Posted on

Greatness: Constructed Reality and You

Here’s the thing: you’re already familiar with constructed reality on a day-to-day basis.

Have you ever had a dream that felt real? So real you couldn’t tell it was a dream until afterward? A dream in which all the pieces fit together, logically, within the dream (even if they seemed entirely absurd after you woke up)?

That’s a constructed reality. Dreams are our minds’ way of communicating to us, when we’re unwilling to listen to direct signals. It builds up a whole world for us, a whole universe, and lets us experience what we refuse to accept in logical impulses.

My point is this: our brains are GOOD at building realities. We all know it. We all experience it all the time.

Have you ever seen someone hypnotized? I very much hope so. It’s an amazing experience (being hypnotized, yes, but even just watching). You tell someone he’s a chicken and he begins to behave as though he’s a chicken. Yeah, that’s a silly one. My favorite is the three-year-old. Watch how someone becomes a three-year-old, within his own mind.

As a matter of fact…HAVE you ever been hypnotized? You can realize you’re participating in an imaginary universe (you’re conscious the whole time) even as you are completely submersed in it. You’re not ACTING, the suggested scene becomes truly real for you and imposes itself on you, but there’s a part of Man that can sit outside and watch, even as the body and mind are caught up in the illusion.

That’s a very important point, right there, and it’s what keeps the rest of what I’m saying from being just mad, useless ramblings. We are capable of stepping outside and watching the play, even as our bodies and minds are trapped within it. Most of us choose NOT to, which…

Well, you’ve heard that rule about hypnosis, that the hypnotist can’t make you do anything you normally wouldn’t do. That’s not entirely true. It’s possible, in normal hypnosis, to let the monitoring part of your mind…go to sleep. Most people don’t (they don’t trust the hypnotist), but it’s possible, and then you just go along.

It’s also possible, as a hypnotist, to build so deceptive a world, so captivating an illusion, that the environment itself (rather than your suggestion) causes the hypnotized to do something they wouldn’t normally do. Maybe you couldn’t Command a hypnotized woman to take off all her clothes in front of a huge audience, but you could convince her that her clothes were full of vicious, biting ants….

Both of those are real concerns. What we do, with our science and our logic and our arm’s-length consideration of philosophy, is put to sleep that monitoring part of our mind. We like to stop thinking of this world as an illusion, because that’s less WORK. It also means we no longer have the freedom to manipulate our own role within it, or to stop the play if it gets too absurd (or repulsive).

We need to be reminded, from time to time, that the reality we’re living in is just an illusion we’ve dreamed up for ourselves. We need to look at it from the outside because we (especially we Christians) know we have that power, that perspective. Constantly examine your life, your reality, to make sure it’s not misusing you, not leading you down paths you don’t want to follow.

Posted on

Greatness: Okay, for Real, The Matrix

(Now…I always have trouble in these conversations knowing exactly when to STOP. That is, I can’t necessarily tell when I’ve lain a foundation AND drawn an explicit conclusion. Or, more often, I’ll lay a foundation and think the conclusion is so obvious that it would be insulting to ACTUALLY state it explicitly, and so I don’t, and then find out I was overly obscure.

That will be an ongoing issue. Any time you see me drop a conversation before I’ve made my point, and you’re not quite sure where I was going with it, please mention that in the comments, and I’ll try to fill out my argument.

All that said, today’s post might be going too far. If you already know where I’m going tying in “The Matrix,” please feel free to skip it.)

(See! I made it past the parentheses this time! Well, not yet….)

The Matrix took me entirely by surprise. I suppose it did that for most folks since, coming into the theatre, all we really knew was that Morpheus couldn’t tell us what the Matrix was. And something about Kung Fu.

It was, however, in its entirety a visualization of Post Modern Social Constructionism. I’m not trying to use The Matrix as a metaphor or anything — it was very clearly drawing on these ideas from the beginning. It’s useful to me, as it has provided a very popular, base-level understanding of what Social Constructionism implies about the universe.

