about Genesis like I was — which is that Genesis asserts this same God created all things, and is therefore the maker of evil as well as the permitter of it.

There are all kinds of ways to try to rationalize out of this problem, but all of them fail. I thought for a while that an alternative cosmology might do the trick, wherein the being responsible for creation is not the same as the being responsible for goodness. Or some schizophrenic fractional personality within a whole, although this amounts to exactly the same thing. This fails too, though, because you still end up dealing with someone at the root of the universe who intentionally made part of it evil. No, the only way to grapple with this problem is to make it not a problem.

The clearest, simplest path to "not a problem" is to write off the entire thing as hogwash. I mean, what is the point in persistently believing in something that defies basic reasoning? So that's what I did. After a while, though, I went back and pulled it out of the hogwash bin. What made me was to do that was my growing awareness of mythic stories from other cultures and eras.

I began to learn a great deal about the Greek gods. The titans created the gods, one of whom is Zeus, who rebels against his creators. Prometheus rebels against Zeus by giving fire to humans. Zeus gives to Pandora a box and tells her "Don't open this," which she promptly does. That last one really made me blink. It sounds an awful lot like the story of Eve. In fact, I started seeing parallel symbols all over the place. Why did all these ancient storytellers, from all over the world, feel like it was important to talk about characters who defied the orders they were given?

Ah, yes. The secondary good. The gooder good.

There was, as it turned out, another way to make the problem of evil not a problem. Maybe the story wasn't wrong. Maybe the interpretation was wrong. Maybe the idea that God made evil, or that God permits evil, isn't a big deal. Maybe it's the best deal.
]]> Disobedience http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=9 Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:27:23 -0500 But is it Bad? http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=5
At the other end of this line, and taking up a range of space, there exists deliberate and premeditated violations of human dignity and those things we consider inalienable rights ... whether protected by law or understood by most thinking people to be proper and good. This would include such things as stealing from your next door neighbor, lying under oath, and bringing guns to high school with you. Our value systems may judge some of these violations to be worse than others. But what they all have in common is the harm and suffering they bring to those who are violated.

Then somewhere in the middle of this spectrum lies a host of actions that are not quite benign, but neither are they things we enforce all that intensely. This includes many of our expectations, social conventions, "acceptable" appearances, and all manner of preferences expressed by people in charge of things. Disobedience here generally comes under the heading of "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission."

So what all of this tells me is that disobedience in and of itself is not intrinsically good or evil. There's something else involved that tells us how to judge the act. At times, disobedience becomes an element we take into consideration along with other data to make our evaluation of a situation. Breaking a fancy knickknack could evoke quite different responses depending on whether it was brushed by accident, or we picked it up because we were told not to, or we were using it for a paperweight and things happened that we did not intend. If that is the case, then not only is the impact or end result of an action taken into consideration, but also the intent or internal process of the actor. In fact, hiding intent is often reason enough for us to lie about our actions. If I can get you to believe that I didn't know the rules, or didn't mean to do whatever it is that you are upset about, then you will be less prone to vengeance, disciplinary steps, or whatever. Why? Because you judge the act to be less of a violation.

But there is yet another piece to all this. What about those things we would do if we could? When we have recovered from the idiot driver who nearly ran us off the road, what sort of things do we wish we could do, if we only had a batmobile or some other means at our disposal for cleaning up the gene pool? Are there such things as "evil" intentions, whether or not they are carried out? My personal bias is to agree with Dallas Willard, who says that a thief is not just someone who steals something, but also someone who would steal a thing if he could. That's precisely what Jesus was referring to when he said that someone who fantasizes about a woman (my paraphrase) has already committed adultery with her "in his heart." Because what we consent to doing tells us at least as much about our character as what we actually do. A person who would consent to evil may well comply with what is right to do, but that does not mean there is no room for redemption. Consenting to what is wrong is evil in and of itself. Committing the evil only compounds the problem, it does not create it.]]> Disobedience http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=5 Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:37:47 -0600 Will to Life http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=6
Astronomers Mark Swain and Gautam Vasisht of Caltech in Pasadena, US, and Giovanna Tinetti of University College London, UK, used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the giant planet HD 189733b, which is slightly more massive than Jupiter and lies 63 light years from Earth. The observations confirm an earlier tentative detection of water vapour and reveal the presence of methane gas.

