Posted by Daniel Lyons
Fri, 09 Nov 2007 10:10:00 GMT
Whorf introduces a concept he calls cryptotypes in talking about
language. I don’t remember his exact examples, except that it has to
do with when you can use “up” to strengthen a verb. You can stir it up
but not swing it up or pour it up, etc. You can break it up or smack
it up but you can’t explode it up. What’s the rule? It’s a big hairy
complicated cryptotype.
I noticed a good one the other day. The official rules of a four way
stop have to do with when you arrive and taking turns clockwise. As
Jim Loy points out, in
reality, it’s a big cryptotype. There is this supposition that if the
oncoming driver is moving, you can go too. That doesn’t come from the
law (it seems to come from common sense). Turning left is complex,
because you have to enter the lane with your blinker on or you’ll fuck
everything up, but you have almost no room at many 4-way stops. If
you’re turning right, you have to stop and make sure you’re not going
to hit anyone, but often, you can stop and then keep going. This is
all messy and intimidating to the new driver, who is trying to adhere
to the law but instead confusing and screwing everything up for other
drivers.
A religious cryptotype I’ve been thinking about recently is the “G-d
will reveal everything to us in Heaven” motif. Where did that come
from? It’s a Jewish principle that anything which doesn’t affect
halacha not be settled in Talmud, so to some extent I’m welcome to
believe whatever I want, but where did this idea come from? I don’t
see any precedent for it in Torah. Maybe it’s there but it must be
fairly vague. None of the afterlife teachings are very firm in
Judaism. But I’m also unaware of a Christian source for this
belief. Yet most of my Christian friends take it for granted (as I do)
that G-d will show us his cards in the hereafter.
It’s important for philosophers like myself to believe that G-d wants
believers to be thinkers. As I said
before,
by voluntarily restricting his actions to those that can be reasoned
about effectively, G-d is giving us the gift of reason. G-d certainly
doesn’t need either to restrict his omnipotence or to use abstraction
to help deal with the magnitude of the universe as we do. Would G-d
would give us such a gift, especially with a corresponding hunger
which can never be sated? I don’t have the answer.
Tags philosophy, religion | 1 comment
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Tue, 11 Sep 2007 05:38:00 GMT
One thing Michael and I often discuss theologically is G-d’s perspective of the world. I have a particular thought about His reasoning which seems unusually lucid right now, so I thought I’d put it down here.
Reason is accepted as a gift of G-d to man in the Catholic and I believe also my own Rabbinic traditions. That we live in a rational universe whose laws can be determined scientifically and which can, to some extent, be understood is also an important given. But does G-d reason as we do?
If we accept that G-d exists outside time then perhaps causality still exists, but without time to give it duration, the effect of reasoning would be instantaneous. Understanding reason as a gift to man, I do not see any reason to assume that G-d also employs reasoning the same way. Indeed, isn’t reasoning mainly the creation of useful abstractions that enable our feeble minds to make observations in general? Without time, but with causality, wouldn’t these derived relationships appear instantaneously to G-d? If G-d can perceive these relationships instantaneously and G-d’s omniscient mind can contain all of everything, then He hardly is in need of abstractions: He understands, instantly, everything. Logic would therefore seem to be a needless crutch to G-d, about as useful as a blind person’s cane to a man who can see.
And in that light, it seems that G-d would have no need to deal with us categorically. In fact He would by necessity deal with us individually, since there would be nothing to be gained by dealing with us categorically. He has no shortage of time or mental effort, and wastes none in performing the steps of a logical derivation.
All of which brings us back to the notion of a personal G-d, elemental to both Judaism and Christianity. It’s the only kind of G-d there could be. Why would a creator of the universe, outside of time and with no limit on “processing power” opt to be distant or deal with humanity in general instead?
This line of reasoning also helps explain why firm ethical rules are handed down to us to be implemented in practice, but which G-d bends in the biblical narrative. Reason is our tool to approach G-d, not G-d’s limitation to us.