(Okay, I’m sometimes a stickler for proper typography and whatnot, but I’m writing this on a forum that doesn’t EASILY allow for hypertext markup, and I’m going to be referring to The Matrix far too often for me to switch into Edit HTML mode, add the less-than-i-greater-than brackets, and switch back out every time I name it. So I’m just going to throw it in title case, and trust that all of us consenting adults reading this article can recognize that I’m referring to the movie whenever I capitalize the “The,” and to the computer construct when I don’t, and make your best judgment calls when I start a sentence with it….)

The Matrix presents us with a universe exactly like our own, reality just as we know it, and then proceeds to demonstrate that this reality is simply a constructed hallucination — sensory input fed directly to our brains. Remember the “brain in a vat” question that I posted about early on? It’s been around for AGES. The Matrix is just another story along the way that has played with the idea.

In the Matrix, all the people are sharing in the same hallucination. They can all point to the same object, and say, “That object is red, and round, and suspended from that tree-shaped thing.” They can coordinate their descriptions of the world, and verify each other’s claims about reality, and successfully build more and more complicated technologies that function more and more effectively based on their observation of this entirely fictional reality.

(Did you catch that? It’s science, as we know it. We SEE it happening within the movie. Neo’s a hacker, after all. Within the Matrix science examines and describes and tests and discards disproved hypotheses and — within the story — all of that only succeeds in supporting the artificial reality, none of it has any ACCESS to the kind of information that would serve to reveal Real Truth. Science can only test the materials of observable reality, which is self-supporting.)

Now, for the sake of completeness, I’m going to make some explicit comparisons. Whereas the reality inhabited by most of the human population in The Matrix was one built using computer code (machine language), Social Constructionism (at least my form of it) proposes that this reality is built out of human language. Whenever we interact socially with another person, we are taking part in (ahem…”jacking in” to) the constructed reality — the shared hallucination of what is real.

In other words, the fake world which we are fed to keep us docile and powerless is provided, not by malevolent machines seeking world domination, but by…us. By our constant desire to understand the world around us, down to the last detail.

So. In The Matrix we have a scene where Neo and Morpheus face each other in a construct training room, and they fight (yada yada), and Morpheus asks, “You think that’s air you’re breathing?” And…well, the whole point of his training is the realization that everything around us is a fiction that we are fed. And, if we choose not to play within the rules, then we can be stronger than human bodies are capable of, we can leap farther, we can defy the laws of gravity (because they’re “rules” that people choose to obey, not governing forces with authority over us).

Christians believe this, on some level. Christians believe that all of natural reality, all the laws of this reality, are “rules” that we, out of politeness, choose to go along with. Otherwise how could Jesus have called a man forth from death? How could Elijah have raised a dead child? They weren’t practicing medicine, they were performing miracles. Walking on water, turning water to blood (or wine), blotting out the sun or causing it to stand still for half a day (or cast its shadow backward several steps). We BELIEVE that the laws of nature are pliable. Social Constructionists explain why.

So why are there walls? Why don’t I have a big pile of gold? Why don’t any of us fly? Eh? Eh???

There’s a reason I keep referring to it as “reality,” in spite of my claims. It IS real to us. There’s a scene in the movie where Trinity looks all serious and says, “The mind makes it real.” That’s exactly it. Social Constructionism is something that happens within our mind — our only connection to our environment. If our mind believes there is a wall ahead of us that will block our way, we will not be able to walk through it. If our mind believes we are bound to the earth, it won’t let us fly.

Yeah. That’s an easy one to prove (or at least, to support) in the negative. Not so easy in the positive, because I don’t know anyone who has achieved transcendence on such a level that he can bestow it on others.

Y’see, even if you MET someone who had freed himself enough from the constructed reality that he could fly, YOU wouldn’t believe he could fly. It doesn’t work within your universe. And your mind would be doing everything it could to keep him from flying or, if not that, to convince you that he wasn’t. At long last, you (and those sane folks around you) would probably just convince yourself it was a dream or hallucination, if nothing else worked.

Right. Tricky. I’m not trying to play word games here to wriggle out of an argument. I’m just recognizing that I CAN’T logically prove to you a system that, at its basest, denies the practical accuracy of logic.

And, to sell out all those Social Constructionists depending on me for a dispassionate, reasoned answer, I can’t provide that, either, because my philosophy was born out of my religion. I already TOLD you where the positive proof comes from, for me. It’s in axe-heads floating to the surface, and snake-statues curing poison, and ten loaves becoming twelve basketsful, and that fig tree and that mountain and the fish with the denarii in its mouth.

