Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

Picked up my DVD of the sequel today -- Whether you're into all the allegorical religious imagery or not, these are some darn cool movies, imho.

The Fall of Man is an interesting story. Cut through the whole 'did-this-really-happen' debate and you arrive at a story that is, at its core, a moral tale about the folly of trying to achieve greatness ('knowledge', or to be as gods) through easy, tangible routes via devices in this world (Eve and the apple).

Interestingly, the theme is very closely paralleled in the tale of Cain who realizes folly in achieving greatness by eliminating the competition, Abel (Cain is then banished from the crummy land his parents were banished to).

The 'Fall' is echoed again in the Fall of the Tower of Babylon (wherein Man attempts greatness through physical feats and is of course cast down), and yet again in the successfull temptation of Judas by an earthly device as simple and base as money, followed by his own death.

I feel my fingertips touching a keyboard. Just in front of me I see a computer. But do I? What is a keyboard? What is a computer? What I see are photons that are bouncing off the computer. The computer is really a collection of atoms, consisting mostly of empty space. The computer feels solid enough because of the repulsion of electromagnetic fields. But really it's just a sea of subatomic particles, bouncing a river of photons toward my eyes.

The 'computer' is a concept in my brain, an interpretation, an idea. A model of reality. The particles are the reality, and with quantum mechanics even their reality is a tad "fuzzy". I'm surrounded by a sea of particles and bouncing photons, and for some reason my brain interprets all these things as a computer, a room, a telephone.

I sometimes wonder if how what I see as these objects in any way resembles what others see in their mind's eye when they see the same object. Is what looks 'red' to me really appears 'blue' in another's eye, yet we all say 'red' because we recognize it as such? When we both look at a 'chair', do we really see the same image in each of our brains? Or have our brains simply been trained to recognize 'chair' based on entirely different, but individually recognizable, mental modelings of the same collection of atoms?

The thing we tend to call 'reality' or what we think of as 'reality' is just ideas, nothing more than models in our brain constructed to make sense of the raging sea of particles, photons and bosons that makes up the Universe. It's weird.

Looks like a good winter project.

The sort of god(s) I generally hypothesize about tend to be of a co-existent sort, as I have a problem with the notion of invoking god(s) as a "First Cause". Aside from that this goes against my understanding of the dependent nature of cause-and-effect, something about the notion of its necessity doesn't make sense to me.

Mainly, I have heard people say that the Universe is too great to have happened by accident, i.e. it has to be 'designed'. And yet, we would never say that this creation is greater than its Creator. If the creation is too great not to have been designed, then isn't the even-greater Creator also too great not to have been designed?

If not, then what does the principle of divine "First Cause" resolve?

To take a detour: in some discussions we have basically a human-like god who shows very human emotions, regularly intervenes in ancient history with various miracles and occasionally takes sides in wars.

At the other end of the spectrum we have more abstract notions of God. Often described as indescribable or unimaginable.

It seems more modern people of even traditional religions increasingly regard God to be of the latter sort. Anyone read Tao te Ching? Interestingly, Taoism seems to carry this abstractification to an extreme, six centuries before Christianity even existed. References an extremely abstract and indescribable higher power of sorts that pervades all nature, time, and being. Not even what many would consider a 'god' per se.

Looks attractive now at 13 PE and 3%+ dividend. Also looks like it could be scraping the bottom of its long-term uptrend channel.

Also, with this morning's selloff Microsoft's valuation is in the low range of what it has seen the last decade.

Accept disgrace willingly.
Accept misfortune as the human condition.

What do you mean by "Accept disgrace willingly"?
Accept being unimportant.
Do not be concerned with loss or gain.
This is called "accepting disgrace willingly."

What do you mean by "Accept misfortune as the human condition"?
Misfortune comes from having a body.
Without a body, how could there be misfortune?

Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things.
Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things.


Lao Tzu, Tao-te-Ching (Ch. 13)

According to a literal reading of the deluge story, then God wipes out everything in a futile effort to rid the world of evil.

Keep in mind that with Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel and so forth this whole "mankind" thing had so far been just one fiasco after another. And since the 'flood' we have gone through many ages, some much more corrupt than others, but all having a considerable degree of 'wickedness' involved in them.

Why wouldn't God be smart enough to forsee that, absent a complete re-write of Man's operating system, the Deluge clearly would not have any lasting effect?

Is the whole Rainbow clause evidence that he did in fact forsee it? But if He knew it wouldn't work then why go through the whole 'Flood' charade in the first place?

Perhaps to send a message to future 'believers' about what happens to those who walk with God (get saved) vs. those who don't (get soaked). But then it would sound more like a salvation allegory. ;-)

We like to think that we have control over our own lives. When you make a choice, are you truly making a deeply willed choice from within, exercising your free will? Or is your 'choice' really just the result of your brain processing stimuli in a predictable manner more or less dictated by the results of your past experience and genetic makeup?

A physicist once boasted that if he knew the position and momentum of every particle in the Universe that he could predict the entire future in every detail. Quantum mechanics changed this of course by introducing inherent randomness to the equation. But, randomness is not philosophy the same thing as actual 'choice' is it? It's just one more thing we don't have any control over. But then what really IS choice, anyway?

So, do you think we have 'free will', or 'choice'? Or is this a convenient illusion, to hide from us the fact that we are all slaves of 'cause and effect'?