Polytropy

There were a couple of tweets on the eve of Easter:

Just a reminder to make sure that you preach a doctrine of the resurrection tomorrow that is not reducible to that of the old IWW song “Joe Hill”

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It’s a good song! I find it moving! But if that’s all we have to say about the resurrection (and I have heard many sermons that suggest that it is) – well, we should all be doing something else with our lives.

Fortunately, of course, it’s not all we have to say.

The author was Ben Crosby, whose Twitter bio includes:

Priest | Anglican | PhD Student, Ecclesiastical History | Prayer Book Protestant

The first of his Easter tweets included the lyrics of “Joe Hill” as an image:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” says he,
“I never died” says he.

“In Salt Lake City, Joe,” says I,
Him standing by my bed,
“They framed you on a murder charge,”
Says Joe, “But I ain’t dead,”
Says Joe, “But I ain’t dead.”

“The Copper Bosses killed you Joe,
they shot you Joe” says I.
“Takes more than guns to kill a man”
Says Joe “I didn’t die”
Says Joe “I didn’t die”

And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes.
Says Joe “What they can never kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize”

From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
Where workers strike and organize
it’s there you’ll find Joe Hill,
it’s there you’ll find Joe Hill!

Easter means more than the song, I suppose, because Joe Hill earned his immortality, by organizing. “Takes more than guns to kill a man” says Joe. Tacitly, something does kill us, or can. On the contrary, says John Donne:

DEath be not proud, though ſome have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not ſoe,
For, thoſe, whom thou think’ſt, thou doſt overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canſt thou kill mee.
From reſt and ſleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleaſure, then from thee, much more muſt flow,
And ſooneſt our beſt men with thee doe goe,
Reſt of their bones, and ſoules deliverie.
Thou art ſlave to Fate, Chance, kings, and deſperate men,
And doſt with poyſon, warre, and ſickneſſe dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us ſleepe as well,
And better then thy ſtroake ; why ſwell’ſt thou then ?
One ſhort ſleepe paſt, wee wake eternally,
And death ſhall be no more ; death, thou ſhalt die.

That is Holy Sonnet X, with the typography and from the source that I used in “Donne’s Undertaking.” Why death shall die is taken up in Holy Sonnet XI:

SPit in my face you Jewes, and pierce my ſide,
Buffet, and ſcoffe, ſcourge, and crucifie mee,
For I have ſinn’d, and ſinn’d, and onely hee,
Who could do no iniquitie, hath dyed :
But by my death can not be ſatisfied
My ſinnes, which paſſe the Jewes impiety :
They kill’d once an inglorious man, but I
Crucifie him daily, being now glorified.
Oh let mee then, his ſtrange love ſtill admire :
Kings pardon, but he bore our puniſhment.
And Iacob came cloth’d in vile harſh attire.
But to ſupplant, and with gainfull intent :
God cloth’d himſelfe in vile mans fleſh, that ſo
Hee might be weake enough to ſuffer woe.

Even though he may take more of it onto himself, Donne would seem to assign guilt to Jews generally. He also seems to forget the detail reported in John 19:34, that a Roman soldier (thus not a Jew) pierced the side of Jesus, after he had given up the ghost. Perhaps Donne still intends to refer only to those compatriots who actually abused Jesus on the original Good Friday. In that case though, I see no reason to refer to Jews as such.

Neither then is that sufficient reason to dismiss the doctrine expressed, that God freed us of the punishment of death by torture by taking it on Himself.

I asked Ben Crosby,

What more have you got to say? I can use my own imagination, but perhaps you have something written and posted somewhere

Saying “This is a good place to start,” he tweeted a poem by a 28-year-old John Updike, “Seven Stanzas at Easter” (1960):

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That – pierced – died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

It is surely important that this is a poem and not a scholarly memoir.

One reason why I am looking back at these things is my reading of The Relevance of Science (1964) by C. F. von Weizsäcker, who participated in nuclear research in Nazi Germany. The author alludes to this in Chapter 1:

No well-established servitude rests mainly on brute physical force. It rests on a domination of minds. I lived under a dictatorship for twelve years. I did not behave like a hero, but I studied the functioning of the system. Perhaps the main weakness of that particular dictatorship was that it did not believe in science; still it knew how to apply the means provided by science. For example it has led me to believe to this day that the radio contains a more deep-rooted danger than modern weapons do.

Today’s radio would be the internet – algorithmically selected texts and videos, to be more precise.