It’s right there in Genesis. God made a world outside of Heaven, a temporal place, and in it he constructed Man out of temporal components, but breathed into it Life. He made Man in his own image — Infinite, but wearing a temporal suit.

So. We (the movie and me, both) propose a world of Real Truth, that we can’t see or touch or taste or feel, but that is yet somehow far more important than the environment we experience, and a reality that we CAN see and touch and taste and feel, that exists only as a dream which we are all sharing in.

Not only that, but it’s vitally important to exist within that dream world, but a Man can do SO much more within it once he has recognized it for what it is. He’s still vulnerable — always vulnerable to the seductive lie that imagined reality IS Real Truth — but he’s able to do more than all the dreaming sheep around him and, with any luck at all, liberate a few of them along the way.

There we go. Now I’m done with The Matrix unless (miracle of miracles) we get some comments conversation going.

Posted on

Greatness: Some Honesty to Upset You Science-Types

I’d kinda planned on skipping these points, or glossing them over, so as not to lose some of you completely (I’m looking at you, Kris). But, any meaningful philosophical discussion really does require a significant degree of intellectual honesty, so I’ll drop some on you.

I believe pretty much everything modern science claims to be true of the universe, is true of the universe. There! You’ve gotta love that. Evolutionary speciation, Einsteinian can’t-go-faster-than-the-speed-of-light-for-no-good-reason-really, Heliocentricity, all that.

I ALSO believe pretty much everything ancient science (often called “Mythology”) claimed to be true of the universe, was true of the universe. See? That’s where I lost you.

Today, the world is fifteen billion years old, or whatever actual number you want to claim. Four hundred years ago, the world was four thousand years old. That’s where I’m going. All natural matter may be constructed out of 136 elements, but two thousand years ago it only took four elements to do the same thing.

I honestly, seriously believe that our world is socially constructed. All of the rules that govern the universe, all natural laws (as well as all nature) are pieced together from the mind of Man. Everything that can be tested, everything that can be measured, everything that can be communicated by way of symbols is simply a manufactured (might as well say “imaginary”) expression of some Real Truth to which we have NO shared access.

Therefore whatever number we put on the age of the earth is just an expression of how we are currently interpreting the nature of the world. If it is more useful for our present-day scientists to believe in time-intensive evolution in order to construct a functional explanation for the nature of animals as we observe them today, then our universe is flexible enough to include a world that’s billions of years old.

All it takes to make it true is to say it, and convince other people to believe it.

I believe lightning used to be heavenly javelins, and now it’s static discharge. I believe birds used to fly because they had so much Air in their nature, and now they do it using updrafts and hollow bones. I believe heat used to be an invisible liquid-like agent that flowed between objects, seeking balance, and now it’s an expression of energy.

I believe margarine used to be better for you than butter, and then butter was better for you than margarine, and now margarine is better for you than butter (I think). And where do we stand with eggs? And coffee?

NONE of this is real. It’s all just a game that all of humanity is playing, every day, and we change the goal sometimes, and we change the rules sometimes, but for the most part, at any given time, everybody agrees to a basic set of rules and we all follow them, and keep playing. That’s what society is.

That’s constructed reality.

There IS something real out there, but it’s not governed by any Natural laws. It’s not accessible to science, or logic. It’s Other, it’s Outside. We encounter it all the time, but in the process of trying to explain it, communicate it, understand it, we make something not-quite-like-it, we make a symbol, and then we pass that symbol around for years, forgetting the original source that it was supposed to describe. We make up uses for that symbol, and modify it over time, until it is very much a part of our lives, but no longer CLOSE to the Truth it was supposed to describe.

And then we encounter that Truth again, and it’s entirely foreign to us, so we try to understand, describe, and we end up making a NEW symbol for it, which we adopt, and pass around, and use for different purposes, but neither one is the actual thing, see?

So we still have myths about lightning as the javelins of the gods (the old symbol), and we still keep those around, and use them for certain purposes (they make good poetic images, for instance), but obviously that’s not the REAL thing, lightning. We know that now, because we’ve encountered lightning on a different level. We have a new symbol for it, this static discharge idea…. But that’s NO MORE the real thing than the javelin image was.

