Oh I'm going to do that as a link

Speaking as someone who spent many years in a "mathspop" band, there is nothing I love more than a songwriter who sneaks equations into their work

Δデルタ    Ιイオタ    Λラムダ    Ξクシー Deruta    Iota    Ramuda    Kushii Δ Delta    Ι Iota    Λ Lambda    Ξ Xi

Δ Delta - the change within any given system (usually over time)

ι Iota - the smallest possible amount, also used as a fancy way to denote Imaginary Numbers (that is, the square root of negative one)

Λ Lambda - the Cosmological Constant, a little mathematical fiddle you have to add to any equations in astrophysics, to account for the fact that the universe is unceasingly expanding

Ξ Xi - ooh, wow, I'm going to have to look this one up, as I don't think (as I initially suspected) just a fancy way of writing the usual mathematical X (which is a different letter in Greek)

For They Know Not What They Do

The Story that is Christianity

Many have written pages on pages on pages of how to understand Christianity. Two of my favorite books of all time, “Mere Christianity” and “Orthodoxy”, both approach the issue of what the core of Christianity is for the layman. The intellectual (or perhaps a more accurate term would be “armchair theologian”) has even more access to works ascertaining precisely what Christianity is. I would say that is a fantastic way of getting to know our place within the world and our relationship with the God that ensures every atom moves properly. I also tend to view these works, seminal as they may be, as incomplete. But I suppose they aren’t trying to be complete, really. That’s because they are only building upon a completed text, of course, one they can hardly re-establish while remaining true to it and simultaneously expanding. They aren’t going to have the spark of the original.

But that’s not my problem with the modern discourse around Christianity. I understand that they lack the spark of the original. When dealing with direct divine inspiration, I would imagine that tends to happen. My problem is that, beyond lacking the spark of the original, it doesn’t even try to come close, it doesn’t *search* for that spark. There is nothing ventured back to the original composition except as intellectual evidence for a broader thesis. That is, the Gospel, the single most important piece of literature in history, is no longer a piece of literature but a manuscript. Because the core of Christianity is not praxis or hermeneutics or any other ten dollar word. It was passed from carpenter to fishermen. Christianity is, with all else stripped away like chaff in the wind, a Story. 

It is a Story of love and betrayal. It is a Story about good vanquishing evil. It is a Story of a Bridegroom united with His Bride, finally redeemed after constant failure and everlasting patience. It is a Story of a Father and Son, and how they, despite the pervasiveness of wickedness, would save the world from itself. It is a Story of love and the sacrifice that would naturally pour out from that love. It is a Story of undeserved grace by one party and an undeserved outburst of fury on the part of the other. It is, as odd as it is to say it, a grand Romance, one that spans across the entire history of man and especially the history of one Man in particular. It is a Story.

And like all stories, this one has a beginning. In fact, it has something before the beginning, before the very concept of time. It has a God, triune in nature, omnipotent and wholly benevolent. Now, this God is a creative God, and as such shapes the world. He forms what would become reality, all the laws of nature and mathematics, the ideas of time, of space, of matter itself, ex nihilo. He makes light and life, seas and earth and celestial bodies, animals and plants in an explosion of what can only be described as art. And He makes man, defined to be with a soul, in the imago Dei, His very image, capable of creation, capable of love, capable of making a sincere decision. The crown of what exists.

And with that, the very next day He rests, surveying His creation. He has done a good work, shrouding the world in the radiant light that He is. He has made something that continues on its own in a way, yet in another way is still eternally dependent upon Him for every action, every movement, every moment in time. Something has been created and with that beauty arises where there was none before. There is a completion to what was to be done, man being what was finally needed for the world to be properly finished. He loves the world, and He loves man. And so He rests. 

After that, He graces us with something magical. You want to know what was the first thing He gave man beyond the very life we hold so closely? The concept of romance, of marriage. Of giving one’s life over to another, of being able to truly understand another individual in a way that nobody else can. Of living your life for someone other than yourself, of being, in a way, one with another individual, fully free and without fear or reservation, only sheer, insurmountable love. It is the closest thing that we have to a relationship with Him with another individual. It is the epitome of a relationship among us, one that if we are lucky enough to have it, is the most beautiful thing we can have within the confines of this world. And He gave it to us because He loves man. 

And man loves Him, the only creature able to love establishing their love first and foremost. God created a garden, one in which it is declared that He walked with man. At every point man was covered by who God was, engaging with Him and with each other in the beauty of merely being able to speak, to talk, to be in conversation with the being behind everything that happens at any point in time, to talk to someone unimaginably beyond the world yet still willing to interact with it, with His greatest creation. And He offers but one demand – do not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. 

And, of course, they do so anyway and as such are blemished by sin and therefore must be driven out of the garden, out of the sight of the God that loves them so much. With the knowledge of what evil is, evil becomes an everyday occurrence rather than the quite literally unthinkable action that it was within the garden. Their love for God is tarnished like silver being exposed to oxygen. It is still silver, no doubt, but it is difficult to tell that it was the same thing as the genuine article, and while the value inherent within it will still be present (the silver atoms aren’t leaving anytime soon), it would require the level of atomic precision to return it to its original form, something we are entirely incapable of doing. 

With that, God can no longer speak with them, walk with them, be with them in the same way He used to. For sin cannot exist within the sight of God, the idea is a logical impossibility. Just as matter and antimatter cannot coexist within any one location, neither can the absence of God and the presence of God. There’s one theory that the reason God was no longer able to be in the physical presence of humanity is because the sinful nature of ourselves would quite literally destroy our very personages if exposed to the sheer holiness that is Him. I don’t know if it’s true or not, and it is impossible to know, but it sure does preach well. 

Most of the remainder of the Old Testament squarely places a focus on the Jews. For his devotion to God, Abraham was given an assurance that his descendants would be specially protected by God as long as they remained faithful, and as such the Jews became the “Chosen People”. This assurance is referred to as the Abrahamic Covenant. They were gifted with the Law, which essentially was a document of divine nature that established what they could and could not do as a nation. One of the most important parts both for their society and Christianity wholesale was that of animal sacrifice, something both commonplace and unique among the Jews. Rather than in other societies, where an animal sacrifice was there to satisfy the gods and not much more, the Jews symbolically placed their sins upon the blood of a pure white lamb and then killed it as a symbol of repentance (where we get the term ‘scapegoat’ from). And if they continued to abide by that Abrahamic Covenant and showed a dedication to faithfulness, then God would accept that symbol.

Throughout the Old Testament, an intriguing turn of events would begin to rear its head – they did not remain faithful. Throughout the history of Israel, the Jews would remain stubbornly in a constant flux between faithfulness and the complete denial of basic morality. Many times they would clean up their act, so to speak, and less than a decade later fall into depravity. The majority of the Old Testament is them doing terrible stuff, getting punished, getting better, and then returning to exactly what they were doing before. As it can be understood, for a society solely existing due to God’s special favor, this was less than heartening. I want to take what may seem like a sharp turn into one of the more overlooked books of the Bible, one of the (very many) stories about a prophet attempting to bring Israel back to God and one of my favorites. 

The Book of Hosea, at least the beginning of it, is a love story between a man and his wife. Throughout the section you find this book in, it is filled with books that essentially amount to a whole bunch of sermons being combined. This is not that. This is a genuinely beautiful story, this is something that I would want to read, this is *real*. And it may well be the best summation of the Old Testament in the entire Bible. This is exactly what I was searching for with the rest of my readings, something that so perfectly encapsulates the relationship between God and those who He loves. 

Hosea was a prophet, someone who was given direction from God to return Israel to its worship of Him. Many had come before him, many would come after him. One could even say that his actions were entirely futile. But he had a calling, despite the truly unrepentant nature of Israel, and he was not exactly going to tell God of all people “no” – that was the very thing he hated so much about the society he found himself in. So he decided to follow that calling, becoming the newest prophet of Israel. 