Source: Newscientist.com

I tend to be against the Drake equation, or any other equation regarding the probability of alien life. Instead, perhaps going against reason, I subscribe to the notion more-or-less put forward by Stephen Baxter, that life is, in fact, everywhere. My evidence for this opinion, such that it is, derives from the sulfide-eating communities surrounding hydrothermal vents in the deep Pacific, as well as other extremophile entities. Life has a will. On an essential philosophical level, I tend to think the Universe has a will to Life, if that makes any sense. More from a theoretical physics standpoint, of all the universes that could be, those that have 3+1 dimensions are the most conducive to life, and of those, there will be some that are more or less conducive. Given what seems the excessive adaptability of life on Earth, I feel confident in positing that given any kind of foothold at all, life will persist, i.e., our Universe is on the side of conducive for life. It appears that in our Universe, you can throw just about any vaguely life-like arrangement of atoms together and they will find a way to arrange themselves and start replicating. DNA molecules seem to seek each other out in a petri dish, for crying out loud.

A will to life, I say.

P.S. Granted, Newscientist is not the most reputable of publications in the scientific community. But here I think they made a fair report.

Ed: Now, me, I say I look forward to the day when we observe with a robot submersible a hydrothermal colony on Europa, or some strange cryo-thriving coral in the Kuiper belt.

P.P.S. Yes I know the Drake equation is about intelligent life. But when (not if) we find conclusive evidence of life outside our Earth, I believe we will be forever spurred on by the wonder of that.
]]> Science http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=6 Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:37:00 -0600 Two Kinds of Good http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=4 Mere Christianity on several occasions and never completed it (I hate admitting that), I never had the benefit of Lewis' wisdom on this topic. However, several of my friends and I came up with a corollary some years ago, and over time those thoughts have evolved into a similar view -- that there are two kinds of good. During the last half of the 80's I was heavily involved in a very intense support group where people brought all the messiness of their lives and talked about their pain and searched for new ways of living. For many of us this process was life-changing, and we went on to form small closed groups outside of the formal setting where we explored things beyond the scope of the original group. One of the things we did there in our extra group was to commit to working through conflicts with each other, something that was nearly impossible to support in the larger group where people often quit if anything went wrong. After working through a few hard disagreements, we discovered something about the ground rules we were using to shape the group process.

Nearly all support groups (e.g. AA, etc) have a set of guidelines that limit how people are allowed to interact, with the express goal of making it "safe" to share your deepest emotions about something without fear of someone telling you how to fix your problems or provide other similar disrespectful help. Generally speaking, these rules are helpful, primarily because you are usually unable to pre-screen who comes into the room or have the time and energy to repair ruptures when they occur. Facilitators are really not up to it, and the other people in the room would rather not spend their time listening to someone else's fight.

But when you get to choose who your confidants will be, and when all of you agree that pushing the envelop a bit will help you learn and grow, new possibilities emerge --- if you are willing to do the hard work of reconciliation when things go awry (and they will). And what became clear to us over time was that there were two kinds of "safety" in the context of these relationships. There is a kind of safety that is achieved by setting up lots of prohibitions and limitations on personal interaction so that no one can get hurt and conflicts rarely arise. But there is another kind of safety that says, "No matter what goes wrong between us, we will stay here and work at it until we find a way to continue this relationship." Not surprisingly, this turns out to be a far richer form of relating, and a far superior kind of safety. Because given enough time and a strong enough connection, friction will occur. And only those who have dismissed the myth of pain-free relationships and committed to do what they can to make things work (even when its really hard) have the kind of foundation they need to deepen their connection. (In retrospect this seems like it should have been obvious -- the same thing is needed in a marriage. But we had just assumed for too long that the ground rules provided the best possible setting).