ALL of it (everything we say is true of the universe) is just a symbol we’re passing around, and modifying with each iteration, until it’s not the same thing at all. In other words, the MORE accurate you make your description (through testing and discussion and professional journals) the LESS like the original impulse it is. Yeah, you hate this paragraph now that I’m talking about lightning as static discharge, but go back and reread the paragraph before this one. It’s a constant cycle. It’s HOW WE DO THINGS.

Do you see what I mean? Do you see what I’m saying? It’s basically what you believe, too, except….

Ehff. You tell me. That’s what comments are FOR.

Posted on

Greatness: Resources, Powers, and Good and Evil

Power is not good or evil. Power is a tool.

(Fantasy authors are obligated to devote at least one chapter in their first novel to this topic. Generally it is a discussion between an old, wise man, and a confused young hero.)

The metaphor generally goes something like this:
* A hammer is a useful tool for building things.
* A wicked man can use a hammer to kill another man.

Umm…that’s the gist of it right there. A tool is not good or evil, it’s just a method for Man to express his base nature (whether IT be good or evil). That fact begins with hammers and goes right on up to money and/or magic.

It frustrates me to see people with access to resources that they are unwilling to use, for fear that the resource will somehow taint them. No…that’s not right. What frustrates me is that people can see very powerful resources being put to wicked use (money, political power, social networking), RECOGNIZE the power of those resources, and then (because wicked people are using them) these good people swear off those resources forever.

In other words, we see people using power in bad ways, and so we leave that power entirely in their grasp, and don’t even try to use it in good ways.

There is some kind of social concept floating around, somewhere, about “legitimate” ways to achieve your ends, I guess. Praying for a new bicycle, I know, is strictly against the rules. Buying your way into Congress is, too, even though we know everyone in Congress got there that way.

I dunno. I’m more of a pragmatist than most, I guess. This world is what it is — you’re welcome to despise the unfairness of the systems of power and resources that it runs on, but unless you’re willing to use those (for noble purposes), you’ll always be at a wholly self-imposed disadvantage in your attempts to make things better.

Just…thoughts.

Posted on

God and Greatness: Attainable Virtue

It is a very good book, as I said before. It SUCKS, as I said before, but it is a very good book. You all have to read it, on pain of dire disgrace.

I liked this bit:
——————————————————————————
God had said that it was only the men who could give up their jealous selves, their futile individualities of happiness and sorrow, who would die peacefully and enter the ring. He that would save his life was asked to lose it.

Yet there was something in the old white head which could not accept the godly view. Obviously you might cure a cancer of the womb by not having a womb in the first place. Sweeping and drastic remedies could cut out anything — and life with the cut. Ideal advice, which nobody was built to follow, was no advice at all. Advising heaven to earth was useless.

——————————————————————————
I love that last paragraph. Not the particular application to which it’s put — I just included that for context — but the central idea. It’s why I’m saying so much of what I’m trying to say — why, even if the church WORKS as it is, we drastically need to revise what we do with it in our lives.

Any religion of Man which makes it evil to BE a Man, is doomed from the start (although, if human history is any example, destined to be quite popular). We can’t HELP being people, we were made that way. It needs to be a starting point, not a destination avoided at all costs! Egads!

Anyway, I’m drained and spent. Stupid, stupid, stupid history! Danged dirty Mordred. If ever anyone needs a punch in the face, it was him. Seriously, this is worse than Gladiator (at least in that, it was Russel Crowe getting the whack). This is…Germanicus. Well…it’s King Arthur. Real tragedy. Damn.

Go pick up a copy. Read it. We can share in the cursing.

Posted on

Greatness: The Seventh Sense

I have a quote for you today, a passage from “The Once and Future King.” First, though, let me mention the book to you.

You should read it. You, personally, should read it, if you haven’t already (or haven’t otherwise made your own study of King Arthur’s legend).

It’s the story of King Arthur. It’s actually (at least presented as) the STORY of “Le Morte d’Arthur,” Mallory’s ancient work on the legend. It is much more readable, HIGHLY political in nature (that is, the author uses the story to make some very deliberate and apparent points which I quite doubt are inherent to the legend), but still a very worthwhile read.