With that came instruction from God. He was to take a certain individual as his wife, one by the name of Gomer. She was a prostitute, and more or less written off when it came to marital prospects, perhaps understandably so. But Hosea was commanded to do so, and as such took her as his wife. And Hosea took care of her, fully and totally, as a husband should, providing for her economically, emotionally, generally being an all around good husband. Why? Simply because he loved her. He loved Gomer more than anyone else within the world. Certainly more than anyone else would within the nation, what with all of the social devastation from her peers of both sexes. 

And as I’m sure you can tell, the infidelity continued throughout the marriage. Constant heartbreak on the part of Hosea, who loved his wife, with the constant rejection of the wife incapable of loving him. Yet Hosea did not cease loving her. Even when the provisions he offered to her went to those she would cheat with him on, Hosea did not cease providing for her, something that was well outside of the norm within society, when at the very least divorce was the status quo. Hosea was continuously loving his wife, and he was continuously being emotionally destroyed by her. One day, Gomer disappeared for longer than she usually did. Hosea went looking for her, and found that she was being sold into what amounted to sex slavery. And once again, against *all of the* standards of the time, he went and gathered together a small fortune to purchase her and free her. And why was that? *Because he loved her.* And the absolute kicker is, there is no record of her ever stopping her activities. Despite all of his love for her, despite everything he gave up emotionally and physically for their marriage, she would always let him down. It was her nature. To fail and hurt in the process but to always be able to return to one who would always love her, it’s heartbreaking in its tragedy. 

It’s not difficult to see the allegory between this and Israel’s repeated falls from the graces of God. A nation chosen by God in particular, one that is provided for and taken care of more than any else in the world, one he frees from backbreaking slavery, one he offers bountiful land to despite everything. A nation that is truly blessed among all others. It of all countries should be one not to turn away from the path that has been consistently positively reinforced and consistently negatively punished. Yet it still does. Because men loved darkness rather than light. Because the love offered towards us is something they took for granted. Because it is our nature to spurn that love. 

Yet there would be one moment to establish that love forever in the eyes of God, and it began with one man, by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. The humiliation of the Incarnation is something that deserves to be talked more about. God becoming man and all the wonder inherent in that is highlighted in various Christmas events and the like, but it rarely goes anywhere beyond the surface level. Another way to say it would be that the substance is highlighted, but oddly enough not the sacrifice of the thing that would eventually become Calvary. For in the Incarnation was the stripping down of Christ long before His arrest. Taken from the omnipotence of Godhood to the inability of a child, forced to flee to Egypt just so He wouldn’t be killed before He turned three years old. Losing omniscience for the insight of an infant, losing omnipotence for the physical ability of a baby. The Incarnation was the deliberate elimination of anything especially divine He had, with the sole exception of his relationship with his Father. It is hard to overstate exactly how drastic a change like this was. Imagine losing any and all sensation, sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, all at once, and then entering into the world and being told to go out and live, get stuff done, have a proper life. The thought is quite frankly absurd. 

Yet all of this and more was suffered for love. For the chance to live as a person to save all people. For the beauty in finally freeing mankind from our nature of destruction to all we come in contact with. For love. Love for us, broken and fallen as we may be, entirely covered in the ink that obscures what we could be from what we are. The entrance of Christ alone into the world is a sacrifice for our sin, and it would not be the last, as I’m sure you are aware. Everything, absolutely everything orchestrated throughout the Old Testament lines up towards this moment. Everything evil and redeemed and evil and redeemed and evil and redeemed, fluctuating back and forth and forth and back for a purpose, for the ultimate evil and the ultimate redemption. All that was needed was for that very redemption to enter the world. And so He did, incapable of speaking, incapable of walking, incapable of bending the entire cosmos to Himself with one thought. The birth of Christ to Mary was, in essence, His first death. 

Jesus Christ had lived life as a man among men, with one exception. He had never sinned, not once. The evil that had plagued humanity as a whole was absent from Him, not a speckle on His fleece, for the entirety of His life. All of the absurd wickedness, every disgusting thing mankind suffers from, it was all gone from His personage. He was, morally speaking, perfection. And with that perfection comes something important. With that truly pure fleece, He was able to be a sacrifice that was more than symbolic. No longer would man slaughter a lamb, a symbol of sin, and obtain a symbol of repentance. Instead, man would commit the ultimate sin and slaughter The Lamb, The Son sent among them, and with The Son's sacrifice gain the possibility of True Repentance.

Eventually, He would begin to teach. A message of adhering to the spirit rather than the letter of the Law, which Israel was just beginning to follow. He taught forgiveness beyond what the Law said, commitment to marriage beyond what the Law said, being willing to help the fellow man beyond what the Law said. He did not supersede the Law, but He was the completion of it. Everything the Law said, He went beyond, not because He added to it, but because He fulfilled it. Everything He said was the intention of that Law, the meaning of it that had been lost to tradition for centuries. Israel had finally established a dedication to the Law and Jesus swept that rug from underneath their feet. It was the acceptance of the thought that went behind the Law rather than exactly what it said. 

And yet the position was unpopular with the people whose opinions on the subject mattered. The local Jewish ruling classes were quite comfortable with the acceptance of established law and tradition, leaving the more learned and established classes at the top. The local Roman ruling classes were quite comfortable without more religious zealotry breaking out in an area known for it. The idea of expanding upon existing Law and riling up support for and against it in an endless cycle of polarization was not in either of their interests. Yet the movement continued to grow, and it increasingly became an elephant in the room when it came to politics within the area. With that, quite reasonably, the decision was made to kill Jesus on charges of sacrilege. 

While they were taking such an action, Jesus was doing something entirely different. He was preparing Himself. He went over to a garden and began to pray, to beg, to plead for any other option. He did not want to die, He was genuinely scared of the suffering that would await Him. He sweated drops of blood throughout his prayer, such was the fear that took hold of Him. He was in agony. There was nothing He wanted less than to die an excruciatingly painful death. Yet He declares that it is His duty, that He must accept death. And that is what He does. The Romans and Jews arrive to take Him away. He does not resist. 

They brought Him before the Romans, because they, as rulers of the area, were the only ones who could prescribe capital punishment legally. There was an issue, however – nothing within Roman law actually enabled them to kill an individual for blasphemy against a god not recognized by Rome at all. So they simply decided to go with charges of treason. A similar issue arose – there was basically no evidence for a statement like that. So the governor of the region more or less tried to weasel his way out of it. He summoned Jesus, desperate for any sort of denial that would allow him to say there wasn’t enough evidence. Jesus, for his part, was cryptic, of absolutely zero help to the governor, Himself, or anyone, really. 

The governor called for something, anything to assuage the crowd from a death penalty with no evidence, something guaranteed to look bad to his higher-ups. Bargaining – citing a Jewish holiday about to come up, he offered a choice between two prisoners to be freed – Jesus or a murderous thief. Those who were present for the choice, a mob at this point, called for the freedom of the murderer. The crowd did not yield. Humiliation – a beating, fine clothes, a scepter and a crown of thorns. The crowd did not yield. A “lesser” punishment than execution – nine and twenty lashes from a cat o’ nine tails, each tail burying itself in muscle rather than skin and more or less skinning Him alive, with immeasurable pain coursing through every single second of trauma to his rapidly shrinking back. For some point of reference, the standard death penalty within the region was thirty lashes from this very whip. The crowd. did. not. yield. There would be no option other than crucifixion. They would never be content with anything else. And so the order went. 

In the most damning moment in the history of humanity, we determined we would commit Deicide. And the deed was done. Christ, God Himself on the earth, innocent in the truest sense of the word, slowly dragged His own cross through the streets of Jerusalem towards a hill called Calvary, where He would meet death. He stumbled, weak from blood loss and unable to continue to carry anything, let alone a cross. The pinnacle of mankind, brought down to being no more capable of preaching than a corpse like any other; He was thirty-three years old. And behind Him followed the very crowd that put Him to death, some jeering, some disgusted by He who would attempt to destroy Judaism, some even weeping over the demise that they themselves caused, any semblance of righteous fury gone from their eyes. 

