Atheism and Messiaen

I'd been describing myself as an agnostic for years; suddenly I looked at the word, and thought about it, and said "Who am I kidding? What the hell about my non-metaphysical personal philosophy makes me NOT, for all practical purposes, an atheist?" And switched the moniker. How many agnostics are there who are not, for all intents and purposes, atheist? -- who go to church, for example, "just in case"? Pah. It's a statement of the obvious that most theists in this country are, in fact, no more than deist in their beliefs, and agnostics atheist -- the difference being only in our knowing -- and our willingness to admit to -- the most appropriate description.

As for Messiaen: the SFO (brilliantly) performed his piece "The Offerings, Forgotten" last night. Now Messiaen was a devout Catholic, as you may or may not know (I hadn't), and much of his work is decidedly theological. Poor Messiaen: he'd turn in his grave to know that the most enduring and well-loved section of his piece "The Offerings, Forgotten" is the "Sin" section, which borrows heavily from "The Rite of Spring" (my favorite piece of music, bar none). The spiritual bookends -- "The Cross" and "Eucharist" -- put half the crowd to sleep. Aha! -- confirming, you (or he) might say, that our culture is, in fact, just so fallen; that we still, in fact, but revel in our sinfulness. But it might just as well confirm the observation often made that Heaven, if it did in fact exist, would be devilishly dull. And obviously, this isn't really an observation about what Heaven WOULD BE like, but an observation about what the Heaven myth IS so often like, in its more popular conceptions: flaccid, static and emasculated, a child's dream of the ultimate piñata: Santa meets Snow White.

NADER: Quit!

The time for voting one's conscience -- i.e., for Nader -- was in the primaries, which Nader spurned. OR, it's in a local election. OR, it's in a general election that's not so obviously close. If there were ever an election when it would make sense to bite the bullet and vote for the more liberal, winnable twit, it would be one such as this.

I'd love a viable third party in the US. I believe that such a party can and will only be a branch of a viable international party; the Greens are perfect. Home-grown parties -- e.g. The Reform -- produce results that need no comment. I'd love to vote for Nader to insure that the Greens get funding in the next election. Unfortunately, this isn't the election for that; Bush is too likely to win, and no liberal should allow that. Think of him in combination with a continued GOP Congress. Think how impressionable he is; what would he be like with nothing but Republicans in Washington? Think of the court. Four justices, potentially! Is election funding for the Greens in 2004 worth that? What if they can't field a candidate? Nader is the only reason they're on the map. Look what happened to Reform when Perot dropped.

THREE parties? If Bush wins, we may not even have TWO in Washington. Think about THAT. Think about what Washington would have been like with Gingrich and Dole.

Nader should retire from the race, with or without endorsing Gore.

the great Reality Paradox (and politicians)

One reader writes:

> i am trapped in the darkness in the middle of this wax museum ...

Gentle reader:

Wax is real, and we are wax. The truth that people, or life, presents to you, is fictional, but still true, and must be taken as such, but with a grain of salt. And we -- we're real, we're true, but wax (and fiction) too. Life is a game, is art; it traffics in the true and real, it has consequences; but it's not as overdetermined or concrete-shackles-sure as we sometimes make it out to be. It must be played, without a doubt, but not always with crippling earnestness. It's wax, it's plastic: neither liquid nor solid, but something between. So ironic, the wisdom of advertisements: Nike's "Just do it" -- Microsoft's "Where do you want to go today?" Life's consequences must be understood and respected, but neither worshipped nor feared. This is why the single-minded earnestness of our current Presidential candidates leaves us cold; we know that even they don't believe what they're saying to the shrill degree they insist on it. From working in Washington for years, I know why they do this: they're convinced that the average voter is a blithering idiot who will respond only to the simplest, shrillest cant. For all my misanthropy, even I don't think the average American is such a dolt; even the dullest beer-swilling redneck knows that these politicians are pandering to, playing for, him. Although "the numbers" state otherwise -- i.e. that asinine, overstated, "negative" campaigning works -- I can't help but think that a normal-speaking candidate -- one not so full of sound-bite bilge and vapid cant -- would do extremely well.

re: A Panegyric on THE BRAIN; HAL's response.

One reader writes:

> Whether panegyric or mere paean, we thoroughly enjoyed Mr. Denker's recent
> diatribe. To be fair, however, one might give a little thought to the
amount > of time the modern central nervous system has taken to develop.
Something > approximating the central nervous system has been building
momentum for at > least 200,000,000 years. ( Go carbon!!) On the other hand,
the silicon based > binary system has been around less than fifty. I don't
know the exponential > gains made by the CSN during its first fifty years but
I'll bet it didn't go > from something like Pac-Man gobbling in the
primordial ooze to surfing the > net. And already the age of non-binary
artificial intelligence is dawning. > Where will it be in 50 x 10 to the 8th
years or so? We better eat that > chocolate before a non-binary Pac-Man
developes a yen, figures out where we > live, and rifles though our
cabinets.> > Best Regards,> > Hal

An Encomium to PHIL, to ENGLAND and to TEA

Dear Phil:

I just want to thank you, and yours, and your great nation &c &c, for TEA, which invariably, when I enjoy it, and I do, and not infrequently, remembers you to me, and your flat, and your large store of English Breakfast, and your HOT POT and, for that matter, your Bovril. I would also like to thank you, personally, for: the Magna Carta, David Hume, Bertrand Russell, the Scottish Enlightenment, drubbing the Nazis, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Posh Spice and, above all, not being France.

