Metaphysic Storm

Vox Day recently wrote a book called The Irrational Atheist. It counters the books written by “The Unholy Trinity” : Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Bertrand Russel. I have no intention of reading Vox’s book. All the arguments I’ve heard for religion are so week, I’ve become rather bored with them. To argue against arguments that are week and then to read a book about why the arguments against are week are week, just sounds like an exercise in futility. But I do agree with Vox that The Unholy Trinity make many insubstantial arguments. Why anyone looks to Darwin as a reason not to believe in god puzzles me. The fact of evolution certainly disproves the Adam and Eve story but there are hundreds of “events” in the bible that are impossible. In fact, one doesn’t even need evolution, art, in and of itself does the job. If I made the painting then god did not, if god did not then he didn’t make everything. Dawkins said it best, “There are literally an infinite amount of things that can’t be disproven.” But just because something can’t be disproven is no reason to believe in something.
I think the “Atheist movement” is doing a disservice to the fight against irrationality. In my arguing against faith I’ve noticed that all I seem to do it reinforce other peoples beliefs. If all a person needs to believe in something, is that it’s written in a book, no amount of logic or reasoning will effect that. The only thing I’m left doing is stating the reasons I don’t believe in god, that I try not to be a bad person and where I derive my ethics from. I don’t think it’s any use attempting to persuade them that their beliefs are unjustified. Doing so only starts a witch hunt, an opportunity for the “good work” or a pity party.

I like arguments against god as god is defined. But after I heard Epicuoious’ argument I felt as though I was done writing about god. It just doesn’t get better than, “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” And that argument has gone unanswered for 2300 years. I was reading a review of TIA by an atheist that credited Vox as having the best counter to the trilemma. Not supprizingly, for Vox is a game programmer, he postulates a scenario where god “Big Chilly” is a programmer and the AI (artificial intelligence) is us.

During the demo, Big Chilly and the three AI-controlled members of his fireteam had successfully taken out both the wide patrol and the guards, and they were just beginning to lay the explosives to blow the door that held the prisoners captive when there was a sudden burst of bright laser fire that caused him to jump in his seat and emit a startled shriek loud enough to make everyone else in the room jump, too. While his AI squadmates shot down the intruder before anyone’s battlesuits took too much damage, what shocked Big Chilly was that for the first time in hundreds of playings, an enemy AI had taken it upon itself to circle around behind the rescue force and attack it from an unexpected direction.

But how could this happen? How could a lowly artificial intelligence surprise a lead programmer who was demonstrably omniscient and omnipotent in the AI’s world? How can the created do what the creator did not will? The answer, when viewed in this context, should be obvious.

Surprise was possible because the programmer was not choosing to exercise either his knowledge or his power at that particular point where real-time intersected game-time. While he could have easily provided that particular character with a scripted path and prevented the character from being able to depart from it, he had already elected not to do so… And finally, while he could have been scanning that particular AI’s “thought” processes and known what it intended to do in the very instant the intention was born, instead he refrained and so learned about its actions through entirely “natural” means.

If it is not difficult to accept that an omniscient and omnipotent programmer can reject omniderigence, why should it be hard to imagine that an all-powerful God might choose to do the same? Even human lovers know that the lover cannot control the beloved, so it should not be difficult to believe that a loving God would permit His creatures to choose freely how they will live. (TIA - Pg. 281)

Vox is arguing more against free will than for god with his usage of AI. AI do not make choices. They follow programs and can not deviate from them. Any true randomness in the Demo came from the choices from Big Chilly and how the algorithms of the AI respond. Randomness is one of the philosophical area I have the most difficult time understanding. Why the universe’s nature is lumpy, random and chaotic has puzzled me. I think my problem with that though is a natural bias humans have for seeking and maintaining order. We think it’s actually possible to achieve perfect order, but most likely, a smooth universe is just like zero, impossible.

His argument for an all powerful all knowing god actually parallels the concept I latched onto throughout my twenties. I thought that if god could do everything, then he would have to be able to experience surprise, a difficult number for something omniscient. I thought that god created us to live in the back of our minds, that our minds were all versions of god, and that he experienced his universe through us to achieve ignorance and limitation. But that’s really a version of pantheism not theism. I used to think how boring it would be, to be the everything consciousness. Either you wouldn’t be able to brake your own laws or you could brake your laws and therefor there are no laws. Vox changed the definition of god to fit reality; I changed my view of reality to fit definition of god.

