any sufficiently advanced blogging is indistinguishable from blather

The Nature of God

Here are some of my thoughts on the nature of God. Nothing new here in the Christian sense, certainly. The subject was on my mind due to a project I’m working on, but I thought I’d record my thoughts here. That said, I don’t claim these thoughts necessarily represent the “Christian view” of God in some sort of scholarly totality or summation, but they certainly don’t oppose it. These thoughts are short and quite basic. (And rather sloppily written. If one is interested in the subject, I’m sure plenty of philosophers have done a better job of writing about the subject than me, and certainly in more depth.)

Firstly, the nature of God is supreme goodness. As in, they are equal, they are the same thing. One does not exist independently of the other. God does not “decide” what is “good” as if God exists first, and then creates or decides what is good, or as if He defines what is good by doing arbitrary things that are then considered good just because He did them. Rather, they are the same thing. To believe that there is an absolute goodness against which anything else may be judged is to believe in God. Notice that you cannot judge goodness to be good or bad in and of itself. It is good by definition. You can’t say, “Ah, good is actually bad!” In this way, you cannot logically say that God is bad or does wrong things. Otherwise you are judging Him to a higher standard, and that higher standard would then be God, not the entity you’re blaming for doing wrong things.

God is also absolute truth. Again, the same thing. Not “God defines truth” or “creates truth” or something. They’re inherent in each other. To accept one is to accept the other.

God is also love. Once again, the same thing. Not “God loves” or “God decides what love is”. God and love are the same thing. When one experiences love (though its incomplete in this life), one experiences the actual God (or at least part of God, because our experience is currently imperfect).

In this way, we see these things — supreme goodness, absolute truth, and love — are all inherent in each other, and that is what we call God.

From this, one can see that the nature of God transcends human consciousness (and is “invisible” and “mysterious” in His totality in this way). That is, God is not a human-like consciousness with just a bunch of power, as a god like Zeus might be understood. He is not inherently separate from the physical world or a human consciousness in the manner that our minds are separate from each other’s minds and our physical bodies are separate from other objects in our environment. (I think this is usually the sort of God atheists reject, which I do too. The misunderstanding comes from thinking of God and absolute truth as separate sorts of things that can be compared to one another.)

Finally, and this is the most profound part and difficult to express, God and humans are part of each other. Not metaphorically, like in a story when some character says “I’ll be in your heart!” Literally. A human soul is made of God. God made you out of Himself, and you remain in Himself (whether or not you experience it). You and God are more intimately connected than you can understand in this world; seeing God allows you to know yourself completely. This is why God “knows you” better than you know yourself and why you can keep no secrets from Him. He is not “spying” on you from outside your consciousness with magical powers; you are part of His nature. This is also why He can hear all your prayers. This is not to say that you are God. Obviously you’re not. God is the totality of which you are a part; you are a part of God and God is present in your being. To do good deeds is to act in accordance with your nature, which is in accordance with God.

Furthermore, to “see” this connection, to see God through the self, or the self through God, is to experience the most comfort and joy and purity you can ever know. Of course, we are clouded from this connection in this current life, save for an intellectual or spiritual understanding, but it can be experienced before death. (I don’t know how. Wish I did! Certainly an honest prayer is probably where to begin.)

OK, I’m tired, so I’m not sure I’ve expressed my thoughts as well as I might have otherwise, but there it is. God bless!

By S P Hannifin, ago

Boycott The Hobbit films!

The second Hobbit film will be coming out soon, but you can count me out! Why? Well, it’s come to my attention that Mr. Tolkien, author of the book on which the film is based, is an evil bigot! Why? Well, just read what he wrote about sex!

This is a fallen world. The dislocation of sex-instinct is one of the chief symptoms of the Fall. The world has been ‘going to the bad’ all down the ages. The various social forms shift, and each new mode has its special dangers: but the ‘hard spirit of concupiscence’ has walked down every street, and sat leering in every house, since Adam fell. We will leave aside the ‘immoral’ results. These you desire not to be dragged into.