“I lived under a dictatorship for twelve years,” says von Weizsäcker. Thus Malcolm Nance seems naive to write now, in “Five Steps To Resist The Coming Tyranny,”

Make no mistake, we, the American people, are entering into a four-year tyranny never before seen in our history. We just do not know how bad it will get, but remember, a minority of the electorate (just 31%!) voted in a wanton authoritarian to run actively on a campaign to wreak revenge on his enemies.

A tyranny respects no statutory term limit.

Having reviewed Babylonian, Jewish, and Greek mythology in the previous chapters, von Weizsäcker says in Chapter 5,

I am a Christian, or I should rather say: I try to be a Christian. This is not a traditionalist’s position. I have even found much of the Christian tradition, both in thought and in life, difficult to understand, and some of it impossible to follow. But, if this is a possible English phrase, I have been hit by the word of Christ.

I have been hit by how Jesus says,

The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.

This seems to reflect an Aristotelian teaching, and it might also be called a “luxury belief,” as I discussed in “Foresight.”

I shall probably be posting more about von Weizsäcker’s book. Meanwhile, I go back to words I drafted last Easter about some bizarre beliefs.

One of those beliefs is in “digital statehood.”

Central government is simply no longer capable of addressing our needs because the world for which it was designed has changed.

The internet, for example, has made place less important, so national borders seem increasingly arbitrary.

That’s by Sam Venis, writing on The Network State, by Balaji Srinivasan.

If place is less important, and national borders arbitrary, what about the borders of time? Plato had Socrates found a virtual state, two millenia ago, and we are all invited to be citizens. At the end of Book IX of the Republic (in the translation of Allan Bloom), Socrates says, to Glaucon, of “the man who has intelligence,”

“with honors too, he looks to the same thing; he will willingly partake of and taste those that he believes will make him better, while those that would overturn his established habit he will flee, in private and in public.”

“Then,” he said, “if it’s that he cares about, he won’t be willing to mind the political things.”

“Yes, by the dog,” I said, “he will in his own city, very much so. However, perhaps he won’t in his fatherland unless some divine chance coincidentally comes to pass.”

“I understand,” he said. “You mean he will in the city whose foundation we have now gone through, the one that has its place in speeches, since I don’t suppose it exists anywhere on earth.”

“But in heaven,” I said, “perhaps, a pattern is laid up for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees. It doesn’t make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere. For he would mind the things of this city alone, and of no other.”

“That’s likely,” he said.

Concerning the author of The Network State, it says on Wikipedia,

In 2017, the Trump Administration considered appointing Srinivasan as FDA Commissioner. While being considered for the appointment, Srinivasan deleted all of his tweets, including tweets critical of the FDA. In one such deleted tweet, Srinivasan wrote, “For every thalidomide, many dead from slowed approvals.”

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In 2020 Srinivasan moved to Singapore.

Why not move to Socrates’s city in heaven?

One can already move virtually to a Baltic state.

Estonia now aims to build a borderless digital society through its e-Residency platform. The platform is open to foreigners from anywhere in the world regardless of citizenship. Anyone in the world can now apply to become an e-Resident of Estonia only by submitting an application online together with €100.

That’s according to Yeap Yee Lin, final year law student of the Faculty of Law, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur.

People might want to move to Estonia “to establish and manage their business online while enjoying the benefit of the EU business environment.” Yee Lin describes the country in gushing terms, but something is missing.

Being a totally paperless nation, Estonia backs up the whole nation’s data in “data embassies” that are scattered around the world. These data embassies function like normal embassies and the data embassies will be fired up in the event of a national emergency. This means that if Estonia faces an attack or an invasion, the entire government or the entire country can simply go into hibernation and be rebooted when the time is right. The entire government and the country will still be able to continue to run without a hitch even when the country’s physical boundaries have been compromised.

Joe Hill ridiculed the promise of pie in the sky. After a Russian invasion, will Estonians themselves go on being proud in the cloud?

Again, according to John Updike,

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That – pierced – died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

That’s poetry, perhaps not to be translated into the mode of a scientific research article, even though the writer does go on to say:

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

Which door does Balaji Srinivasan want to walk through? Socrates tells of two options observed by “Er, son of Armenius, by race a Pamphylian,” who

said that when his soul departed, it made a journey in the company of many, and they came to a certain demonic place, where there were two openings in the earth next to one another, and, again, two in the heaven, above and opposite the others. Between them sat judges who, when they had passed judgment, told the just to continue their journey to the right and upward, through the heaven; and they attached signs of the judgments in front of them. The unjust they told to continue their journey to the left and down, and they had behind them signs of everything they had done.

Are today’s would-be digital citizens being more realistic?