From there it's not such a big step to see that there are two kinds of good. There is good that comes from controlling everything around us so that relatively little can go wrong, evil is prevented, and we reduce the possibility of getting hurt. But perhaps there is something better. What if there is a way to either: (a) recover from whatever goes wrong; (b) restore what has been damaged; or (c) learn to suffer well, so that evil does not have the last word. What if good can actually overcome evil? This is far better on at least two counts. First, in the world we currently live in, total protection is not possible. Second, a worldview based on prevention is bound to be fear based, whereas one that anticipates redemption is rooted in true strength and trust. This kind of good brings hope, because it is actually stronger than evil!

Such a perception of good may also turn out to be the best response to the "problem of evil" that philosophers and theologians have wrestled with for centuries. God might well have prevented evil altogether, and created a universe that had no spiritual darkness at all. But he chose instead to express a far greater goodness that is able to restore what has been overrun by evil. We may prefer the pain-free version. But perhaps pain-avoidance isn't the best goal. And perhaps "good" and "evil" are defined by more than the extent of suffering we endure.]]> Good and Evil http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=4 Sat, 9 Feb 2008 12:07:45 -0600 Unauthorized access http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=3 "I aim to misbehave."
- Capt. Malcolm Reynolds

Disobedience is one of my favorite topics, and has been ever since I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, which was about 16 years ago. At that point in my life I was, if I do say so myself, an Internet pioneer. Not in the sense that I was inventing anything great, but rather that I was on the Internet. I believe it was 1991. I remember making a phone call to CompuServ and asking them if they could provide me with an Internet connection, and the poor customer service representative tried her best to pretend she knew what I was talking about. Of course she didn't. Hardly anyone did, back then. But I had a need to be on, the same way people feel the need now when their net connection goes down. You can't bear the disconnectedness.So I did what was expected of me: I hacked my way on. Alright, that deserves at least a bit of explanation. I had been online for some years before 1991. A friend introduced me to the net-connected dumb terminals at the local university in late 1987, and we snuck in and played MUDs whenever we could. We also thrilled ourselves with connecting to FTP addresses that ended in .com or .gov. These were the zaibatsus and secret government sites we had read about in our dystopian sci-fi novels, and we believed ourselved deck cowboys who slipped past all the traditional barriers. I should point out that .com addresses in those days were as rare as hen's teeth. You never saw them. Everything was .edu then. The other thing that was rare in those days was cycles. As in processor. Also bandwidth was at a premium. Keep in mind that a typical desktop was running at 4.7 MHz. All this meant that computing had a cost that was still calculated in the late 80s, and although that cost was not nearly as high as it had been in previous decades, it was still counted.

This accounting of computer resources led to our group of miscreants getting in trouble. It turned out that the university administrators did not look kindly on some kids "using up cycles" and "causing the bridge to crash" (which we did sometimes). They didn't like paying students using these things up, and few of us were paying students - some were from other universities; some, like me and a few others, were still in high school. At first we would stride into the computer labs confidently, as if we belonged there. We would simply guess passwords, which were astonishingly often the word "password," or watch anyone who logged in, because they inevitably had their username and password written in full view on a piece of paper next to the computer.

The admins began a campaign of kicking us off when they saw a telnet session. In response we copied the telnet binary, renamed it "less myreport.txt", and ran it like that. The admins started finding our secret binaries and removing them, and blacklisting the accounts we used to get in. This kind of cat-and-mouse continued until I made a special floppy disk that, when inserted, would automatically bypass all log-in procedures and launch a telnet session off the floppy, undetectably. (Ashamedly, this last was an MS-DOS hack. There were some DOS machines in the lab, and we exploited them mercilessly.)

Now from my point of view none of this is all that interesting, except for the next bit: over the next months I began to see real students sticking a floppy into the computers and launching telnet sessions. The "hack" (I use that term weakly) I had created had spread. When I asked about it, someone told me that the admins had banned the playing of MUDs, and everyone had begun using this "special disk" to MUD anyway. No one knew who had made it, and I didn't try to claim credit, yet I was deeply gratified. I was technically being a jerk to the admins, and could by today's standards be classified as a criminal. What was I happy about?

