Computer Riddle

You like riddles, right?  Sure, we all do.  Well, I bring you one today that's an old favorite of mine.  Whoever gets the right answer can consider themselves the proud owner of The Fountain of Useless Knowledge Award.  The last time I offered this award it was such a rousing success that I figured I'd drag it out again.  Luckily, this time you don't need to go scouring the internet for answers (in fact, you better not.)  All you need to do is get some of those rusty cogs and gears working in you brain.  So, clear out the cobwebs and see if you can't figure this out.

Okay, so you're trapped in a room for some reason.  There are two doors through which you can exit this room.  One door leads to freedom, the other door leads to a certain, horrifying death that probably involves several sharp, rotating blades.  The doors are marked, "Door A" and "Door B", but unfortunately you have no idea which one leads to freedom and which one to death.  However, there are two computers in the room with you that you can turn to for helpful information.  These computers are marked "Computer 1" and "Computer 2", and they will answer any question you have, but you can only ask one question.  And there's a catch.  One of the computers always tells the truth without fail, and the other one always lies without fail, and again, you don't know which is which.  So how can you use your one question to lead you to freedom?

One of these men is a liar.

As before, I'll hold off on posting the comments, and I'll wait a few days before posting the answer in the comments myself if no one gets it.  I'll give it, say, to the end of the month.  Enjoy!

Some Radical Theories on the Cause of Deja Vu

I think it's safe to say that most of us are familiar with the phenomenon of Deja Vu, and have most likely experienced it at one time or another.  I've experienced it quite frequently; that unsettling sense that what is happening has already happened before.  Now, it seems that no one has a really solid answer on what causes this.  Explanations range from an association with another memory that you can't quite recall, to a crossing of the wires between long-term and short memories giving you the false impression that you're remembering your current experience.  Some of the explanations are slightly more exotic, involving delays in the processing times between your two eyes, or perhaps a mild epileptic episode.  But we want something more, don't we?  Uncanny experiences beg for uncanny explanations.  So with that in mind, I figured I'd throw around a few more radical possibilities (for entertainment purposes only, of course.)

THE MOBIUS THEORY

Scientists have speculated that The Big Bang may be a re-occurring event.  At some point it is believed that the universe will collapse in on itself in something called "The Big Crunch."  Possibly this could lead to another Big Bang and the whole cosmic carnival could set up its shops and tents all over again.  If this is so, we tend to imagine these cycles as consecutive, one following after the other in time, but what if they are actually concurrent?  What if The Big Crunch simply leads right back to the same Big Bang that started it all?  Rather than a series of universes, you end up with time just endlessly looping back on itself.  If this is the case, the fabric of space-time might be getting warn out and warped in some spots like a cassette tape that's been played over and over.  Deja Vu would be our momentary experience of these warps as we pass through them.

THE REPLACEMENT THEORY

Some have speculated that when you die your soul might go to a sort of Purgatory, a limbo-like place which is neither Heaven or Hell, but some kind of vague waiting area in between.  It's believed that your soul has to do penance in this place in order to move on.  Now, no one has ever been exactly clear on what this "penance" is.  Perhaps we have to briefly re-experience certain crucial moments of our lives, moments that might have seemed inconsequential at the time.  We have to briefly re-enter our bodies at some point in our lives and subtly nudge ourselves in a slightly different direction that will make all the difference down the line.  Our living consciousness, and our afterlife consciousness are momentarily unified and in sync.  One slightly spills over into the other.  This gives our afterlife consciousness the tenuous ability to affect our actions, while simultaneously giving our living consciousness the disorienting sense that it's remembering what's happening which we call Deja Vu.

THE CONTROL THEORY

How can you truly know that the things that you remember are real?  What evidence do you have?  Well, you have the fact of the memory itself, and you have the external evidence around you that bears witness to the past.  You continually use the one to verify the other.  You remember taking the garbage out.  You go look out in the can, and its there.  So what if there was an agency that could control your life by reprogramming your memories, with say, like a sort of wireless modem in your brain?  And what if they had people on the ground that could clean up the details so that it fit these new memories?  Everything would fit perfectly, and you'd be none the wiser.  Perhaps, though, there is a slight sensation you experience when new memories are being downloaded, or your existing memories are being altered.  Your brain has no way of noticing that your memories have been changed because it can't use the old memory as a point of reference, so it misinterprets this sensation as a confused double vision of the current experience called Deja Vu.

 ...and no, I'm not completely insane.       