Clearly any person who still holds this ancient and unpopular view is a hateful bigot who just doesn’t want certain people to be happy by doing whatever they sexually please. So intolerant! These people must be punished with boycotting. We all know that it has recently been discovered that the only way to happiness for the human race is if we all embrace and celebrate sexual indulgence in all its beautiful forms. If you see The Hobbit film, you’re giving money to the estate of Tolkien, which might go to some people who believe what he believed! How awful is that?!

What you can do instead:

* Start a pledge and sign it and keep your hard earned dollars away from Tolkien’s estate and people who believe in certain sexual morals.

* Tell all your friends what Tolkien really believed. The ultimate plan is that people who believe in these sexual morals will run out of money and starve or will switch their opinion to celebrate our sexual choices.

* On whatever day the movie comes out, instead of going to the theater, attend a Skip Hobbit event with your wise and tolerant friends. We’ll be hosting events all over the place, because nothing says “tolerance!” like pre-organized events dedicated to keeping money away from one specific person who is famous and thinks we’re doing something that’s not good for us, like acting on our sexual desires, whatever they may be.

* Donate money or volunteer your time to organizations that support the celebration of sexual indulgence!

* If you have any control in the media, report this boycott! Pretend you’re being unbiased, of course, and are just reporting the news.

By doing this, we’ll send an ominous message to all those who do not bow to our sexual indulgences that they will be publically singled out, shamed, and financially punished for being honest about their evil beliefs.

We’re going to nobly and heroically change the world by singling out one oppressive bigot at a time! If sexual indulgence itself was enough to make us happy, we wouldn’t need everyone’s approval. But of course everyone’s approval is actually a big factor to our happiness, so we really need to fight for it! Equality!

———-

In the interest of letting all sides of this controversial issue express their views, here’s a letter from a reader:

Dear New Blather,

I agree that Tolkien is an evil bigot, but I sure don’t think a boycott is the way to go! Think of all the other people who worked on the movie! I mean, art and artists are two separate things. But, I must be clear, I agree with you about all the sexual indulgence stuff. I mean, Tolkien is just so bigoted in that area. I can’t argue with that. I want everyone to like me, so I really want to be clear about that. But, yeah, a boycott is going a little too far. I really want to see the movie, after all. So I think my opinion is a bit more mainstream than yours. But, again, I do agree that Tolkien sure is evil what with his religious views and all. I mean, we should be able to have some sexual indulgence without other people saying it’s wrong. To say it’s wrong is just evil. And to have what we think is wrong reflected in law is evil because separation of church and state and stuff and imposing religion is wrong. But a boycott? No.

———-

Finally, the movie studio has released a statement:

We here at the Hobbit movie studio just want to make it clear that Tolkien is dead and we really don’t care about his beliefs. We just want your money, so whatever your beliefs are, we think they’re OK. If you feel like you’re part of some sort of community, we just want you to know that we support you. We only made the movie based on Tolkien’s work because his book was popular, not because we agree with any of his old stupid sexual beliefs. Sex for everyone, that’s what we say!

By S P Hannifin, ago

That book on melody…

I started writing a book on melody back in 2008, I think it was. Maybe even a bit before then. But then I got sidetracked programming melody generators, namely my Android app and my online version. I learned quite a lot from these endeavors, so I’m glad I spent time with them before continuing my book; it made for fantastic research. I still plan on creating a desktop version of the melody generator, but there’s a lot of interface programming to learn. I really hate interface programming!

In the meantime, I’m returning to writing that book on melody. I’m starting it from scratch, though I have plenty of notes to work from that I made while programming the melody generators, so I have almost all the content I need. It’s just a matter of sorting it out and presenting it in an easy-to-follow way.

For now, I aim on having it done by the Fourth of July, and then releasing it as soon as I can after that. It will most likely be a self-published ebook, though I’m not yet sure how I’ll sell it. I’ll worry about that later.

And now I better turn off my computer… big storm above…

By S P Hannifin, ago

For playtime

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play,” said Arthur C. Clarke.

Seems a reasonable guess, considering the promises of technological innovations.

But I’d say the technology is already here, today. We have it. We have the technology to allow us to play the days away, living life enjoying each other’s company rather than laboring and stressing over work done for money. There are still some things we must do, such as maintain our electric and water maintenance facilities, our farming and food distribution, our public safety and emergency services. What else? These services don’t need to cost anything but time, in the same way our household chores cost nothing but time. We just train an entire community to do these things, and then someone will only have to volunteer a couple hours every week or month at most.