An entity that is at all time is incapable of making any choice. Choice requires being locked into the now and someone that is not, can not elect to do anything. Choice and intent are keystones to being an agent. A god that can not choose is no god at all. A programmer in “real-time” is not omniscient in the “game-time” world, and scanning a mind implies being bound by time. By the very definition of God, he would be a slave to himself. God could never make a law he could not brake.

On January IX the year of our lord MMVIII, I called the police on myself and had my Walther .CCCLXXX PPK taken from me. I bought the gun at X-VIII Tactical Gear & Supply on the VIII. At that point I had been lacking sleep for about a I.V weeks and started getting the heebee jeebee’s. I’ve been calling the force every month since, trying to get my stainless steel gun back. It seems I want it more now that they’re holding it. Was this whole incident a sign I made to myself? Statistically I’m probally safer with a sling shot.

The dream this morning:

I road my carbon (color black) fiber bike to the evidence/property police room in a relatively undevastated part of the New Orleans. I locked my bike outside to a parked car in the neighboring lot, or did I lock it to a fence? I don’t know, but I did lock it to something stationary. I walked inside the property room and asked them for my gun. They seemed reluctant to give it to me, but because I am not a criminal nor have I been declared crazy, they were forced to give it back.

I looked at my lovely first hand gun. (I had it blessed by an Eastern Orthodox priest the day before (not part of dream)). It was covered in granulated powder residue. It looked like the cops had been having fun with my pistol, rapping it’s virginity, steeling precious bangs from it’s life. I immediately wanted to brake it down and clean it, purify the filth that the officers left on my baby. I took it apart with ease for it was so covered with lube it almost fell into pieces itself. Then I tried to reassemble it. I couldn’t get the slide on, the spring flung away and the barrel was missing. The police looked at me with suspicion . After a few hours they were getting ready to go home and asked me to leave. I finally got the gun assembled and put it in it’s black plastic case.

When I got outside my bike was stolen. I interrogated the neighbors but they had no answers. The feeling of lose was tremendous. My carbon fiber Trek XCVIII (empty-set) (empty-set) has been an extension of myself for the majority of my adult life. And I lost it dealing with the police. Or was It myself?

Yesterday my computer was unable to finish an episode of lost. I kept getting an ear piercing screech just after one of the characters said, “Should you kill me?” It echo’s in my mind.

The horse has been repeating in my life for years now, far more than any city boy should have experienced. Probably due to my last post, I had a dream about them. I was back at my Catholic grade school poking a stick into an air conditioner. Outside the window I saw people riding through the play ground. Then I saw my aunt Jane riding bare back. I asked myself with astonishment, “Is she riding bare back?”, not convinced of what I was seeing.

I just took a brake from painting to eat lunch and watched an episode of lost. Kate was in the jungle and saw a horse but had a difficult time believing what she saw. Later she asked Sayid if he believed in ghosts and wondered allowed if she was crazy for seeing an improbable animal in the jungle.

Back at the “mind experiment / doomsday button compound” Locke and Mr. Eko discussed the odds of having a plane break apart in mid air and two sections landing safely on separate sides of the island. Then both groups finding compounds, one with a film projector, an edited doomsday orientation film and a computer that needs the cursed numbers entered every 108 minutes. And the other group finding a bible with the middle cut out and the missing part of the film stashed away. Mr. Eko said, “Don’t mistake coincidence for fate.”

They spliced the film together but the extra footage didn’t have any new information.

After explaining to my friend Sparkbaby, that I’m either crazy or a human agency is interacting with me covertly, she stated that the reason I think that it can’t be the supernatural is because of my western-logic biases. She sent me an excerpt from “Monocultures of the Mind” By Vandana Shiva, which posits that the scientific label is used to suppress and exterminate alternative knowledges.

Here is the excerpt:

IN ARGENTINA, when the dominant political system faces dissent, it responds by making the dissidents disappear. The ‘desparacidos’ or the disappeared dissidents share the fate of local knowledge systems throughout the world, which have been conquered through the politics of disappearance, not the politics of debate and dialogue.

The disappearance of local knowledge through its interaction with the dominant western knowledge takes place at many levels, through many steps. First, local knowledge is made to disappear by simply not seeing it, by negating its very existence. This is very easy in the distant gaze of the globalising dominant system. The western systems of knowledge have generally been viewed as universal. However, the dominant system is also a local system, with its social basis in a particular culture, class and gender. It is not universal in an epistemological sense. It is merely the globalised version of a very local and parochial tradition. Emerging from a dominating and colonizing culture, modern knowledge systems are themselves colonizing.