Sartre's Consciousness

You have before you the picture of an apple.  You see it.  You are aware of it.  At some point you become aware that you are aware of it.  And now that I've mentioned it, you've become aware that you are aware of your awareness of it and...well, we could go on like this all day.  Consciousness is an elusive little bugger.  It constantly slips away.  Try to catch it working, and you find yourself falling into this kind of infinite regress.  Many people have misinterpreted this as a layering of consciousness, but actually it's a demonstration of its method of operation.

For instance, when we say that you are aware of your awareness of the apple, we mean that you've set up camp across the hill, trying to catch consciousness in the act.  But once you've done this, the immediate awareness of the apple that you're trying to perceive at work is only a concept of awareness.  It has no living vitality.  You're no longer viewing the apple through this "awareness."  You're no longer see anything through it.  You're only seeing the apple indirectly from your vantage point across the hill, as part of a composition involving the apple and this concept of immediate awareness.  When we say that you are aware that you are aware of your awareness of the apple, this mean that you've moved to yet another hill more distant than the other.  Now you've postulated two concepts of awareness, and you've positioned them in a relationship with one another, one viewing the apple, the second viewing the first.  But again, these are just concepts, ideas of awareness.  You're not really there.  You're up on the distant hill, viewing a broader composition involving the apple and these inter-related concepts of awareness.  So, you're not descending through layers of consciousness; you're shifting its vantage points.  You're only ever viewing the situation from one perspective.

Sartre's idea of consciousness is like a perfectly translucent lens having neither depth or substance.  You can never get around behind it or beside it or above it to see it, because it's consciousness itself that does the seeing.  Furthermore, consciousness only exists as consciousness insomuch as it is consciousness of something.  It is a subject exhausted entirely in its object.  It's existence lies completely in its function.  Your awareness of the apple exists as a view of the apple, as a relationship with the apple and nothing else.  And yet this awareness is not the apple.  It is a perception of the apple.  It is something other than the apple.  This gulf between subject and object was the crucial point for Sartre.

It is when consciousness is turned inward, that this gulf becomes significant.  Consciousness is the seat of our being.  It is the nucleus of ourselves.  It is the eye of our soul that peers through this lens.  When I am aware of the apple, it is I who has the immediate involvement, consumed entirely for the moment in my focus on the apple.  When consciousness shifts to consider this awareness, it is I who am viewing it from the new vantage point.  I am the subject, always withdrawn from my object.  I am not the apple.  I am not my concept of my awareness of the apple.  I am always something else.

So when we turn this lens on ourselves and view the things which constitute our person, we find this same withdraw.  I possess a body,  I own it, but yet I am not my body.  I am not my job, or my house, or my name, or my memories.  I'm not even my thoughts.  I am removed from these things as a subject is to an object, just as I am from the apple.  I have these things.  In some cases, I control these things, but yet I am not these things, not at the core foundation of my being.  I find myself constantly retreating to the far hill to gain a perspective on them.

Thus Sartre proposes the fundamental paradox of our existence.  Our consciousness, which holds our very being, continually slips free from any defining attributes or any substance that could constitute its identity.  It's always somewhere else.  It is always something else.  It exists entirely in not being the object of its focus, and yet its existence lies entirely in its focus on those objects.  You chase it down and it falls continually away into the dark.  It is a void, a tiny black hole drawing perception into it, and existing exclusively through this perception.

This will be the starting point of my next post on this matter.    

It's Actually the French Word for Suitcase

Perhaps you've been in this situation before.  You bump into your neighbor on your way in or out and you get to talking and they say something like, "Yeah, money's a little tight this year.  We might have to stick around here and have a staycation.", or you're talking to someone at the office and they say, "Look at this pretty necklace Bill gave me for our monthaversary."  If you're anything like me, you feel yourself caught somewhere between the urge to cringe, and the urge to grab the nearest pair of scissors and go to work on their tongue while screaming, "Hold still dammit!  You don't deserve the ability to speak!"  Okay, maybe you're nothing like me.

They're called portmanteau words, which I'm told is itself a french example of such a word.  I'll have to take their word for it, since I don't speak French.  A portmanteau word is the bastard child formed from the illicit union of two legitimate words.  It it is not a compound word, like "doghouse" or "chalkboard", because in those cases, the original words are left intact.  Portmanteau words are the result of a messy butchering and splicing process, the sort of thing you'd expect to find in the basement of a psychopathic mad scientist.  The entrails of etymology splatter the walls.  If you break down a word like "evacuation" into its different components you can trace them back to their Latin roots.  The creators of portmanteau words couldn't care less this about this sort of thing.  Search for the roots of "jazzercise" or "ghettolicious" and you'll find nothing but nonsense.  The mad scientist sews the heart of one word to the spleen of another.  Basic anatomy is none of his concern.  It's all about cuteness and flow.  So you end up with a word like "evacucation", which I'm just going to go ahead and declare is a vacation where you end up spending most of it sitting on the toilet.  (They told you not to drink the water.)