Eventually the procession was able to make it to Calvary, at which point the crucifixion began. There are two tangentially important facts about crucifixion as a means of execution. The first is that Jewish Law states that any who die by being hanged on a tree have been cursed by God. It was considered that anyone who goes through that was abandoned by God, and it’s a generally bad omen. The second fact, somewhat more well-known, is that “crucifixion” is the root of the word “excruciating”. Crucifixion was not the means of execution generally used; it was always used in cases where an example was going to be made, due to its incredible cruelty as an execution device and its incredibly public location.

A brief overview of how exactly an individual dies would begin with both arms secured in place to the cross with nails, hammered into the wrist between the radius and ulna and directly through the median nerve. This would leave the body hanging from the overextended arms, which, apart from the immense pain such a position provides, physiologically makes it impossible to inhale. That’s where the legs being kept in place (with rope or nails) would come in, pushing the body up whenever oxygen was needed, and allowing the diaphragm to do its job. This had the added effect of causing even more pain from the scraping of the oft-scourged back against the rough wood of the cross. The process would continue until either the victim would die of asphyxiation due to exhaustion of the legs or until their legs were broken, making them incapable of continuing breathing. In total, time to die was varied but could last up to several days.

As the nails hammer into the flesh of Jesus Christ, He does not resist. As He is hoisted into an upright position as the death knell tolls and His minutes upon the earth begin counting down, He does not resist. As an innocent man being killed for a crime He did not commit, He does not resist. He is simply a Lamb walking quietly to the slaughter. The cross is beyond painful, there is nothing that could have prepared Him for such physical torture. But He does not resist. He shouts out the opening line to a song He knows well: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” He does not believe He has been abandoned by God, but in the moment, it certainly feels that way. It is hard to think of anything outside the pain of the moment. 

Voices resound around the crowd watching Him. Cries taunting Him to save Himself if He could supposedly save so many others. The apparent desecration of God is unthinkable within Jewish culture, no god of theirs could die like that. And so, in their denial of such a concept, they desecrated the only God they could ever have laid their eyes upon, the only God they ever could have spoken to, the only God who lived among them, who ate and talked and laughed among them. The Human God and the Divine Man, being scourged, crucified, abused with all manner of insults. He does not resist. The only thing He offers up out of His battered, gasping chest is a plea, not even to them: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

While I may have offered the Book of Hosea as the clearest summation of the Old Testament, those ten words are the clearest summation of the New. For despite everything, all of the suffering that we placed upon each other, for all of our sins, for everything. For the very execution of the only perfect man to ever live, for the very execution of the God who knows and loves every single individual, we are forgiven. Yes, it is in our nature to betray that love constantly, it is in our nature to harm everyone we come in contact with, it is in our nature to hate and kill and lie. But we are forgiven regardless. 

Jesus Christ makes one final shout to His Father, a proclamation that He is coming, if you will, and dies, the last breath of oxygen leaving His lungs long before the expected time of death. And in that moment, everything changes. The scapegoat is slaughtered. All the sins of mankind, past, present, and future, are placed upon His shoulders in a horrific mask of wickedness. Mankind has had their own sins cleansed in the greatest show of love possible, the brutal self-sacrifice required to keep all of us away from the fruits of our own actions. With Jesus shrouded in the infinite sins of humanity, God is unable to even look at His own dying Son, forced to turn His face away from the evil that has subsumed Him. Even the fury that would have been leveled at the crucifixion is placed on no other shoulders than the victim of it. We as a collective have, through the most heinous act in history, been redeemed of our heinous acts.

The eternal salvation of mankind is not the only thing that happens. The sky goes black instantly. Tremors begin to shake the earth and thunder shakes the skies. Dead men stand up and begin to walk, reunited with their family in a way that the Christ who just died could not be, carrying the sins of man and unable to stand within the presence of God. And within the temple, something curious happens. The veil that blocked the room to where the Jews believed the physical presence of God resided was torn asunder. No longer is man forced to use a proxy to commune with God, no longer is man separated from the One who loves them so much. Mankind, it could be said, is back in Eden, back before everything started. 

Jesus died quickly, so unlike those beside Him who had their legs broken, there was yea, a spear piercing His heart also. He was taken down from the cross and buried in an actual tomb, courtesy of a rich follower. Several days passed, and on Easter, the tomb was found by a contingent of women to be empty with the exception of burial wrappings, much to their eternal surprise. Despite the remainder of Jesus’s followers remaining in a combination of shock and depression, they too eventually made their way to the tomb and found it empty as described. It was empty.

At the crucifixion, at the condemnation of God to death and His willingness to do that for humanity, the devil rejoiced. In God’s love for us, He did exactly what the devil wanted. To remove Himself from the picture, to call for the death of Himself. But there was something that a created being like the devil could never understand. For death was artificial. It was not in the original world, it was not inherent to life, as much as it might seem otherwise. Death was a consequence of man’s sin, and while that sin was upon Christ, His death had washed it away. In one glorious, triumphant moment, the enemy of man for so long, death itself, was defeated by Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the Son of God. 

For God was not constrained by institutions that only exist as a consequence of evil. He was the one who established those institutions, and in the death of Christ, He could overthrow those institutions while simultaneously ending mankind’s eternal culpability for sin. And so Christ erupted out of the grave, and with it the grave ended. Death, the bitter rival of humanity from the beginning of time, was never going to have an impact again. For love, God died an excruciating death. For love, God refused to die. For love, we have been saved by Him. 

The most common analogy offered by Jesus between Him and those who follow Him is that of the Bridegroom and the Bride, each desperately in love with the other, each willing to give everything for the sake of the other. We can never be the perfect Bride, that much has been made clear. But in the eyes of the perfect Bridegroom, we’ve already been made perfect. No matter how much evil we purvey, no matter how broken of an individual we are, we are made perfect in the cleansing blood spilled from the sacrifice of the Lamb. All the grime that is us, every evil action we take, it has all been scrubbed clean off. For love. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/alan-sokals-joke-is-on-us-as-postmoderism-comes-to-science-23a9383c

By: Lawrence Krauss

Published: Jan 5, 2024

When I taught physics at Yale in the 1980s and ’90s, my colleagues and I took pride in our position on “science hill,” looking down on the humanities scholars in the intellectual valleys below as they were inundated in postmodernism and deconstructionism.

This same attitude motivated the mathematician Alan Sokal to publish his famous 1996 article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” in the cultural-studies journal Social Text. He asserted, among other things that “physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct” and that “the scientific community . . . cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.”

Mr. Sokal’s paper was a hoax, designed to demonstrate that postmodernism was nonsense. But today postmodern cultural theory is being infused into the very institutions one might expect to be scientific gatekeepers. Hard-science journals publish the same sort of bunk with no hint of irony:

• In November 2022 the Journal of Chemical Education published “A Special Topics Class in Chemistry on Feminism and Science as a Tool to Disrupt the Dysconscious Racism in STEM.” From the abstract: “This article presents an argument on the importance of teaching science with a feminist framework and defines it by acknowledging that all knowledge is historically situated and is influenced by social power and politics.” The course promises “to explore the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and postcolonial nationalism. To problematize time as a linear social construct, the Copenhagen interpretation of the collapse of wave-particle duality was utilized.”

• In March 2022 Physical Review Physics Education Research published “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study.” From the abstract: “Within whiteness, the organization of social life is in terms of a center and margins that are based on dominance, control, and a transcendent figure that is consistently and structurally ascribed value over and above other figures.” The paper criticizes “the use of whiteboards as a primary pedagogical tool” on the grounds that they “play a role in reconstituting whiteness as social organization. . . . They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.”

• A January 2023 paper presented at the Joint Mathematics Meeting, the world’s biggest gathering of mathematicians, was titled “Undergraduate Mathematics Education as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space and Opportunities for Structural Disruption to Advance Queer of Color Justice.”

Undergraduates are being exposed to this stuff as well. Rice University offers a course called “Afrochemistry: The Study of Black-Life Matter,” in which “students will apply chemical tools and analysis to understand Black life in the U.S. and students will implement African American sensibilities to analyze chemistry.” The course catalog notes that “no prior knowledge of chemistry or African American studies is required for engagement in this course.”