Tags philosophy, religion | 2 comments
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Tue, 05 Dec 2006 05:30:49 GMT
Yahoo! Jewish Chat 4.
Bizarre.
Tags religion | no comments
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Sun, 26 Nov 2006 07:59:24 GMT
This last week I got some interesting bad news about my eyes: apparently my pupils over-dilate in darkness or semi-darkness. I have my first old-man disorder at the ripe old age of 25. On long drives at night I will have to turn the dome light on to prevent my eyes from perceiving every light source as a giant luminous splotch with an echo above or below it. This is also why I needed new glasses recently, but why I didn’t notice until I left my job and started working nights. There is no cure for this problem except time; as I age my pupil dilation should get less responsive, which will counteract this problem.
I just finished reading Demian by Hesse. A great book, except for all the cult stuff near the end. There are a number of passages that I really identified with, but the strongest was this:
“Sometimes when I ran through the streets in the evening, unable to return before midnight because I was so restless, I felt that now at this very moment I would have to meet my beloved—as she walked past me at the next street corner, called to me from the nearest window. At other times all of this seemed unbearably painful…”
I was very annoyed that I could identify so thoroughly with a character who goes on to basically endorse Anton LaVey satanism. Tsk-tsk.
I was thinking today about programming in Erlang and how much I enjoy it, but at the same time, though I enjoy my big functional languages, not one of them has a decent Mac library; most of them don’t even have decent Unix GUI libraries or web frameworks. Erlang at least has a promising-sounding web framework but I am tired of web programming for the moment. It’s so very occupational.
I became annoyed thinking about OCaml and how much I had liked it. OCaml is basically the marijuana of functional languages—you start there, and then you get into the heavy stuff like Lisp, Haskell and Erlang. Or else you remain trapped with OCaml, perhaps consuming liters of the Russian vodka of languages—C++—at the same time. “Well, it could be worse.” Yes.
I am disappointed that nobody has anything to say about my quicksort post. I suspect that one is for the ages, and in a couple years, someone will be quite glad it’s there. Nobody pointed out that I am doubling the constant factor in my partition, or that I should use median-of-three for better performance against pre-sorted lists. I expected Lance to show up and demand some merge sorts, which I haven’t coded since my second year of CS.
For myself in response to the Brick Science article, I wrote a small linked list library in C. It turned out to be about 55 lines of code, and it took me about 15 minutes to write, which reassured me after reading that the author expects 155 lines/hour. I would not expect anyone to achieve that in a reasonable language, but with C you can really fluff things up with meaningless brackets and wasted type declarations. Even Lisp, which is the most text-liberal functional language, is a factor of two or three improvement over C. I remember days at Clearwired where I was productively producing about 10 or 20 lines of Python an hour. Of course, HTML is a bit cheaper.
I have become a real dick about movies. Elitism is the opiate of the Dan, but I have tried to be conservative about which things I am an elitist about: heavy metal, programming languages and religion being the primary fields, but also somewhat about politics. I have more-or-less ejected politics as a synonym for theft, graft, stupidity, and waste, no matter the incarnation, so into the open slot I have tossed movies. My brother hasn’t helped, we have been alternating classics I have loved for some time with known-good classics of his interest, and both learning a lot. Plus now we have a lot of pretentious hatred for new movies. It’s a perfect fit with the rest of our hatred set (music and television).
I am now going to attempt to read another classic book, since I usually read about four non-programming books a year and Demian is number one for 2006.
Tags c, demian, erlang, eyes, functional, haskell, hesse, life, lisp, movies, music, ocaml, politics, programming, religion | 2 comments
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Thu, 21 Sep 2006 04:07:25 GMT
A friend of mine had this to say about Islam: “The religion of peace has spent its capital. People aren’t buying it anymore.”