It's not easy for these illegitimate children, born out of the wedlock of proper syntax.  They are spawned indiscriminately by any fool with a mouth.  Some of them catch on, most of them are quickly left to return to the groan-inducing dust from whence they came.  "Workaholic" is certainly an inspiring success story for words like "bromance" and "sexting" which are still struggling to make their mark.  Hell, even spellcheck apparently recognizes it as a proper word, and it doesn't even recognize itself!  Then you have words like "motel" which have enjoyed respectable society for so long, they've forgotten when they came from.

They say necessity is the mother of invention and the portmanteau word demonstrates this to a fault....then it won't shut up...then we start dropping hints that it's time for it to leave...then eventually we threaten to call the cops if it doesn't stop with the corny jokes.  But the portmanteau never takes the hint.  "Look at the time!", it says, "We've been up all night.  I could stick around and maybe we could have brunch together.  Get it!?  It's like "breakfast" and "lunch" put together.  Hee Hee!"  Oh portmanteau word, don't make me kill you.

I'll admit that some of them fill a legitimate void.  Some of them are even pretty catchy.  But for every word like "televangelist", you get fifty other words like "shart" or "procrasturbate."  Seriously?  And "guesstimate" just has to go.  It's either an estimate or a guess you stupid excuse for a word!  You're either pretty sure, or you're taking a complete shot in the dark.  You can't be both.  The bottom line on most of these words is that they're just incredibly lame.  Someone out there thinks they're being cute or clever, or maybe they're just plain lazy, and then some other idiot decides to run with it and we all have to endure words like "frenemy", hoping that they die a quick painful death.  Oh well, as long as they don't start using nouns like "antique" as verbs.  Oh...really?  Well, that's just craptabulous.           

My Favorite Part of the Resurrection Story

The story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the cornerstones of Christianity.  It is the "good news" of the Gospels.  It is not my intention with this post to delve into the meaning and impact of this story in any kind of general way.  Nor am I going to attempt to unravel the apparent discrepancies between the different Gospel accounts of the story.  Nor am I going to attempt to definitively determine what degree of the story is fact or fiction, or whether it is completely one or the other.  As the ringmaster of this nuclear carnival, I reserve the right to put these matters off until another day, or indefinitely if I choose.  For now, I just want to consider one teeny, tiny little detail of the story.

In the story as it is told in the Gospel of Luke, after his resurrection Jesus appears to the disciples in the rooms where they are staying.  While they were staring at him, hardly believing their own eyes, he simply asks them if they have anything to eat.  Now, there aren't many moments bordering on the cute or the comical to be found anywhere in the Bible, but this always brings a smile to my face.  You can picture the disciples standing there with their eyes wide and their mouths open as Jesus strolls in and asks, "You guys got anything to eat around here.  I'm starving."  And why wouldn't he be?  After all, he hadn't eaten for three days.  Strangely enough, of all the details of the story, this one seems to feel the most authentic to me.  If I were to believe any of it, it would be on the basis of this.

Consider, for a moment, the possibility that the story is entirely fiction.  Some ancient storyteller sits down to make all this up.  He reaches this incredibly significant moment where Jesus returns from the underworld and appears before his disciples.  It would seem to be an occasion for some great revelation, some profound statement, the imparting of some incredible secret about life beyond the grave.  Having him ask for something to eat completely underplays the moment, almost comically.  It seems especially out of character for ancient literature, where the characters were usually towering, and yet quite wooden, archetypes.  They barely ate at all, let alone upon their triumphant return from the grave.  Hercules would have broken up out of the ground on a bull of fire that he had tamed in Hades.  Jesus quietly, calmly asks for a meal.

The moment is so absurdly apropos, that if it is fiction, then it's almost a literary anachronism.  It would be like discovering a painting with linear perspective thousands of years before the Renaissance.  It displays a depth of sensibility, involving a subversion of dramatic effect that would have been completely alien at the time.  It's almost...ironic, ages before writers had the sophistication or self-awareness to be capable of such a thing.  It's such a little detail, and yet so oddly appropriate.