A Panegyric on THE BRAIN

Just how much more clever is a person than a computer? A microprocessor iscomposed of simple binary switches, quite like individual neurons in the human brain. Modern microprocessors contain as many as 10 million such switches, all hooked up in a linear network, one after the other. The human brain has a few more switches -- they number in the billions -- but, unlike the computer, they’re all interconnected (or at least a lot of them are) into a bunch of parallel networks. Although a computer switch is much faster than a neuron, the parallel processing power of the brain -- its multiplicity of networks -- is what lets the brain process so much more information than a computer, so much faster; each one of these neuronal networks is like its own little computer.

I’ll be darned! Just how many of these neuronal networks ARE there in the brain, then? Well, the number of potential parallel networks increases exponentially as you add more switches: three switches gives you four possible configurations, and four gives you eleven. Based on the amount of interconnectedness they observe between neurons, researchers estimate that the number of discrete networks in the human brain exceeds ten to the 80th power.

10^80? Is that a lot?

Well, let’s say that each one of those neuronal networks equals one microprocessor. It’s not a very fair comparison -- what with billions of neurons to only millions of transistors -- but we’ll give the computer the handicap. Just how big of a computer would we need to approximate the brain?

Well, if each microprocessor’s about one square inch in size, that’s 10^80 square inches. Let’s see, where’s my pencil. There’s 4014489600 square inches in a square mile, so -- how many square miles is that? I was never good at division.

2.49 * 10^70 square miles. That seems like a big spread. Let’s take the square root of that to see how big it is on just one side.

157828282828282828282828282828283000 miles. That’s damn near as wide as Texas! What’s that in light years? Well, seeing as a light year is 5.88 trillion miles, that would be ...

26841544698687555830412 light years. Who the hell measures anything in light years, anyway? How wide is the Milky Way?

100,000 light years. Oh. So that would be how many Milky Ways?

268415446986875558.

Now that’s a lot of chocolate!

Love is the question

Add your own theoretical constructions to the list.

LOVE IS THE QUESTION From: "Christopher Pelham" : > What of romantic love? Does romantic love for another grow as a result of > the way he/she conducts him/herself, or is it simply there or not there, > awarded(?) based on some sort of a priori response to the other person's > spirit? Or could there be more than these two ways of describingthe origins > of romantic love?

THEORY IS THE ANSWER From Yours Truly: 1. Psychological: subject needs to "love" object-other in order to fulfill some inherent, purely psychological need (supposing such a Santa exists) -- e.g., parental displacement. 2. Socially conditioned. Or familially, &c &c. 3. Physiological: configured as innate biological predisposition to copulate, antecedent to any meaningfully distinct understanding of a "psyche" which surpasses physiology. 4. Linguistic: subject/predicate linguistic construction conditions us to find an object for our subject. 5. Nietzschean-Mythic: "love" as a necessary myth illuding us from the horrific emptiness of actuality; 6. Existential: "love" as an unnecessary but pleasant pastime illuding us from same; 7. Theistic: in a thousand variants, including 7.1: as duty to Divine commandment, 7.2: as celebration of Divine desire, 7.3: as execution of Divine will, 7.4: as revenge (e.g. taking the Pastor's daughter out for a throw). 8. Fallibilist: subject justified by object's unflagging contradiction. 9. Aesthetic: justifiable/understandible only in terms of its own internal aesthetic logic. 10. Aesthetic-Manilowic: universal aesthetic subject ("I am Music") necessitates aesthetic object ("young girls cry").

From: "Jack R. Friedman" > Marxist: Love as a bourgeois ideological construction that permits > class-enemies to avoid the suffering of the proletariat and the > lumpenproletariat through the introversion of thought in the form of an > obfuscation of the material reality that underlies the social.

From: "Ryan Holifield" > Benatarian: Love is a battlefield. We ARE young; no promises or demands.

From: "Dillon Parker" > Nazarene-musicological/masochistic: a viable and guaranteed > means to satisfy our inherent craving for pain, because "ooooh...oooooh, > love hurts!"

From: "Jessica Seddon" > god is love

(May Jessica's simple, earnest "faith of babes" be an example to us all. - Ed.)

From: "Christopher Pelham" > So both the Marxist and the Benatarian definitions would likely preclude > pre-destination. On the one hand, if love is an ideological construct, then > there was a time before it was constructed (unless God created the > bourgeoisie In the Beginning as it were and they came ready-made with this > construct in mind) and so love could hardly be a timeless predestined > quality or fact. And on the other hand, love could only be a battlefield if > there were something to battle over, and if love is pre-destined then no > amount of fighting over it would make any difference. And yet Benatar > stresses that "WE ARE YOUNG" (and she was physically older than the > audience she was presumably addressing so what construct of youth is she > implying here? youth as a state of mind?) so is she here mixing her > essentialist and existential messages here or she re-inforcing her > existential message by saying that those who remain young because of the > choices they make must fight for the opportunity to (re)define love on > their own terms ("no promises or demands")? > > and then there's the bob dylan song title "love minus zero/no limit" which > some people interpret as being a statement of love's infinitude which > raises the paradox of whether the infinite can be defined or not and > consequently of whether love (if it is infinite) can actually be defined or > not. This is relevant because if love is infinite, then maybe it can't be > beginning and ending (casting doubt on the theory that love is an > existential experience -- although i guess something could be outside time > and yet still perceived and/or experienced as being within it due to the > nature of how our minds work . . . which leads to the question of how much > if at all the mind (as opposed to the spirit . . .) is involved in love.