The knowledge and power nexus is inherent in the dominant system because, as a conceptual framework, it is associated with a set of values based on power which emerged with the rise of commercial capitalism. It generates inequalities and domination by the way such knowledge is generated and structured, the way it is legitimized and alternatives are delegitimized, and by the way in which such knowledge transforms nature and society. Power is also built into the perspective which views the dominant system not as a globalised local tradition, but as a universal tradition, inherently superior to local systems. However, the dominant system is also the product of a particular culture.

As Harding observes:
We can now discern the effects of these cultural markings in the discrepancies between the methods of knowing and the interpretations of the world provided by the creators of modern western culture and those characteristics of the rest of us. Western culture’s favorite beliefs mirror in sometimes clear and sometimes distorting ways not the world as it is or as we might want it to be, but the social projects of their historically identifiable creators. The universal/local dichotomy is misplaced when applied to the western and indigenous traditions of knowledge, because the western is a local tradition which has been spread world wide through intellectual colonization. Continue Reading »

To protect the guilty, I will not be using proper names in my discussion of them, the others that have been communicating with me. I’m well aware that what I have experienced in the past two years is identical to the symptoms of schizophrenia: I hear messages in the radio, I believe the order my movies are delivered are systematically arranged to relate to my current state, messiah complex, messages directed to me in tee shirts and license plates, musical albums written about my life, television episodes written around me, etc. It’s such an egotistical thought that it even disgusts me a little. I’ve even speculated that the reason behind this is to learn how to push people into schizophrenic states. The Matrix has me and I don’t know what they want.

I know that I’ve had many false positives in my search for anomalies. Many times it’s hard to make a determination. But I regularly experience events that are way outside the bounds of the bell curve. Today on the radio I heard that this was the anniversary of civil rights leader Martin Luther King’s last speech. I know that King didn’t see god on this day for me but… My mind associated his speech with the inevitable danger I feel I’ve put myself in, in publishing about the people who have violated my civil rights: mental torture and violating my privacy.

[Dr. King’s mountain top speach]

Later I listened to the DJ as he repeatedly said that they were washing there hands of this traffic. Over and over, he’s washing his hands. I’ve been a dirty boy. I actually felt guilty for revealing what’s been happening to me. I got a wicked case of Stockholm. Don’t get me wrong, they haven’t done anything bad to me (that I know of) except driving me to the point of insanity and removing any feeling of privacy. When they made their first hello and the three intense months that followed, I realized they had been watching me for quite a long time, acquiring a massive amount of data on me to use in their manipulation. But there is a possibility that I’m wrong about the time they’ve had their eyes on me. I’m an open book with people and it wouldn’t take that long to build intelligence about my past to use against me. What’s bothered me the most is that if they do wash their hands of me how would I know that my privacy is actually back?

Before they said hello, I started to notice exceptionally strange things happening in my life when I bought my Quest minivan, traveled across the Republic painting and wrote my philosophy, 801. I felt like my Antisupernaturalism was being tested with weirdness. My family even said that god’s guiding me because I moved from New Orleans a month before the storm. If god does exist, he like Ray bans. But that’s another story.

An hour ago I finished watching the first episode of the second season of lost, “Man of science, Man of faith.” You know, that’s the show about a bunch of people that end up on an island and all the people have freakish events that put them there. Jack and the crew blew the hatch that Lock found in the middle of the ghost infested jungle. The hatch only opened from the inside and when it came off had the word “quarantine” on the inside. Hurley warned against opening it because a set of cursed numbers were engraved on the outside. I believe the numbers are 4 8 15 16 36 and 42. 42, of course, is the answer the improbability computer spit out to the question, “what is the purpose of life?” in “A Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy.” I took a screen shot of the wall at the bottom of the hatch

As you can see, there is the number 42, a bunch of Jebus fishies, a house (the symbol of the self), an arrow pointing up, the word “SICK” and the number 108 in the middle of a sun. I tattooed the symbol of the sun (also a symbol for freemasonry) on my ankle when I was 15.

Jack: It was a Tour de Stade.
Sarah: What?
Jack: When you run all the steps in every section of a stadium up and down.
Sarah: Why would you do that?
Jack: I’m intense.
Sarah: Did you finish?
Jack: No, I hurt my ankle.
Sarah: That sucks for you.