You have heard of King Arthur. It’s really a good idea to learn something about the man. About the legend, rather, which is more meaningful in its way.

Also (and this perhaps more than all the rest I’ve said) there should be a LAW that no one is allowed to watch the movie “First Knight” unless they’ve first read “The Once and Future King.” I mean that most earnestly! Dirty stinkin’ movie….

*Mutter, grumble.*

Okay! On to the nature of Man, and the human experience:
——————————————————————————
There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. You can’t teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically–she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years. And then, when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living–not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. She no longer hopes to live by seeking the truth–if women ever do hope this–but continues henceforth under the guidance of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense, which she won when she first learned to walk, and now she has the seventh one–knowledge of the world.
——————————————————————————
I don’t think the author is being particularly sexist here–White refers to women so often in this passage because the characters under discussion are Guinever and Elaine–both young women. And the “seeking the truth” bit is a direct reference to the motives of Lancelot, who is the common link between them.

I like this passage a lot. I like the idea of developing a special sense of balance to get through life, even when it refuses to obey any logical rules. (For one thing, it makes me hopeful.) I have my doubts that the world is ever as logical as you guys all think it is.

White says that young people believe in order and rules, and older people give up on that (obviously that appears briefly in the quoted passage, but there is more detail on it later). I don’t feel like I’m old before my time (which is a change, really — for all of my childhood I felt that way, even through high school). But I think I see more chaos in life than most of you do. I like the idea of learning, with time and experience, not see some order beneath it, but just to find a way to weather it.

Also, I really like this passage because it feels like something I would write. The voice and the sentiment…it works for me.

Posted on

Greatness: Reading Recommendation

(First, let me say this: if you people don’t COMMENT, how am I going to know how wrong I am? C’mon!)

Okay, finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (it’s mentioned in the Recommended Reading post I made earlier). I now highly urge you to read this book. Not just because it’s got ideas relevant to these Conversations (which is why I recommended it before), but just because it’s a tremendous read. Everyone who reads this blog at all, will enjoy reading that book.

It’s amazing what the book is attempting to do. Y’know how the Romans didn’t feel like their people had a strong enough sense of pride in their Romanity, so they made up the story of Aeneas to connect their history to the ancient Greek mythology?

No? Well, they did. And it worked. And I think, at some point, Julius Caesar ended up tracing his ancestry back to Mars or Apollo or some such. The deMedicis did the same thing, creating a myth that they were somehow part of a much greater, ancient mythos.

It feels like Samantha Clarke is trying to do that for Britain today. She’s telling this story that is clearly fictional as though it were history, and she is setting up precisely that kind of myth. It’s as big as King Arthur, in its own way. It’s one of those stories that is more real than actual history, because it brings Meaning to the lives of the people.

Daniel and I have often discussed the need for more mythology in today’s world, and pretty much decided it would have to be some new kind of thing. Something that incorporated technology and naturalism and (*shudder*) logic, in order to WORK with today’s expectations.

Samantha Clarke didn’t bother with that. This is pure, old-fashioned, highly Brit-Lit mythology. I love it. It’s incredibly fun to read.

Also, I get the impression there’s going to be a sequel, but the book is quite excellent as a standalone.

Anyway, go buy it. Read it. And, also, comment on my posts, or else!

Posted on

God and Greatness: Those Who Are For Us

I went to church with Trish last night. I’ve commented before how topics on my mind seem to crop up throughout the day in surprising places, most notably at church. There was a Bible passage I’d discussed with Toby at work yesterday morning, and when I sat down in the pew for class Wednesday night, I actually thought to myself, wryly, “I wonder how that passage is going to come up in Terry’s lesson.”

Unfortunately, he robbed me of that opportunity. He opened the class with a question — what Bible passages or Biblical concepts do you think of when going through a tough time, for consolation — and the passage on my mind was too perfect an answer. So I brought it up, and spoilt my little game. Alas.

Anyway, here’s the passage we discussed yesterday:
——————————————————————————
Now the king of Aram was warring against Israel; and he counseled with his servants saying, “In such and such a place shall be my camp.”