A lot of the work most people do nowadays is, in the big scheme of things, unnecessary. We sell things and provide services to each other that we really don’t need. We want to protect ownership and private property so we won’t bother each other. Get off my property! We just like giving someone else the privelege of our working hours in exchange for the money so that we can turn around and make the same trade with someone else for whatever services or goods we want. Want, because other people have them. Want, but don’t need. (Plus, having grown up in such an environment, we feel safe with it, for the most part. There’s some strange fear that the world might collapse if we change things too drastically. Nevermind how drastically things have already changed in just the last century. Who wants to go live in 1913?)

Ultimately, most of our economics are based on vanity, and that may be the hardest thing to give up. We like to protect the possibility of getting that new gadget, bragging about our next achievement, buying a big house. Can we share? No, it’s mine! Socialist!

But, if we did give it up, we’d all be far wealthier than we could imagine, because life would be one big playtime. Isn’t that the sort of life people desire to gain through wealth? And all this time, the cost isn’t actually monetary.

By S P Hannifin, ago

The Sins of Jurassic Park?

Found on YouTube:

Firstly, Jurassic Park has many more continuity errors than are featured in this video. The film has a ton. It’s discontinuity heaven.

However, I don’t think some of this video’s critiques are valid, namely the ones about Hammond having to be present for all the Mr. DNA intros, about the cars visiting the T-Rex paddock second, or the cars reversing their directions on the track. Any astute viewer should recognize that the tour these visitors are taking is not representative of the tour intended for actual future guests. The point of these people visiting the island is to “sign off” on the island, endorsing it for the sake of potential investors. The park is still unfinished. As Dr. Arnold notes, “Vehicle headlights are on and they’re not responding. Those shouldn’t be running off the car batteries. Item 151 on today’s glitch list. We have all the problems of a major theme park and a major zoo, and the computers aren’t even on their feet yet.” And as Muldoon later notes, “We need locking mechanisms on the vehicle doors!” They still have things to work on, things to finish. Even the visitor’s center is full of builders and painters working on the place. Think they’ll have that on the tour?

Also, as silly as the “Unix system” looks, it was a real system:

Of course, one must keep in mind that Jurassic Park’s computer systems and programs that ran the park were very flawed, as their development was apparently headed by Dennis Nedry, who, as far as we can tell, cared more about money than the integrity of his work. In fact, his computer programs were designed to let him sabotage Hammond, not keep everyone safe. Of course, though Nedry is sleazy, part of this is Hammond’s fault; his greedy ambition to be the first one to create something like his park blinded him to its many faults, not least of all its dependence on an apparently giant (two-million-lines-of-code is a lot) highly-non-modular highly-automated computer infrastructure to control its systems, an obvious recipe for disaster even if the lead programmer had the best of intentions and was simply naive. Which, of course, Nedry was not. After all, even Nedry knew better than to mess with the raptor fences!

By S P Hannifin, ago

Got my twitter back

Looks like a got my twitter back! Didn’t get an email or anything from twitter support, but suspended notices aren’t popping up anymore and everything looks back to normal. It looks like my account had been compromised somehow. I’ll be searching around for how that could have happened. But the link to my website had been changed to something spammy, which I’m betting is why my account was suspended. Glad I got it back, but it looks like I lost all my followers and everyone I was following, so that will take some time to rebuild. Hope it won’t happen again.

By S P Hannifin, ago

The universality of superior intelligence

I’ve heard it theorized that if we ever contact sentient intelligent aliens from other planets, we may have no way to relate to them because their methods of thinking will be too outlandish for us. They will think in fundamentally different ways.

Nonsense, I say! While there may be some variations on thought processing speed, memory, and perceptions (being able to hear different sound frequencies, for instance, or having a stronger sense of smell, or perhaps being able to sense infrared light, though I’m not sure what good that would do), I theorize the foundations of intelligence are like the laws of physics or mathematics; they are universal. Nature always hones in on the same principles.