If Platonists and Christians have ridiculous beliefs, they aren’t the only ones. It takes an astonishing level of credulity to entertain the following fantasy:

Suppose that we develop superintelligence safely, govern it well, and make good use of the cornucopian wealth and near magical technological powers that this technology can unlock. If this transition to the machine intelligence era goes well, human labor becomes obsolete. We would thus enter a condition of “post-instrumentality”, in which our efforts are not needed for any practical purpose. Furthermore, at technological maturity, human nature becomes entirely malleable.

That’s about the book by Nick Bostrom called Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World.

I read about Balaji Srinivasan’s book in the Guardian Weekly (15 July 2022). On the opposite page, Simon Tisdall wrote,

Across the geopolitical west, public trust and confidence in the institutions underpinning democracy is waning …

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Institutional breakdown in the US has led some to ask whether the country is ungovernable.

Nick Bostrom imagines we could “develop superintelligence safely” and “govern it well.” How can we do that, if we cannot even govern ourselves? It would take superintelligence to govern superintelligence, it seems to me.

According to the “auto-generated” transcript of the interview that introduced me to Bostrom’s ideas,

… the only way for example to to know mathematics is to invest a bunch [9:39] of time and effort into learning mathematics but at technological maturity if you could just sort of [9:44] download the the math Algebra 2 module uh at the Press of a button then there [9:51] would be no need to exert effort to learn mathematics right right now you [9:57] have to like if you want to be fit you have have to go to the gym and work out but if you could just pop a pill and [10:03] your body does the same thing …

I wonder whether Bostrom is testing my credulity here. Can he really believe in the possibility of what he describes?

To have things without working for them is an old dream, sung for example thus:

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There’s a land that’s fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees
And the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

That source passes along the suppressed closing verses, revealing the previous ones to be a swindle:

The punk rolled up his big blue eyes
And said to the jocker, Sandy,
I’ve hiked and hiked and wandered too,
But I ain’t seen any candy.
I’ve hiked and hiked till my feet are sore
And I’ll be damned if I hike any more
To be buggered sore like a hobo’s whore
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

Sometimes we do get things without working for them. It’s called luck, or τὸ αὐτόματον; Aristotle distinguishes it as a species of chance, ἡ τύχη, in the Physics.

Some people resent others for having luck. See Maugham’s fictionalized exchange with one George Ramsey, near the end of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” first published in 1924. Better, read the whole story, which is only four pages in The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham.

“You’re not going to deny that all my life I’ve been hard-working, decent, respectable and straightforward. After a life of industry and thrift I can look forward to retiring on a small income in gilt-edged securities. I’ve always done my duty in that state of life in which it has pleased Providence to place me.”

“True.”

“And you can’t deny that Tom has been an idle, worthless, dissolute and dishonourable rogue. If there were any justice he’d be in the workhouse.”

“True.”

George grew red in the face.

“A few weeks ago he became engaged to a woman old enough to be his mother. And now she’s died and left him everything she had. Half a million pounds, a yacht, a house in London and a house in the country.”

It seems Bostrom is trying to tell us we can all be Tom Ramsey.

Maybe he goes on to warn us not to be. I’m just astonished that a supposed polymath can have the idea that all of mathematics is already somehow known.

• It isn’t known; more is discovered all the time.
• It cannot all be known, by Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

Maybe Bostrom doesn’t mean that. Maybe he means only that what is already known could be taught at the press of a button.

That’s still not my sense of how knowledge can possibly work.

I had the following exchange in September of 2023. Somebody wrote, with a screenshot of some Greek text,

Aristotle: “to examine every opinion is most futile, perhaps.”

Fortunately we have set up social media to test this ancient hypothesis against modern technology.

I responded, as I often do when people do not supply precise references:

If I hadn’t been reading this myself recently, I might have appreciated knowing it was at 1095a28, I.iv.4

That other person took a pose:

if you can’t identify Aristotle lines, in Greek, at a glance, then maybe my tweets aren’t for you

I quoted the passage that Collingwood alluded to in his 1940 lectures, “Goodness, Rightness, Utility,” as I mentioned in “‘It Was Good’”:

A standard to set alongside Aristotle’s own:

τῆς πολιτικῆς οὐκ ἔστιν οἰκεῖος ἀκροατὴς ὁ νέος … διαφέρει δ᾽ οὐδὲν νέος τὴν ἡλικίαν ἢ τὸ ἦθος νεαρός … τοῖς γὰρ τοιούτοις ἀνόνητος ἡ γνῶσις γίνεται, καθάπερ τοῖς ἀκρατέσιν

I linked to the translation of Rackham:

the young are not fit to be students of Political Science … And it makes no difference whether they are young in years or immature in character … for to such persons their knowledge is of no use, any more than it is to persons of defective self-restraint.