Such ideas haven’t totally colonized scientific journals and pedagogy, but they are beginning to appear almost everywhere and are getting support and encouragement from the scientific establishment. There are also indications that dissent isn’t welcome. When a group of physicists led by Charles Reichhardt wrote to the American Physical Society, publisher of the Physics Education Research journal, to object to the “observing whiteness” article, APS invited a response, then refused to publish it on the grounds that its arguments, which were scientific and quantitative, were based on “the perspective of a research paradigm that is different from the one of the research being critiqued.”

“This is akin to stating that an astronomer must first accept astrology as true before critiquing it,” the dissenters wrote in the final version of their critique, which they had to publish in a different journal, European Review.

That sounds like an exaggeration, but in 2021 Mount Royal University in Canada fired a tenured professor, Frances Widdowson, for questioning whether indigenous “star knowledge” belonged in an astronomy curriculum. The same year, New Zealand‘s Education Ministry decreed that Māori indigenous “ways of knowing” would have equal standing with science in science classes. The Royal Society of New Zealand investigated two scientists for questioning this policy; they were exculpated but resigned. The University of Auckland removed another scientist who questioned the policy from teaching two biology classes.

In 2020, Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society published an article by physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein titled “Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics.” Ms. Prescod-Weinstein wrote: “Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression.” This sentence, which dramatically misrepresents Einstein’s theory of general relativity, wouldn’t have been out of place in Mr. Sokal’s 1996 spoof.

Had an article like this appeared in 1996, it would have been dismissed outside the postmodernist fringe. But last year Mr. Sokal himself, noting that the article was No. 56 in the Altmetric ranking of most-discussed scholarly articles for 2020, felt the need to write a 20-page single-spaced rebuttal. The joke turns out to be on all of us—and it isn’t funny.

Mr. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, is president of the Origins Project Foundation and author of “The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos.”

[ Via: https://archive.md/Bbmju ]

==

Don't forget this gem of ideological gibberish masquerading as both "science" and legitimate scholarship, when it's clearly neither.

Abstract

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

AI structuralism

In the last chapter of The Order of Things, Foucault touts structuralist forms of psychoanalysis, ethnology, and linguistics as models for the means of thought beyond the self-cancelling limitations of the human sciences. I wonder if he would have included contemporary computer science to that list if he could have anticipated then the developments of AI now.

Lévi-Strauss brings up cybernetics in La Pensée Sauvage and goes so far as to wish for a machine that could perform the "classification of classifications" at the scale necessary to completely describe the possibilities of knowledge in some supposedly objective way. Since the machine he dreams of didn't exist, he writes, "I will, then, content myself with evoking this program, reserved for the ethnology of a future century."

Foucault is not so explicit as that in The Order of Things (the whole book felt like a fog of abstractions to me) but he suggests that thanks to the structuralist project, "suddenly very near to all these empirical domains, questions arise which before had seemed very distant from them: these questions concern a general formalization of thought and knowledge; and at a time when they were still thought to be dedicated solely to the relation between logic and mathematics, they suddenly open up the possibility and the task, of purifying the old empirical reason by constituting formal languages, and of applying a second critique of pure reason on the basis of new forms of the mathematical a priori." I take that to mean that the old dream of producing a formula that explains everything that can happen in the world suddenly seemed back in play; the limits and situatedness of the human observing perspective on the world — the "unhappy consciousness" that Hegel described — could be surmounted.

In an essay about The Order of Things, Patrice Maniglier describes the book as "an attempt by Foucault to get around the philosophical opposition between hermeneutics and positivism and thus to disentangle the anthropological circle, all in the hope of a new way of thinking whose premises he perceived in structuralism." In other words, Foucault at the time saw structuralism as a way around the problem posed to knowledge by the subject/object divide, the fact/opinion divide, by the fact that words and things are separate, that language is not transparent, that people don't understand their society, the point of their efforts, or their own lives and decisions. Structuralism was seen as maybe solving the crisis of modernity and its perpetual struggle to recenter the decentered subject. Of course structuralism failed in that mission and was largely discarded as an intellectual movement by the 1970s. But it seems as though its assumptions, methods, and aims have been resurrected, wittingly or not, by AI developers, who posit generative models and so forth as ways of producing knowledge without requiring a human subject.

In one of The Order of Things last few paragraphs, Foucault writes

Ought we not rather to give up thinking of man, or, to be more strict, to think of this disappearance of man —and the ground of possibility of all the sciences of man — as closely as possible in correlation with our concern with language? Ought we not to admit that, since language is here once more, man will return to that serene non-existence in which he was formerly maintained by the imperious unity of Discourse?

One might understand LLMs, in their idealized form, as that "imperious unity of Discourse" restored. They posit that language can have meaning without a speaking subject investing it with intention and context. And perhaps one can expect LLMs to fail just as structuralism did, and that no amount of commercial enthusiasm for them can eradicate the subjectivity they still presume even as they encode it it ever more obfuscated and extenuated ways.

[B. The Logical Investigations are curiously contemporaneous with the hermeneutic of the Interpretation of Dreams. Can one find a theory of symbol and sign which reinstates in its necessity the immanence of the meaning to the image? - cont'd]

4. But one must go further, if one is not to reduce the act of meaning to a mere intentional aiming [defined by unity of

what is aimed at

its ideal

in the meaningful designation].

How [is one to] conceive this passing of the aim over into a significant fullness, where it becomes embodied?

Should we follow the Husserlian analyses to the letter and concede a supplementary act of meaning, that which the Sixth of the Logical Investigations calls an "act of fulfillment"?

That is at bottom merely

to baptize the problem

to give it a status within the activity of consciousness

but not to find a foundation.

a. No doubt that is what Husserl sensed in the revision (Umarbeitung) of the Sixth Logical Investigation which he prepared in 1914. Through this text one can glimpse what a phenomenology of meaning might be: one and the same feature characterizes

a symbol (such as a mathematical sign)

a word

or an image

– Michel Foucault, Dream, Imagination and Existence: An Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger's Le rêve et l'existence (part II: Man in his significance), 1954, translated by Forrest Williams

Guessing it's the guesswork of the parent that attributes meaning hermeneutically so to speak to the cry of the kid now what happens when you bring a blanket or food or a clean diaper that's not just a way of satisfying the need meeting the need of the child in that moment what you're also doing is caring for the child and the child experiences that as care as affection as love so if every time the kid cries you show up and put a bunch of food in them what you're basically telling the child according to Lacan is that this is what love looks like in particular this is what it means to love you every time you cry i bring food that tells me that you are to be met and satisfied at the level of food intake and so you can see how this might spin into an eating disorder further down the road where somebody in order to feel good about themselves loved held supported after a tough day eats i don't know not one but three pints of ice cream pack it in to the point of feeling quite ill passing from the field of pleasure to the field of pain that's a certain type of jouissance not the one we're after but it's a certain type of jouissance enjoyment at the level of overeating desire is what's left of demand after need has been met in fact you can just have a simple mathematical equation desire equals demand minus need what's left after the blanket has been brought and the child is now warm it's an insatiable desire for love nobody attending to the work we're doing here has been loved too much that's not how that shit works you might have been smothered there may have been somebody who provoked anxiety in you by constantly being up in your business but no one has ever felt loved too much by too many people love the desire for love the demand for love is insatiable this is one of the ways that we get at a Lacanian theory of desire it's the insatiable demand for love that remains as a remainder after needs have been met desire is what's left of your demand after the need has been met and it is always in that sense a desire for love we can be more precise desire is always embodied desire is always a body's desire for another body which is why you've also heard me run the argument that desire is first and foremost desire for another person but in order to get your desire for that person met you have to guess and approximate and imagine the desire of that person what other things do they like and in so doing you find yourself desiring as another person