In this way, I believe humans are the most intelligent possible beings in the universe. If something cannot be understood by a human, then it cannot be understood by any physical being at all. There may be aliens just as intelligent as humans, but there can be no aliens with “superior” intelligence (of the “I understand things you cannot even fathom!” sort, not the “I can do math in my head faster than you!” sort), because there exist no different systems of logic that are just as valid as the system humans use, because our system is based on immutable principles ingrained in the nature of nature of itself. (I do not mean the system of logic as defined by mathematical laws in a text book; these systems are incomplete. We do not yet fully recognize the logic we use, yet we use it naturally. Its subtle simpleness and ease of use is what makes so hard to find, but we’re getting there.)

By S P Hannifin, ago

Twitter suspended me

I just tried tweeting something, and couldn’t. My twitter account has been suspended! (Don’t have schadenfreude!) I’m guessing they have some automated algorithmic process for suspending accounts and mine came up as a false-positive. (Too many links, maybe? I do post links a bit, but they’re never misleading or repetitive or spammy.) Either that or this is the work of my arch-nemesis, Finneas Blinn, who is envious of my intellect and success and seeks to ruin me in every way.

Fortunately, Twitter allows you to submit a ticket asking them to review and restore your account, which I of course immediately did.

We’ll see how long it takes. Googling around, seems false-positives are not uncommon, and restoration can take anywhere from a couple of days to several weeks. So it’s like querying agents!

Anyway, I’m not too worried. I only follow around 40 people and only have around 240 followers. I don’t have a business that relies on tweeting people or something, so waiting won’t bother me. Besides, there’s always you, WordPress, my ever faithful friend and ally.

Oh, and here’s the tweet I was trying to tweet when my account suddenly became suspended: “almost done plotting my next novel… have a summary of all the scenes, but still need to work out the specifics of connecting some of them”

By S P Hannifin, ago

Professor turns test into a game, blogger remains unimpressed

Here’s an interesting article a friend shared on Facebook. The article has gotten a lot of likes and tweets, and commentators on the article congratulate the author, a professor of Behavioral Ecology at UCLA, for his wonderful brilliant idea.

His idea? He let his students “cheat” on an exam by letting them work with each other and with any other resource they wanted. The “meta” idea is that they’d learn something about behavior by how they take the test.

What would they learn?

I don’t know. The article is rather vague on the specifics, save for an idea any idiot should know, “If we all work together, we can do more.” That doesn’t mean working together is automatically a good thing, obviously; it depends on what people are trying to achieve. If two or more people are trying to achieve the same thing and lose nothing by another person achieving it, then, of course, work together. I think the human species would’ve died out long ago if humans didn’t innately understand this, so I fail to see anything very amazing or brilliant by exemplifying this in allowing such cooperative behavior to emerge in a set of unconventional exam rules.

The professor writes:

In the end, the students learned what social insects like ants and termites have known for hundreds of millions of years. To win at some games, cooperation is better than competition. Unity that arises through a diversity of opinion is stronger than any solitary competitor.

But did the students themselves realize this?

Is that supposed to be profound?

What really bugs me more than anything, however, is when the professor writes:

Is the take-home message, then, that cheating is good? Well…no. Although by conventional test-taking rules, the students were cheating, they actually weren’t in this case. Instead, they were changing their goal in the Education Game from “Get a higher grade than my classmates” to “Get to the best answer.” This also required them to make new rules for test taking.

What student’s goal is merely to “get a higher grade than my classmate”? Is the value of a D worth more if everyone else got an F? I think the goal for most students is to “get the best grade I can based on how much I value it.” Because, in the end, for the purposes of the student, the true worth of a grade is decided by himself, not a professor or an institution’s arbitrary rating system.

You see, you silly professor, your test was never a “game.” At least, not in the sense you thought it was. You do not get to decide what the students are playing for, so you never had control of the rules in the first place. The students have always been in control of the rules, because they’re in control of their own goals. The rules any educator establishes for his students are part of the educator’s goals, what the educators are playing for, what the educators want to do with their student’s grades and what they want those grades to reflect.

So I fail to see how the professor accomplished anything worthwhile.

If you want to accomplish something worthwhile, follow my education philosophies!

By S P Hannifin, ago