Our bodies mature, without any particular effort on our part. Our minds don’t. There’s no automatic passage from childhood to adulthood – or from ignorance to knowledge.

So it seems to me, and apparently to Aristotle. Perhaps a parent of grown children can gainsay me. I don’t think Bostrom can:

Even Bostrom’s marriage is largely mediated by technology. His wife, Susan, has a Ph.D. in the sociology of medicine and a bright, down-to-earth manner. (“She teases me about the Terminator and the robot army,” he told me.) They met thirteen years ago, and for all but six months they have lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic, even after the recent birth of their son. The arrangement is voluntary: she prefers Montreal; his work keeps him at Oxford. They Skype several times a day, and he directs as much international travel as possible through Canada, so they can meet in non-digital form.

That was nine years ago; I don’t know whether the couple’s living arrangements have changed.

According to Wikipedia, citing a Financial Times article that I cannot reach, Bostrom “did some turns on London’s stand-up comedy circuit.” Maybe I haven’t got his punchline.

Another joker is, or was, Marvin Minsky, who

was bullish and provocative; one of his favourite gambits was to declare the human brain nothing but a “meat machine” whose functions could be reproduced, or even surpassed, by human-made machines. Weizenbaum disliked him from the start …

That’s from “Weizenbaum’s nightmares: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI,” by Ben Tarnoff (July 25, 2023).

In 1966, Joseph Wiezenbaum created the program called Eliza, which simulated a psychotherapist.

Early in his career, Sigmund Freud noticed that his patients kept falling in love with him. It wasn’t because he was exceptionally charming or good-looking, he concluded. Instead, something more interesting was going on: transference. Briefly, transference refers to our tendency to project feelings about someone from our past on to someone in our present.

The projection can be onto a program too:

“Some subjects have been very hard to convince that Eliza (with its present script) is not human,” Weizenbaum wrote …

Weizenbaum had stumbled across the computerised version of transference, with people attributing understanding, empathy and other human characteristics to software.

The “success,” so to speak, of Eliza: it helped with getting tenure and

brought Weizenbaum into the orbit of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Project, which had been set up in 1958 by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky.

If the brain is a meat machine, as Minsky said, then making it work forever should be possible. I believe this is the dream of people like Ray Kurzweil, whom I took up when writing “On Being Given to Know.”

Meanwhile, as we have seen through some poetry, Christians are already promised eternal life.

One might suggest that the promise is to be realized with our brains, which can figure out how to achieve immortality through cryonics or transhumanism.

In Ankara in the aughts, I had a colleague from Germany who had grown up Catholic, but converted to Protestantism. He rejected the theory of evolution because it conflicted with his faith. I said something like, “Why don’t you use the brain God gave you?”

Some people believe it is up to God to protect them from Covid-19 and other diseases. As others point out, the way God protects us is by giving us the intelligence to develop such prophylactic measures as vaccines and N95 masks.

“God helps those who help themselves”: this is not a specifically Christian teaching, but is suggested in some Bible passages listed currently in the Wikipedia article on the doctrine.

The article traces its subject to the Greeks. I see it in a passage I looked at in “Motivated Reasoning in the Cyropaedia of Xenophon.” This is from I.vi.5–6:

Cambyses

And do you remember certain other conclusions on which we were agreed? How we felt there were certain things that the gods had permitted us to attain through learning and study and training? The accomplishment of these is the reward

• of effort,
• not of idleness;

in these it is only when we have done all that it is our duty to do that we are justified in asking for blessings from the gods.

Cyrus

I remember very well that you used to talk to me in that way: and indeed I could not but agree with the arguments you gave. You used to say that a man had no right to

• pray he might win a cavalry charge if he had never learnt how to ride, or
• triumph over master-bowmen if he could not draw a bow, or
• bring a ship safe home to harbour if he did not know how to steer, or
• be rewarded with a plenteous harvest if he had not so much as sown grain into the ground, or
• come home safe from battle if he took no precautions whatsoever …

Such thinking may explain the specificity of such prayers as are seen for example in the Iliad. In Book VI, Hecuba’s sister Theano prays Athena, not that the whole Greek effort collapse, but only that the spear of Diomedes break. Even this will turn out to have been too much to ask.

Christians pray some version of what Jesus taught:

And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.

The request for forgiveness is combined with an attempt to deserve it.

For all I know, research into artificial intelligence is only an attempt to deserve the promise of Easter.