Fasforward to 1991. This was the heyday of BBS culture. We all had modems, and we used them for evil purposes. Denied legitimate access to the Internet, I dialed in to the local university's "staging" program - a kind of terminal server. What you were supposed to do with this program is tell it which university resource you wanted to connect to. But what you could also do is point it at pretty much anything else, given the right commands, and it would obediently connect. I guess they were hoping no one would know the right commands, or something. In time, the admins of this system let me know I was unappreciated, and I proceeded to defy them as I had defied their predecessors.

And so I found myself in Minnesota in 1991, disobediently slipping through the cracks onto the Internet so that I could have a debate against someone named Geoff in Rhode Island about whether God exists. Under such circumstances I read these lines from Mere Christianity: "A man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it." By Human Nature, he meant an innate knowledge of what was right and what was wrong. This created in me a kind of cognitive dissonance. You see, I had been using C.S. Lewis's logic as fuel in my argument, but in the very process of doing so I was violating what I knew Mr. Lewis was advocating - following the Law of Human Nature. Even so, I still continued to feel justified in my electronic intrusions.

Then, in a later part of the same book, Mr. Lewis advanced a theory that I had never before encountered, and which, perhaps for very obvious reasons, I latched onto. The idea was that of a primary and a secondary good. The primary good was doing what you knew was right. The secondary good was going against this "law," repenting, and ultimately doing what you knew was right in the end. What is more, he suggested that the secondary good was somehow "more good" than the primary good. I had no idea what he meant by that at the time, but I found this philosophy to be incredibly profound.]]> Disobedience http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=3 Thu, 7 Feb 2008 19:21:50 -0600 The movie will begin in five moments http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=2 this, and let it run its course (which against all odds it does not yet seem to have run), I have had the honor to receive a bona fide flood of email. The ostensible subject of these emails was a triad of films, but underneath, much to my profound joy, I discovered a deep sea of poignant, extraordinarily well-put philosophical questions. What is evil, anyway? What is the point of doing something that you've been told to do? How far can reasoning take you to knowing about God? How can you know anything at all? What about suffering?Some of these questions I had begun to raise during the writing of the Reloaded essay. Well - maybe that's not quite right. I had begun to raise these questions a lot earlier than that, but the essay crystallized a lot of it out of me. And when the emails started pouring in, so many people asking exactly the same questions, and so many expressing their agreement with the answers I had suggested, it fueled my interest in these questions even more. I made up my mind to put together new essays that addressed these philosophical topics directly.

I quite seriously started three different essays. But, as happens with writing projects, I became bogged down by my lack of clarity about the topics. Everything was so meshed together in my head that I had a hard time teasing the ideas apart into discrete essays. Within each essay I kept having to reference the other two, so I'd decide the structure of all three documents needed to change. On and on, round and round. Ultimately I just got frustrated and put it all aside.

And there the ideas sat, unexplored; questions unanswered and unconsidered. Keep in mind, now, that when I wrote the first essay, there was hardly such a thing as "blogging." A few people had barely started plinking down some lines of code, with an intention to someday make it easy to post up your ideas online. It certainly wasn't easy then. Honestly, it isn't that easy now - at least, not from the setting-it-up point of view. Easy-er, yes. More importantly, along with it getting easier (-er), the tools gravitated toward a serial model. Syndication, as the kids say. No more need for thinking like a book publisher, that's the prize.

I felt like here, at last, was the key to unlocking what I had been wanting to write about. I'll just bang out the philosophical equivalent of a letter to the editor once in a while! The sad truth is that in my case I do so much in-process editing that even a short missive takes me ages to complete, but I'm hoping the ability to work through these topics a lunch hour at a time will let me get through them.

Here's to hoping it works!]]> Notes http://blogs.wylfing.net/undersea/index.php?itemid=2 Sat, 2 Feb 2008 21:12:37 -0600