The man of God sent word to the king of Israel saying, “Beware that you do not pass this place, for the Arameans are coming down there.”

The king of Israel sent to the place about which the man of God had told him; thus he warned him, so that he guarded himself there, more than once or twice.

Now the heart of the king of Aram was enraged over this thing; and he called his servants and said to them, “Will you tell me which of us is for the king of Israel?”

One of his servants said, “No, my lord, O king; but Elisha, the prophet who is in Israel, tells the king of Israel the words that you speak in your bedroom.”

So he said, “Go and see where he is, that I may send and take him.” And it was told him, saying, “Behold, he is in Dothan.”

He sent horses and chariots and a great army there, and they came by night and surrounded the city.

Now when the attendant of the man of God had risen early and gone out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was circling the city. And his servant said to him, “Alas, my master! What shall we do?”

So he answered, “Do not fear, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.”

Then Elisha prayed and said, “O LORD, I pray, open his eyes that he may see ” And the LORD opened the servant’s eyes and he saw; and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.

When they came down to him, Elisha prayed to the LORD and said, “Strike this people with blindness, I pray.” So He struck them with blindness according to the word of Elisha.

Then Elisha said to them, “This is not the way, nor is this the city; follow me and I will bring you to the man whom you seek.” And he brought them to Samaria.

When they had come into Samaria, Elisha said, “O LORD, open the eyes of these men, that they may see.” So the LORD opened their eyes and they saw; and behold, they were in the midst of Samaria.

Then the king of Israel when he saw them, said to Elisha, “My father, shall I kill them? Shall I kill them?”

He answered, “You shall not kill them. Would you kill those you have taken captive with your sword and with your bow? Set bread and water before them, that they may eat and drink and go to their master.”

So he prepared a great feast for them; and when they had eaten and drunk he sent them away, and they went to their master. And the marauding bands of Arameans did not come again into the land of Israel.

——————————————————————————
I always have a little trouble at this point, deciding whether to make a sermon out of the passage (as long habit in the church of Christ and as son of a minister have taught me to do), or do I just make my point, and get on with it.

I love II Kings, though, and all the stories therein, so I think I’ll make a sermon out of it, and hope that you get my Conversation points in the process.

First, notice what is going on in this passage. Pay attention to the way Elisha uses the power that God has given him. He is spying on an enemy king, to protect his own nation (and I’m very much caught up in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel right now, so this concept is very much on my mind). It’s essentially a political use of magic power.

When the Aramean army shows up at Elisha’s house, his servant freaks out. I realize we all know this story, but look what’s happening here (in the terminology I’ve been using). The armies of men show up, all terrifying in their Constructed might. They have learned how to use weapons to impose their will on the world (their own world, and those of others). They have learned how to unite their wills in great numbers, to overpower smaller numbers of men. They show up in great power, to threaten the Man of God, and his servant is afraid.

And Elisha just tuts, and asks God to open his eyes, so that the servant may see the great host arrayed around him. Elisha is a Man who lives by faith, who casually accepts the inexplicable presence of God’s Real Truth in his life, so he’s not blinded by Constructed reality. He doesn’t hide the power of God from his own mind, he accepts it on its terms. He doesn’t recognize the Constructed strength of his enemy, for he knows that, in Real terms, it’s insignificant.

And so he prays, and for a moment at least, his servant is able to see the world as it really is. He can still see the Aramean army around him with their temporal power, but all across the hillside he can see the fiery host, the army on Elisha’s side.

And then…well, there are two ways to interpret what it was he saw. Perhaps it was the Heavenly host, God’s army of angels lined up to do battle with the enemy. That’s what I was always taught to read, here. And if that’s the case, then it’s an army of Real Truth that can wash away Constructed might as though it were nothing, cobwebs and moonlight, by its sheer DENSITY. I think there’s reason to believe differently, though.

The passage just before this, in II Kings, is of the axehead that floats. If you’re not familiar with it, I recommend you go read it. Briefly, a man is out chopping wood, and loses the head of a borrowed axe in the river. It sinks, and the man is distraught, but Elisha comes and convinces the axehead to float up to the surface, and the fellow gets it back.