-Samuel McCormick

The hegelian dialectic

The stone which was set at nought by the scientific builders of the nineteenth century is become the head of the corner. A dialectical (Divided) method of argument by 19th Century German philosopher. We have found a need for dialectic, for the logic of philosophy. 1 Hegelian Dialectic: a step by step guide to controlling an outcome. IT is curious that a book which professed only to be a study of Hegel, and deals with criticisms of the Hegelian method and principle current more than. Mathematical discoveries, which have caused a revolution in our mode of conceiving the physical universe, and the discoveries of the new psychology, which have profoundly changed our mode of conceiving the mind, have necessitated a reconsideration of what is implied in the experimental method. It is a living work to-day because, more than at any previous time, the problem of the methodology of science is in the forefront. Most of this book was originally presented in papers read and discussed at the Aristotelian Society in the early 'nineties and published in Mind, for at that time the Society did not publish Proceedings. His own view would seem to be that the ultimate reality is a unity of personalities, but that this unity is not itself a personality. Hegel believed that mankind’s destiny was to progress to a point called the Absolute, in which all people are united in a higher, spiritual understanding. McTaggart reaches would be accepted probably even by the most convinced Hegelians, namely, the conclusion that the logic is of permanent value and the dialectic sound, but that the metaphysic is unsatisfactory and cannot be final. Dialectics is a method of finding a common truth between two opposing viewpoints, and was invented by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the 19th century. It contains the best exposition of the dialectic, and the best defence of the dialectic, and the best criticism of it by any living writer. With regard to this hermeneutical assumption, this essay examines analytically the dialectical relationship between law and love in Paul and young Hegel, the. McTaggart's Hook on its first appearance now lays it down, having read it again from beginning to end. He suggests that people who are best able to process ideas of simultaneous. This is the feeling with which one who read Dr. (3) This style is defined by people who associate a word with its polar opposite. IT is curious that a book which professed only to be a study of Hegel, and deals with criticisms of the Hegelian method and principle current more than thirty years ago, should be reprinted to-day and present the same freshness and vigour to the reader now as it did then.

Search Information About the Gematria with Rabbi Trugman

GEMATRIA WITH RABBI TRUGMAN: KNOW THE SIGNIFICANT CONNECTIONS BETWEEN WORDS AND PHRASES.

The technique of assigning numerical values to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet is known as gematria (from the Greek term geometria). One of the aggadic hermeneutical guidelines for understanding the Torah (*Baraita of 32 Rules, no. 29) entails describing a word or group of words based on the numerical value of the letters or replacing other letters of the alphabet for them according to a predetermined scheme. The term is most commonly used to signify altering based on numerical value and is also used to denote "calculations" on occasions.

Rabbi Trugman's program "OHR CHADASH" is pleased to introduce you to a useful tool Gematria with Rabbi Trugman that will help you to understand new depths in comprehending Torah and its complex layers of significance, as well as how the universe is integrally interrelated, eventually leading to fresh and enlightening insight. You can enter a word in Hebrew and almost instantly see spelled out all the locations in the Torah, the 24 books of the Bible, where this term, name, or phrase appears. By examining these appearances, we can make connections that we may not have seen previously. 

How Does Gematria Connect Us With Torah and Life?

This Gematria addresses several ways of determining the numerical equivalent of individual letters and how these letters can be determined based on their names' implied word value. This approach is based on the idea that numerical similarity is not a coincidence because the world was formed by God's word and each letter signifies unique creative energy. Thus, the numerical equivalent of two words indicates an inherent link between each one's creative potential.

According to Kabbalah, if two words or sentences share the same number, they are said to have a profound relationship. The Gematria reveals a deeper set of correspondences than those found in the literal text, pointing to a whole mathematical structure beneath the Torah. Gematria reveals the deeper meanings of the Torah.

ABOUT GEMATRIA: Beliefs And History

While gematria was utilized occasionally in the Talmud and Midrash, it was not important to rabbinic writing. The rabbis used gematria to bolster biblical exegesis on occasion, but not frequently. They were considerably more involved in using logical reasoning and debate to defend their beliefs. However, gematria is vital to Kabbalah, the Jewish spiritual tradition. Indeed, the various names of God and their permutations in Kabbalah have numerical values that are thought to hold strong power.

The name "GEMATRIA" is derived from the Greek "geometria," and the notion can be found in Plato's works. Some people have thought throughout history that the Torah contains secrets that can be discovered through gematria and utilized to forecast historical events. Some Hasidic groups that study kabbalistic literature think that the Torah, when viewed through the prism of gematria, offers insights to present events. Skeptics, on the other hand, have pointed out that, depending on the words and sentences highlighted and calculated, gematria can be used as "evidence" to support opposed beliefs.

Ohr Chadash: Take Yourself To New Horizons Of Understanding Torah Teachings And Experience The Jewish Mystics.

Exploring ourselves and reaching new boundaries of understanding, connections, relationships, and many other necessary commodities accessible on and off the planet is what makes people the best versions of themselves and fulfills the meaning of providing justice to the world's creator's hardships. Ohr chadash is a program run by Rabbi Avraham Arieh and Rachel Trugman, who have 45 years of expertise in Jewish education. Ohr Chadash strives to impart the bright light, rich traditions, and spirituality of the Torah in a contemporary manner that is both practical and mystical to all Jews and people, regardless of race, religion, or creed. Along with the teachings, programs, and events of Jewish education, torah teachings, and spiritual connections, our useful tool Gematria with Rabbi Trugman helps in finding the relations between words, their significant meanings, and connections.

We seek everyday engagement with our students and friends through our social media presence, constant contact, published books, music, classes, and events in person and online. We cultivate long-term, trusted connections with people who want to learn, grow, and broaden their spiritual horizons by connecting with God, the Torah, Jewish tradition, and the Land and People of Israel. Join Ohr Chadash today and make a significant contribution to the beautiful world via our inspiring educational programs and discover the spiritual and mystical avenues of Jewish and Torah teachings.

Comment on the Theory of the Drives

I just wanted to say I've noticed a lot of discrepancies between my approach to Lacanian psychoanalysis and what Lacan himself does with Freud's theory of the drives. I did a small experiment where I switched around the positions of the scopic drive and the phallic drive on the parabolization of the drives that Lacan presents in his 10th seminar on anxiety, and what I ended up with was a more clear division between these tendencies that were Oedipal versus tendencies that are anti-Oedipal.

What that amounts to is that I have a fundamental disagreement with Lacan regarding how closely he sticks to Freud with the theory of genitality as it pertains to the drives themselves.

I don't really think especially the oral and anal drives stick with us into adulthood and correspond in a one-to-one or even in an indirect fashion, which still might have a one-to-one aspect to it, with our adulthood behaviors, nor with how the drives are deployed in post-Oedipal functioning.

What I've also essentially noticed is that Lacan's addition to Freudian theory is that of the scopic drive, but the scopic drive itself in his theory is structured something like what I described as the “premonition of castration” pertaining to the formalization of the Oedipus complex, and it seems to conjoin the two levels, the upper level and the lower level, of the graph of desire, which features two vectors respectively pointing both from jouissance to castration, and from signifier to voice.

So what I'm envisioning is that the point that demarcates the emergence of the scopic drive on the parabolization of the drives also draws a line to the very beginning at the bottom-left of the parabola, which entails the oral drive’s deployment in the child's functioning.

What this means about genitality itself is that the amalgamation of the drives into adulthood functioning is something that is not parsed out in a way that makes complete sense, unless one is approaching psychoanalytic literature as it exists within its own unique genre. This may work within the field of analysis itself as well, but it presents a lot of problems within certain fields of logic, especially visual logic, which psychoanalysis must also reckon with. It seems as though the parabola that Lacan presents in his seminar is something based on the reading more than on an original system of his own that he wants to present to people. So, it is more of a hermeneutical tool than it is a novel theory of the drives.

But from my personal point of view, how accurate is it to approach this problem from the perspective of speculative reasoning in order to make correct inferences about the problems and solutions that can be found within the realm of visual logic itself? My powers of observation are limited without access to academic resources, and without access to observational technologies. However, with my understanding of the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, as it pertains to the superego drive that Lacan implicitly introduces as the opening up of genitality all by itself, there is a way of detecting the divisions between the temporal progression from one drive to the next drive, which is expressly non-dialectical, and pertains more to the fields of mathematics and geometry than to the fields of literary interpretation and clinical experience.

— (7/3/2022)

Science & God’s Existence

By Author Eli Kittim

Can We Reject Paul’s Vision Based On the Fact that No One Saw It?