Today I heard a commentator say that basically what the Pope had said was that Christianity and Islam cannot connect theologically, because Christianity is assumes Hellenistic principles of reason and the reasonableness of G-d, and Islam basically rejects them altogether. Therefore, the Pope said, we should instead engage in a cultural dialogue, because that would be possible.
At about the same time as this all began I was wondering to myself if I would ever meet any of these reasonable Muslims that I assume exist. (If anyone who reads my blog is a Muslim, please email me or comment, because I’d like to hear from you.) I read Mustafa Akyol’s blog, but apart from him I don’t think I can point to a reasonable Muslim voice I hear from on a regular basis, and he doesn’t post that often.
The Pope’s take, however, meshes pretty well with my perception of the problem. American Muslims, by and large, are not rioting in the streets demanding an apology. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suppose that they support their foreign brethren about the same way American Jews feel about Israelis: their government makes choices that are sometimes hard to defend, and I have no interest in living there, but nonetheless I feel a connection to them and I support them. The reason is that we all are essentially Western. The problem we’re having is a cultural problem between West and, well, Arabia. This doesn’t make it a religious war between Christians (and Jews) versus Muslims, because most American and Turkish Muslims don’t tolerate the kind of behavior that’s common across the Middle East: honor killings, gratuitous martyrdom, and so forth.
So, my friend observed that because Islam glorifies G-d’s omnipotence over his reason, and the world at large basically glorifies power, the world is basically moving in the direction of Islam, to its detriment. My response was that, well, there are reforms taking place in Islam, particularly in Turkey, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a sort of unspoken reform going on here in America. He wanted to know about the religious foundation of these reforms. I say, that’s not our problem. Look at America. The philosophical foundations of the Constitution were eroded perhaps over a hundred years ago and yet our country marches on. I don’t care whether the foundation of another religion’s reform is sound, I only have to concern myself with mine.
I think ultimately we both agree with the Pope: this is a cultural problem. Indeed, going back to the Qur’an we find statements about the treatment of women and religious equality which are quite admirable and definitely not implemented in most Muslim nations. But they are implemented here and there are Muslims here who are happy (as much as any American is) with America. So cultural acclimation seems to be possible.
I think if we could just restrain the excesses of our culture a little bit, this problem would be greatly diminished.
Tags catholicism, islam, judaism, politics, religion | 40 comments
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Sat, 02 Sep 2006 22:30:00 GMT
From one fuzzy, overweight American religious convert with a penchant for “heavy metal” to another, what is your problem? Do you really think all of America will convert over your video? Do you think even five will? Of course you don’t—so how do you plan on constructing a bomb that can distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims? Or the righteous of all religions of the Book and everyone else, which is the distinction your religion purports to make in the first place? Does the innocent Muslim victim of an Al Qaeda attack get the same “reward” as the “heroic” terrorist who murders her? Do you really believe that thought could be consolation for their family, for their life, you asshole?
I suppose there’s some comfort knowing that when I went searching for G-d, I found Him in a house of learning, love and worship, filled with warm, normal people. You found your “god” in a cave filled with pissed off foreigners with bombs and guns. I wonder what the ratio of murder training to Koranic studies are in that cave, you asshole.
Tags judaism, rants, religion, terrorism | no comments
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:52:45 GMT
On reading The Lord and His Children in The Forward, I’m struck by how un-Jewish the last paragraph is:
And still He wants what He cannot have: Knowing man’s imagination to be evil from his birth, He wants His Children to be a holy nation. Foreknowing they will worship golden cattle, He demands that they love Him and Him alone. In His aspect as a father of children one might almost grieve for Him.
- “Knowing man’s imagination to be evil from his birth…”—What is this, original sin? The Jewish doctrine is that man has a good inclination and an evil inclination, and sinning is what we do when we give in to the evil inclination. G-d wouldn’t pre-ordain us to be evil—wouldn’t that be a sadistic G-d, if he created us and demanded that we not sin while simultaneously programming us to sin? Nobody can really believe this.