We are not supposed to believe, there, that Elisha summoned an angel and asked it to fetch the axehead for him. I’ve never been given THAT impression. Rather, I think it was a little Construction on Elisha’s part. By faith, he knows how ephemeral this world is, and by faith he is willing to release himself from it, to shape it as God wants him to. I don’t see Elisha (often) bending the world to suit him. Less so than Elijah, even. He trusts in God, and bends the world to make it more like the kind of world God would want Man to live in. That’s admirable.

I think that’s what we saw with the axehead — Construction. Elisha rearranged the natural laws so that iron would float, for just a moment, in just that place, so that reality itself bent to serve the needs of Man (its master).

And, returning to today’s passage (or, rather, yesterday’s) concerning the fiery host — here’s the thing: he didn’t USE them.

That’s the thing that makes me hesitate to call them an army of angels. Perhaps they are, perhaps the angels are just a great cloud of witnesses, and Elisha wanted to remind his servant that they existed. But it seems more like Construction to me — primarily because they took on precisely the form of an army. A Constructed thing, designed to rival the threat of Men, but magical in nature. When a mighty army of Men came against them, Elisha conjured up a mightier army of fire….

And then didn’t use them. I mean to say, I think this was just an example. Elisha was showing his servant that this world DOES NOT FOLLOW the laws we believe it follows. If a strong man comes against us, we can have something stronger on our side. If an army comes against us, we can have a mightier army on our side. It takes just the faith of a mustard seed to reorder reality….

So the servant’s eyes were opened to the power available to Elisha. The servant was able to see the protectors available. The same might that allowed Elisha to rescue a worker’s axehead also allowed him to defeat an army, but he didn’t use it.

Instead, he prayed. “When they came down to him, Elisha prayed to the LORD and said, ‘Strike this people with blindness, I pray.’ So He struck them with blindness according to the word of Elisha.” And God did as he asked, changing Constructed reality by the power of his almighty hand. This is the density thing, again. The angels could have done the same (well, not the same as God, but they could easily have overwhelmed Constructed reality), but, as I said, Elisha didn’t call on the angels (which is why I doubt they were there — there’s no NEED for them to have been there).

The rest of the story is about respecting human beings as human beings. Elisha’s a funny little guy, but he sure comes off classy in the end of this story (and the king of Israel, not so much). It’s a good resolution, so I left it in the quote, but it’s beyond the scope of my argument, so I’ll leave it at that.

I’ve explored two possible interpretations of the fiery host here, and one is very much within my worldview and the other is probably one you’re more familiar with, but I’m not particularly arguing in support of either. The important point is this: there is something Real, all around us, something available to us that makes us more powerful than reality. More powerful than natural law or even than the world of Men.

There is something unseen, that is more Real than all the reality you deal with every day. Remember that.

Posted on

Greatness: Colors Again

Daniel just sent this link, and I find it awesome.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18625015.500

The news story is quite short. Read it through. It’s not arguing my case at all, but it’s talking about the issue, and that alone is cool. Kris, you should love it. Nobody else really got the POINT of my question, so I’m just posting this as proof that it’s a valid question in the first place.

Thanks for the link, Dan.

Posted on

Greatness: Point-by-Point

There appears to be some significant level of misunderstanding what I am proposing to be the case, and what I am suggesting as a profitable course of action. So let me recap. Most of these are not new ideas (within these conversations), but I’m going to try to bullet-point a bunch of them, in a good order, to actually clarify what I’m saying.

1) There are base truths. People are real things, and there are forces and energies around us (including other people) which present themselves to us through our senses.

2) Real Truths are chaotic, inexplicable things. When we experience something through our senses, we interpret it in a way that is meaningful to our brains. To do this, we build a logical structure that can rationally contain the original experience.

3) Over time, each new experience must be interpreted into our rational understanding of the world in a way consistent with others. We begin to build more and more complex logical structures in order to accomodate these various conflicting stimuli.

4) One of our strongest systems for building rational structures is Language, which we use as a foundation for most of our other techniques. We name experiences, and then are able to group similar experiences using similar names. Mathematics is as much a language as English or Swahili, and serves as a very clear example of this.

5) By sharing language between two people, we can establish common points between our rational systems, and nail down our common experiences until we share the same interpretation of the base experience. (I could write pages and pages of articles on this point alone.)