Given that none of Paul’s companions saw or heard the content of his visionary experience (Acts 9), on the road to Damascus, some critics have argued that it must be rejected as unreliable and inauthentic. Let’s test that hypothesis. Thoughts are common to all human beings. Are they not? However, no one can “prove” that they have thoughts. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have any. Just because others can’t see or hear your thoughts doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Obviously, a vision, by definition, is called a “vision” precisely because it is neither seen nor observed by others. So, this preoccupation with “evidence” and “scientism” has gone too far. We demand proof for things that are real but cannot be proven. According to philosopher William Lane Craig, the irony is that science can’t even prove the existence of the external world, even though it presupposes it.

No one has ever seen an electron, or the substance we call “dark matter,” yet physicists presuppose them. Up until recently we could not see, under any circumstances, ultraviolet rays, X – rays, or gamma rays. Does that mean they didn’t exist before their detection? Of course not. Recently, with the advent of better instruments and technology we are able to detect what was once invisible to the human eye. Gamma rays were first observed in 1900. Ultraviolet rays were discovered in 1801. X-rays were discovered in 1895. So, PRIOR to the 19th century, no one could see these types of electromagnetic radiation with either the naked eye or by using microscopes, telescopes, or any other available instruments. Prior to the 19th century, these phenomena could not be established. Today, however, they are established as facts. What made the difference? Technology (new instruments)!

If you could go back in time to Ancient Greece and tell people that in the future they could sit at home and have face-to-face conversations with people who are actually thousands of miles away, would they have believed you? According to the empirical model of that day, this would have been utterly impossible! It would have been considered science fiction. My point is that what we cannot see today with the naked eye might be seen or detected tomorrow by means of newer, more sophisticated technologies!

——-

Can We Use The Scientific Model to Address Metaphysical Questions?

Using empirical methods of “observation” to determine what is true and what is false is a very *simplistic* way of understanding reality in all its complexity. For example, we don’t experience 10 dimensions of reality. We only experience a 3-dimensional world, with time functioning as a 4th dimension. Yet Quantum physics tells us there are, at least, 10 dimensions to reality: https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2014-12-universe-dimensions.amp

Prior to the discoveries of primitive microscopes, in the 17th century, you couldn’t see germs, bacteria, viruses, or microorganisms with the naked eye! For all intents and purposes, these microorganisms DID NOT EXIST! It would therefore be quite wrong to assume that, because a large number of people (i.e. a consensus) cannot see it, an unobservable phenomenon must be ipso facto nonexistent.

Similarly, prophetic experiences (e.g. visions) cannot be tested by any instruments of modern technology, nor investigated by the methods of science. Because prophetic experiences are of a different kind, the assumption that they do not have objective reality is a hermeneutical mistake that leads to a false conclusion. Physical phenomena are perceived by the senses, whereas metaphysical phenomena are not perceived by the senses but rather by pure consciousness. Therefore, if we use the same criteria for metaphysical perceptions that we use for physical ones (which are derived exclusively from the senses), that would be mixing apples and oranges. The hermeneutical mistake is to use empirical observation (that only tests physical phenomena) as “a standard” for testing the truth value of metaphysical phenomena. In other words, the criteria used to measure physical phenomena are quite inappropriate and wholly inapplicable to their metaphysical counterparts.

——-

Are the “Facts” of Science the Only Truth, While All Else is Illusion?

Whoever said that scientific “facts” are *necessarily* true? On the contrary, according to Bertrand Russell and Immanuel Kant, only a priori statements are *necessarily* true (i.e. logical & mathematical propositions), which are not derived from the senses! The senses can be deceptive. That’s why every 100 years or so new “facts” are discovered that replace old ones. So what happened to the old facts? Well, they were not necessarily true in the epistemological sense. And this process keeps repeating seemingly ad infinitum. If that is the case, how then can we trust the empirical model, devote ourselves to its shrines of truth, and worship at its temples (universities)? Read the “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn, a classic book on the history of science and how scientific paradigms change over time.

——-

Cosmology, Modern Astronomy, & Philosophy Seem to Point to the Existence of God

If you studied cosmology and modern astronomy, you would be astounded by the amazing beauty, order, structure, and precision of the various movements of the planets and stars. The Big Bang Theory is the current cosmological model which asserts that the universe had a beginning. Astoundingly, the very first line of the Bible (the opening sentence, i.e. Gen. 1.1) makes the exact same assertion. The fine tuning argument demonstrates how the slightest change to any of the fundamental physical constants would have changed the course of history so that the evolution of the universe would not have proceeded in the way that it did, and life itself would not have existed. What is more, the cosmological argument demonstrates the existence of a “first cause,” which can be inferred via the concept of causation. This is not unlike Leibniz’ “principle of sufficient reason” nor unlike Parmenides’ “nothing comes from nothing” (Gk. οὐδὲν ἐξ οὐδενός; Lat. ex nihilo nihil fit)! All these arguments demonstrate that there must be a cosmic intelligence (i.e. a necessary being) that designed and sustained the universe.

We live in an incredibly complex and mysterious universe that we sometimes take for granted. Let me explain. The Earth is constantly traveling at 67,000 miles per hour and doesn’t collide with anything. Think about how fast that is. The speed of an average bullet is approximately 1,700 mph. And the Earth’s speed is 67,000 mph! That’s mind-boggling! Moreover, the Earth rotates roughly 1,000 miles per hour, yet you don’t fall off the grid, nor do you feel this gyration because of gravity. And I’m not even discussing the ontological implications of the enormous information-processing capacity of the human brain, its ability to invent concepts, its tremendous intelligence in the fields of philosophy, mathematics, and the sciences, and its modern technological innovations.

It is therefore disingenuous to reduce this incredibly complex and extraordinarily deep existence to simplistic formulas and pseudoscientific oversimplifications. As I said earlier, science cannot even “prove” the existence of the external world, much less the presence of a transcendent one. The logical positivist Ludwig Wittgenstein said that metaphysical questions are unanswerable by science. Yet atheist critics are incessantly comparing Paul’s and Jesus’ “experiences” to the scientific model, and even classifying them as deliberate literary falsehoods made to pass as facts because they don’t meet scholarly and academic parameters. The present paper has tried to show that this is a bogus argument! It does not simply question the “epistemological adequacy” of atheistic philosophies, but rather the methodological (and therefore epistemic) legitimacy of the atheist program per se.

——-

it is unjust that we cannot readily tell whether capitalism is the least bad system

Leftists often claim capitalism is unjust on the grounds that it is patently inferior to some feasible non-capitalist alternative. But I claim capitalism is unjust on the grounds that we are incapable of knowing whether capitalism is inferior to some feasible non-capitalist alternative. I will set forward a new and surprising argument for the injustice of capitalism--an argument based on the possibility that, for all we know, capitalism may really be the least bad economic system that is realistically possible.

I claim it is unjust when you see an abusive action that you are incapable of knowing whether you can justifiably condemn. This is a form of epistemic injustice grounded in the immense scope of our empirical ignorance about morally important issues. It may be a new form of epistemic injustice in that it has not been named or theorized in the literature. Yet it is also perhaps a familiar form of epistemic injustice, because it (or a similar phenomenon) may also present be in situations where you do not know whether someone is gaslighting you, or where you do not know whether someone's remark or action was prejudiced against you. It may be a distinct variant of hermeneutical injustice, or it might be something else; I'm not sure how to classify it.

Consider the following dialectic--

I notice an abuse committed by a large corporation--clearly reprehensible, harmful to innocent people, yet not illegal. It is clearly an injustice to be condemned. Who should I condemn? Initially I condemn the corporation and/or its leaders.

Then a capitalist refutes me: No, no, no. You can't justifiably condemn the corporation or its leaders. They were simply following the economic incentives. If they hadn't committed this abuse, they would have been out-competed by some other corporation. The corporation and its leaders had no true agency here--the system forced their hand!