- “Foreknowing that they will worship golden cattle…” From what source do we know this? The Torah doesn’t make this claim. Only philosophy would make such a suggestion, but we do not have the god of the philosophers but the G-d of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
- “In His aspect as a father of children one might almost grieve for Him.” Quite an insinuation on the part of the author! What comes to mind is that any pity one might have for G-d because of how sinful people are would be better directed at the problem.
Tags judaism, religion, whining | no comments
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Mon, 28 Aug 2006 03:36:12 GMT
Let’s talk a little about the obnoxiousness of Page E in the Albuquerque Journal tonight. It’s a big job, and hard to know where to start, but let’s start with what’s above the fold: a giant Enneagram. The daft 9-pointed star is usually obnoxious enough, but now it’s enhanced with a picture of Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” behind it.
I didn’t know the name of that drawing until I looked it up to write this post, but let’s deviate for a moment and complain about it. It’s almost always hauled out to back up a pseudo-scientific claim. I’m pretty sure one of those shady massage schools around here has it in their logo. What did Da Vinci intend to communicate with that drawing, if anything? Does this image move anyone, anywhere?
Naturally, the appearance of anything Da Vinci brings to mind the Da Vinci Code, which brings to mind powerful knowledge suppressed by The Church. It should bring to mind the concept of poor fiction.
There is a connection between the Enneagram and Catholicism, but I’ll leave that to someone more qualified to talk about it. In a nutshell, the Church said, “people, this is bullshit.” Bullshit isn’t compatible with Catholicism even when it isn’t explicitly anti-Catholic; something very respectable about Catholicism. Anyway, now you’re hearing it from me: it’s bullshit.
Below the fold, we get to more of the good stuff: a picture of Ron Bell, the disgusting Albuquerque lawyer, and his girlfriend (they’re in their forties or fifties), at a furniture store having an argument about a sofa. Apparently, Ron is a “7”, which means he is “versatile, distractible and scattered,” A-grade lawyer material if you ask me—though it does explain the expensive-looking gigolo suit. Apparently the Enneagram helps you through the difficult times in life, such as when you’re a rich playboy lawyer and have to buy furniture for your mansion. Because, G-d knows, that’s what I need help with.
What always surprises me about horoscopes and the Enneagram and similar bullshit is that there is a mentality that goes along with it that almost nobody really has. Does it really seem true to you that everyone you’ve ever met falls into one of nine categories? Does it really seem true to you that everyone you’ve met could fit into one of any number of categories? If it were true, wouldn’t smart people like us simply notice the similarities and re-formulate the system on our own? The Enneagram system tries to distract us by having each type be affected by its “wings,” that is, the types across from each other, but that just makes things more complicated without even meaningfully changing the number of boxes. Western astrology at least tries to complicate things by adding the locations of other objects to the mix.
As long as we aren’t thinking about G-d, truth or reality, I suppose someone is benefitting from all this, but it isn’t the followers.
From time to time I hear strange things in Judaism about this kind of thing. Someone suggested recently that because of Urim and Thummim, Tarot card reading and other fortune-telling must be OK in Judaism. By what reasoning? Urim and Thummim were only available to the king and were lost ages ago. Apart from the strange witch episode in the Torah (a one-time event), nothing else ever appeared to fill the gap. When G-d allowed the second Temple to be destroyed, there was another system which filled the gap. G-d doesn’t take big things away from us which we definitely need. I find it very difficult to believe that my troubles—finding a date, choosing a job, etc.—are of the same caliber as those of national leaders and thus warrant prognostication, if G-d even bothered to preordain them. (I’m not saying he doesn’t have the power to pre-ordain everything, just that I don’t think he does.)
It all smacks of people searching for supernatural reassurances in spite of their faith. Many of the atheists really are on a better track regarding idolatry insofar as they reject the authority of these systems as strongly as valid religions. It’s worth pointing out that the first Noahide commandment is “Do not worship false gods.” That certainly permits a rational atheism that strongly condemns idol worship.
Tags religion, whining | no comments