6) When we teach another person our language, we teach them how to interpret base experiences. Thus the apparent similarity between individuals’ constructed worlds is actually crafted by the process of learning to communicate — once we have a chance to compare worlds at all, we’ve already made them similar.

7) “Constructionism” refers to the process of building a rational network to accomodate the unique human experiences. “Social Constructionism” is the process of sharing our constructed systems with others, and developing realities capable of overlapping.

8) Science is a Constructed System, in that it analyzes real experience and tries to explain its relationship to other real experiences (and predict future experiences based on that).

9) Religion is a Constructed System, in that it responds to the real relationship between Man and God and seeks to address the differences between them, providing a rational (if not logical or naturalistic) structure of behavior and belief to accomodate those relationships.

10) Philosophy is a Constructed System, in that it analyzes the most challenging and inexplicable of human experiences, and attempts to consolidate them into a comprehensible explanation.

11) Social Constructionism is a Constructed System, in that it recognizes the dissociation between reality and base experience, and seeks to rationally explain the source and method of a rational reality given irrational experience.

12) Okay, I’m done with that now.

13) Constructionism is the mechanism by which Man INTERPRETS his reality but, in the process, he imposes his will on it. Consider Schrodinger for this. Or Schroedinger. Or Schro:dinger. Howsoever it is spelt. By observing, we change things. Or, rather, we incorporate into our own, personal reality, a reflection of those real things which we observe, and this reflection is shaped by our understanding thereof. Thus, though there may be real things without, unchanged by our perception…the instance of those things within our personal universe is changed by our personality.

14) All rational creatures are, as part of being rational, capable of constructing for themselves these logical fantasies which are Constructed Systems. Rational beings are able to interpret their experiences and, in the process, build for themselves operational replicas of the world of Real Truth, with a kind of mental scaffolding they are able to use to navigate it. This scaffolding, rather than the environment containing it, is then taken to be the true reality, because it is logical and consistent.

15) It is the nature of rational beings to try to exercise these powers of Constructionism. It is difficult for rational beings to accept Real Truth as it presents itself to them, they want something more comfortable. Thus the drive to Construct reality.

16) I am not a Constructionist in that I’m advocating that people Construct more. I’m a Constructionist in that I believe (or…recognize) that this is the way the world is, and I’m trying to clarify that for everyone else. Yes, Science works, but that’s no reason to BELIEVE in Science. It works because we’ve made it work. I’m not suggesting that we Construct instead of practicing Science — I’m saying that Scientists are Constructing reality whenever they try to describe it. I’m not trying to stop them, I’m just trying to change your perspective a little bit.

17) Recognizing the difference between Constructionism and Naturalism allows us to meaningfully, intelligently believe in something greater than reality while still successfully functioning within reality. Naturalism only allows the latter. (Existentialism, on the other hand, only allows the former. Dirty hippies!)

18) The act of Construction is a rebellion against God. Some of you think I was calling for people to do more Constructing. I was not. The act of Construction is rebellion against God. It’s also something very much a part of temporal life. There are ways to escape it, but those ways are not easy and they’re not natural.

19) God created temporal Life for Man as an opportunity to act out our rebellious Constructionism (which, as I said, is an inherent tendency of rational beings) within an environment of only temporary consequences. We will all Construct our experiences, throughout our life, and this is rebellion against God, but it’s allowed…temporarily.

20) Heh. Temporarily. That’s a good one….

That’s my summary. At its barest, I think you could use “Construction” as a synonym for “Worldview” and get away with it. Construction is our interpretation of our experience. However, at its true Post-modern best, Construction recognizes that this Worldview is imaginary (that’s the point of the term — it’s something we built, not something foundational), and thus subject to deconstruction and reconstruction and just general fiddling with. And, if we can do that, we have no reason to be bound to our initial understanding of reality. We can build one more to our liking or, even better, build one closer to the reality that God wants us to experience.

Got that? We can change our world. That’s the point of Constructionism. And, with faith, we can change it into something more like what God wants. That’s maybe not THE ultimate purpose of Man, but it would be pretty good preparation for accepting Paradise when it’s offered, and make a whole lot of people’s lives better while they’re living them. Which isn’t a terrible ambition, y’know?