I respond: Okay, okay. Then I condemn the lack of regulations. If there had been proper regulations, then *no* company would have been incentivized to commit this abuse or any comparable abuse. The regulation would apply to all the companies, preventing any of them from doing such a thing. So, none of them would *need* to commit such abuses in order to get a competitive edge, because none of their competitors will commit such abuses *either*.

The capitalist rebuts again: No, no, no. You can't justifiably condemn the lack of regulations. You must consider the economic realities on the ground, as indicated by many lines of empirical evidence and mathematical models. If there had been more regulations, this would have created perverse incentives. Supply and demand would have gotten badly out of whack, resulting in a market failure that would hurt many people, especially the poor. Our economic system of capitalism cannot thrive under your proposed regulations.

I reply again: Okay, okay. Our economic system of capitalism cannot deliver the goods when we impose safeguards against abuse. This shows how our economic system is fundamentally broken. We should switch to some non-capitalist mode of production and distribution.

The capitalist concludes: No, no, no. You cannot justifiably condemn capitalism. Again, you must consider the economic realities. The relevant scientific consensus, a sizable majority of economists, sides with capitalists and against anti-capitalists on a wide variety of issues--for market freedom and against trade restrictions, price controls, wage controls, and so on. The evidence for capitalism's superiority is quite complex and hard to summarize, and of course we must first discard the weak pro-capitalism arguments set forth by Republicans and reactionaries. But once the dust has settled, the empirical evidence vindicates capitalism as the best economic system for lifting millions of the global poor out of poverty, incentivizing efficiency and innovation that raise the standards for products and services of myriad kinds, and so on.

How can I reply? I don't know how to actually sift through the vast trove of empirical evidence and mathematical models that would be relevant to discovering whether capitalism or some non-capitalist economic system actually delivers the most important results most effectively. I don't think more than a tiny number of people actually understand this evidence in the necessary depth to form a judgment on most of these issues (although many people *think* they do).

Now, look what has become of my initial condemnation. I saw an obviously abusive action by a corporation. I sought to condemn it as a clear case of injustice. Yet now, for all I know, this abuse was simply the inevitable byproduct of the least bad economic system available--and I am epistemically powerless to discover whether this is really true or false. If this abuse was the inevitable byproduct of the least bad economic system available, perhaps it wasn't unjust in the first place.

I demand to know whether I can justifiably condemn someone or something for causing the abuse, rather than simply accept the abuse as inevitable. It is unjust that I cannot know whether the abuse was condemnable or inevitable. And it is unjust that I cannot know whether capitalism is the least bad economic system or not.

In general, capitalists and anti-capitalists are wildly overconfident in their own grasp of economics. Many leftists make anti-capitalism arguments that are overconfident in economic assumptions that are legitimately disputable. By contrast, my argument for the injustice of capitalism does not require confident assumptions about economics, but rather is grounded in the grotesque intractability of our economic ignorance.

I mean I grew up in the frothy mix of STEMism’s arrival in the public school system and while it did create legions of the most insufferable type of nerd, it also created a renewed emphasis for the self-regulating effect of the scientific method across the curriculum-- which is good. But the thing is, people started getting tracked towards hard sciences a year or so before the humanities started teaching existentialism and structuralism. That’s created lots of people who fully believe if you can lesswrong it into a mathematic expression you’re absolutely correct.

That isn’t an entirely awful way to do things, but the unwashed social science and humanities gang were informed at that point that Cartesian argumentation is just the qualifier for admittance to the Hermeneutic Tables Ladders and Chairs match of PHIL 1001.

The Revelation of God in Creation

I recommend Gerald McDermott’s “Everyday Glory” on seeing the symbolism of God in creation. He actually gives James Jordan credit on this issue by citing him!

I can testify that learning to see specific, concrete symbols of God in specific aspects of creation (i.e. birds- and specific birds, *mean* something intelligible) and realizing that there is a biblically rooted hermeneutic for growing in one’s understanding of this language truly makes the reign and presence of God a much more constant and immediate reality than it is otherwise. It’s one thing to say that creation reveals that God exists. But Scripture says more. Scripture says that the character of the biblical God is written into the structure of the cosmos. 

This is one reason why God doesn’t regularly speak English (or our native language) to us. He wants us to learn how to interpret divine language and speak it back to Him. He’s written a Book well over a thousand pages of small print as the grammar and index of this language. But God’s language in creation is far richer than one based principally on one sensory experience like hearing. As the specific number of trees grow in the particular forest from the ground of a specific composition, birds nests dotting the treetops as the birds sing a choir with a specific tune once the woven web of celestial glory has wheeled overhead- all of this is meaningful.

It is a language constituted by the elegant yet extraordinarily complex and subtle interpenetration of all sensory qualities in a given place and time, by the underlying realities not immediately available to the senses (like the craftsmanship and content of the four-base genome down through to the fundamental particles whose relation is systematically correlated with our sensory world), and by the logoi from the mind of God which give existence to the cosmos in general and every specific creature in particular. Clearly, we are nowhere near speaking knowledge of this language, but it’s there.

I think that people sometimes encounter this in events called “synchronicities.” When we recognize that all things have their principle of existence in their created archetype which expresses the uncreated logos, we recognize that *meaning* is an *intrinsic and basic aspect of every creation of God.* And it is not a still painting. God is living and active, forming creatures in their embodied life as ordered according to the pattern of that meaning. One striking instance of this is the woman in the UK who had lost her son and was weeping at his grave- and a wild robin calmly flew to her and landed on the gravestone and then on her hand as she wept. This woman and her son bore the surname “Robinson.” (this is on YouTube) It is neither a coincidence nor a miracle, though is manifests the loving and gracious character of the Creator. This incident and countless others like it manifest the innately meaningful character of reality, meanings which are woven through mundane experience (though usually we are not capable of making heads or tails of most of it and it is not wise to try to find all meanings and signs in every little mundane event we go through) and coextensive with the rhythm of every creature’s being.

The cosmos is a declaration of the Logos, the Mind and Reason of God. Likewise, our brains are rich and complex revelations of the human mind as it interfaces with the multiplicity of the world through embodiment, where different created things are gathered together and given unity through the principle of the human soul. Strikingly, the structure of celestial matter is webbed and fractal in design- and is structurally analogous to one specific kind of embodied being: the neural networks in the brain. As light (the particle of electromagnetism) fills Deep Heaven and stitches together the crystal tapestry of the starry vault, so also does light (i.e. electromagnetism) bathe our brains constantly. We find in the structure of heavenly bodies apparently nonrandom ratios and mathematical relations concordant with traditional symbolic resonances in the heavens. Because the Logos-Mind of God is declared (in the Holy Spirit- associated with light and glory) in the brilliance of Heaven’s field, archetypal ideas associated with basic dynamics of human existence are traditionally associated with specific heavenly bodies. Jupiter is the merry king, Saturn judges sabbatically through blessing and curse, Venus is the glorious queen who is fruitful, and so on.

One could go on. The Bible, when its teaching is sought out through an understanding of the Whole in confidence that every stroke of the pen is the utterance of God, truly does unveil the creation as an Awesome theater for the Glory of God, a temple fashioned as an instrument and context for the communion of created beings with each other and with God. And it shows us a big vision of a world utterly opposed to nihilism. Where nihilism says that even the most meaningful of things lack ultimate meaning, the Bible and Christianity teaches that even the most mundane and insignificant things are filled with meaning. For me, learning to read the Bible symbolically and typologically while taking its statements about creaturely signs (i.e. things like a Rock signifying God, precious stones signifying His glory, the tabernacle furniture, etc) as objective information about the ontology of the world instead of invented analogies without real basis outside the text- that path transformed my life. It radically and fundamentally gave the world back to me. It brought back a sense of true wonder in creation that I had not experienced since I was a little child. There is something enchanting about picking up a leaf and counting its points and veins to speculate (but not arbitrarily) about its symbolic resonance, especially when such speculation seems to bear fruit and understanding. 

“It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, the glory of kings is to search them out” (Prov. 25:2) and “the Heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of His hands; day to day they pour out speech; night to night they reveal knowledge. Their is no word nor language where their voice is not heard.” (Ps. 19:1-3)

Intro to Jewish philosophy (VIII)

Traditionally speaking, Judaism is a monotheist religion, although it dates back to polytheist Canaanite religiosity in the Ancient period, before a community began to rally themselves around a canonical text sent by God through His prophets, the Torah (or Tanakh, which refers to the entire Old Testament). Supplementary texts were Midrash (rabbinic literature) and Talmud. All these texts would always invite hermeneutical interpretations with different claims about hidden meanings. In Medieval times, these interpretations became particularly prolific.

Why did Jewish thinkers engage in philosophy? Jewish thinkers saw philosophy as a tool that would help them understand the theoretical and practical dimensions of faith, beliefs and practices by means of philosophical concepts and norms, by problematasing typical Jewish topics in a systematic fashion. For Jewish philosophers, there were mainly three concerns they wished to address. The first is Jewish-centric: They sought to understand why God chose Israel and the Hebrews and its eternity, and what did this say about the nature of God; Messiah and the afterlife; Prophecy of Moses (if God is a transcendental being, how does He communicate, convey intelligibles?); and the Torah. The second is a common reason, reasons that their Muslim peers, as well as the Christians, sought to explain, such as: The existence of God; the divine attributes (through logical theory); creation; providence; and human conduct. And lastly, the independent (or secular) reasons: philosophical motivations beyond religiosity; about language, for example. It’s philosophy with inspiration in religion: meaning of terms; logical arguments; the division of being; and the structure of cosmos, are a few of these topics.

There’s been a great Islamic influence in Jewish philosophy, evidently explained by the presence of Jewish communities in Islamic societies, especially from the 7th century onwards, parallel to the flourishment of Arabic culture and the Islamic Empire. Very soon Jews started to adapt Muslim and Christian concerns and to advance, transform, and participate in Arabic curriculums, particularly in science, mathematics, medical theory (Maimonides, for example), astronomy, and, of course, philosophy (especially in the hands of Saadia, Halevi, Maimonides, and Gersonides).  

Jewish historiography normally narrows the history of Jewish philosophy into three periods: 1) Hellenistic (2nd century BCE to 1st CE): Almost nothing survived from this period beyond material artifacts excavated archeologically. 2) Medieval (10th century AD to 18th century AD): It is here that the vast majority of Jewish philosophical activity emerges, in Arabic and Hebrew. 3) Modern (18th century AD to present). In the medieval period, from 10th to 12th century  there’s a cultural revival period in the North Africa, Spain, and Egypt, where they would use the Arabic language in their philosophical discourse. In the case of Jewish philosophy, metaphysics was the main interest. After this revival, there started being noticeable changes in Jewish philosophy (post-12th century until 16th AD): Key subjects were physics, metaphysics, logic, ethics, and politics; and the famous rise of the Jewish commentary tradition. This happened as there was also a geographic shift: Jewish presence started sky-rocketing in Continental European places like Spain, southern France, and Italy. Upon reaching these places, there started being a decline in Jewish Arabic writing in favor of the emergence of Hebrew as a language of philosophical discourse. Why not Latin? Because there was great rejection of all things Jewish by Latin scholars, and so they resorted back to Hebrew as a way to foster their own independent intellectual activities and reaffirm themselves as properly distinct.

Back then, Jewish philosophers are typically grouped in 4 segments: 

a) the Mutakallimun: jewish philosophers trained in theology, or theologicians with a proclivity for philosophy. Influenced by Arabic theology (kalam) with origins in the philosophical deliberations on theological matters of early medieval Islam, such as to the attributes as predicates of divine essence. Jewish Kalam wished to, amongst others, to refute heresies, defeat sophistry, combat skepticism and reaching epistemological certainty. The Jewish adoption of kalam has in Saadia Gaon (d. 942), of the Baghdad Rabbinical Academy, one of its greatest examples. Indeed, it was in the Middle Eastern Jewish communities, particularly the Baghdad Academy, that this tradition started arising.

b) Neoplatonists: jewish philosophers with an interest on the school of Alexandria and all things neoplatonic, particularly the strand that sought to bring philosophy to religion and reconcile the two. They saw themselves as the heirs to Al-Farabian and Avicennan traditions, and were influenced largely by the theology of Aristotle (i.e., Enneads) (Latin: Liber de causis). The main features of Jewish Neoplatonism was its dedication to topics such as the transcendence of God, the emanation of Cosmos (necessary or volitional), hypostatic substances between God and world, and the return of the soul to its righteous place. All these were standard issues of Aristotelian philosophy relocalized into jewish thought. The first proper Jewish Neoplatonist was Isaac ben Solomon Israeli (d. 955), greatly influenced by Al-Kindi, who came slightly before him.

c) critics of Aristotelian philosophy: jews suspicious of the prevalence of Aristotelianism that sought to eliminate jewish philosophy of this pollution. The most prominent figure was Judah HaLevi (d. 1141), known mostly for his Book of Argument and Proofs in Defence of the Despised Faith. He wanted to defend the Jews from Latinists; in doing so, he wishes to refute Aristotle’s philosophy as unable to demonstrate metaphysical truths. He contraposes the God of philosophers to the God of Abraham (a God that does not need to be sought through complex intellectualism); and demonstration to revelation. He favors an epistemology rooted in experiential existence which partakes in divine reality. For him, piety increases ontological proximity to God.

d) Aristotelians: peripathetic-like thinkers. They famously drew a distinction between a theoretical and a practical philosophy. Theoretical philosophy was concerned with physics, mathematics, metaphysics; whilst practical philosophy dwelled in ethics, economics, and politics. The first Jewish Aristotelian was Abraham ben Daud (d. 1180), for whom Judaism and Philosophy are identical; two sides of the same coin.

[C. At a deeper level than any spatial ‘metaphor’, classificatory medicine presupposes a certain ‘configuration’ of disease - cont'd]

[2. The secondary spatialization of the pathological: How can the flat, homogeneous, homological space of classes become characterized by its seat in an organism? - cont'd]

[g. The disease and the body communicate only through the non-spatial element of quality, e.g. the brains of maniacs are dry because mania is "hot" - cont'd]

[iii. A true mathematization of disease would imply a common space of figures and ordering. In contrast, classificatory medicine implies a qualitative gaze - cont'd]

How can one distinguish, if not by their quality,

the convulsions of an epileptic suffering from cerebral inflammation?

those of a hypochondriac suffering from congestion of the viscera?

A a subtle perception of

qualities

differences between one case and another

variants

—a whole hermeneutics of the pathological fact, based on

modulated

coloured

experience, is required.

– Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, (Chapter 1: Spaces and Classes), 1963, translated from the French by A.M.Sheridan, 1973

According to Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication, ‘[t]he semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering aspects’ (Shannon and Weaver 1949/1963: 8). Here, only discrete sets of signals, frequencies, entropy, redundancy and channel coding count. Still, ‘humanities of the digital’ ask different questions to technology and source codes than engineering and informatics do. Epistemological curiosity, rather than hermeneutics, drives media archaeology; electro-physical action cannot be ‘understood’. All technology is material artefacts, encoded by cultural knowledge; its language is diagrammatic circuitry and mathematical logics. The return of the text within computing is alphanumeric, not semantic. Conventional hermeneutics belongs to the scriptural regime (the symbolic order of the alphabet), as opposed to signal analysis (such as spectrograms). Media philology refers to signals for analogue technologies, but returns to symbols in the case of the digital code, just like electrically pulsed telegraphy is simply isomorphic to the written alphabet. This results in a heuristic, temporary suspense from the hermeneutic imperative. The core of the techno mathematical definition of media in terms of communication engineering is to calculate what kind of temporal delays and intrusion of noise occurs in the material channel, the actual ‘medium’ (Shannon and Weaver 1949/1963). Within such configurations of logical signal encoding and material transmission, data are suspended from cultural semantics. This is the media archaeological epoché. The time seems ripe for the rebooting of hermeneutics, but this time in the technical sense of ‘understanding’ nonhuman agencies (‘authors’) such as algorithms as machines. While classical hermeneutics inevitably leads to historization, media archaeology rather deals with the non-historical temporality of media operativity.