Of course, one could make the argument that the detail is included because they wanted to drive home the point that Jesus' resurrection was a physical one.  They wanted to make the point that he returned in the flesh, not merely in spirit.  I completely agree.  Whether fact or fiction, this is undoubtedly why the detail was included in the story.  But this just goes to demonstrate how revolutionary Jesus was, even as a character in a book.  The people of the Bible are in general more human than their counterparts in other mythologies, both literally and in the quality of their depictions.  Zeus and Apollo were gods.  Moses and Abraham were men, and as such, their stories are far more grounded, realistic, and relatable.  But there is no where that this is more evident than with Jesus himself.  Although he is the most divine person in the Bible, he is also, ironically, the most endearingly human.

It is as if, in driving home the point of Jesus' humanity, the writers of the Gospels were forced to really consider for the first time what those truly human qualities were.  Whether they were chronicling or manufacturing the details of Jesus' life, they were forced to break the mold of those old wooden archetypes.  As a result, the Jesus we read about in the Gospels has a substance, a vitality that the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian gods do not.  When he has to be woken from a nap when the disciples were afraid of the storm, it's oddly touching to thinking of Jesus taking naps.  When he turns water into wine, we want to consider him a friend.  We sympathize when he steadily maintains his patience in the face of Peter's continual lack of understanding.  We understand his fear and his ambivalence in the Garden of Gethsemane.  We feel his pain on the cross.

This is something we almost take for granted now, but at the time it was groundbreaking.  Not only the human character, but the human being, was seen in a new light.  Christianity gave rise to a concern for the individual soul and inner life that was unheard of before.  In telling this story of God walking among us as a man, and by considering in wonder the things that made him human, we became aware of ourselves for possibly the first time.  Even by the simple act of asking for something eat, Jesus Christ changed the world.      

The Pinball Process

I love pinball machines.  I love the colorful illustrations on the playing field and the cabinets, like playing a comic book.  I love the flashing lights and all the random noises and sound effects.  I love the games themselves.  If I were a rich man, I would collect pinball machines.  I would have them fully restored to their bright, original shine, and I would display them all along one wall of my huge game room.  If a case could be made that a game can possibly be a work of art, I think pinball might have the best chance of qualifying for that title.

Despite the impressive imagination and creativity that goes into the art-work used to decorate pinball machines, one could still argue that pinball machines lack a fundamental aspect required for something to qualify as true art: depth and significance of meaning.  Cartoon rocket ships, sharpshooting electric cowboys flashing hands of poker, and alluring women draped over the shoulders of a secret agent are neither meaningful or profound.  I'll grant you that.  But this is based in the assumption that the artistry is something to stand back and contemplate.  Quite the contrary.  Pinball may be the world's first interactive art-form.  The art is found in the playing of the game itself.

While it has been argued elsewhere that the interactivity of modern video games may be counter-productive to their ability to present a piece of narrative art, the very interactivity of pinball allows it to convey an artistic representation that is impossible in other art forms.  Simply put, pinball portrays an artistic representation of the learning process.  It represents, not the mind, but rather the mind's relationship with the world.  On a small scale, it reproduces the lifelong process of how we grapple with reality.

At your first encounter with a new pinball machine, you are confronted with a chaos of brightly disordered stimuli.  No matter how many pinball games you might have played in the past, you understand nothing of the rules and complicated scoring systems of this particular machine, because every machine is different.  This apparent chaos is an almost universal feature of pinball design, and it goes hand in hand with its colorful and noisy assault on the senses.  There is something so wonderfully, and yet indefinably, appealing about it.  This is because it affords us the rare opportunity, in microcosm, to experience the world almost as we did as an infant: bright, immediate sensory input without analysis or categorization.  The machine stands before us as the world once did, simply as a feast for the eyes and the ears.

Now, it's true when we are presented with any kind of new game, say backgammon or Monopoly, with rules that we are unfamiliar with, we have nothing but our immediate sensory impression to go by.  We see the colorful pieces, the board, so on.  But from a lifetime of arranging sensory information into units and systems, we immediately recognize the sense of order in the games.  We may not know the rules, but we have the undeniable intuition that there are rules.  From long experience, we know organization when we see it.  Pinball deliberately bypasses this intuition by obscuring any appearance that there is any underlying system beneath all the sound and fury.  The first glance at a pinball table looks like nothing but a mess...a shiny, fascinating mess.

As we begin to play, the only thing we know for certain is that we need to keep the ball in play for as long as we can.  Basic survival.  But the longer we're able to keep the ball going, the more we gradually begin to pick up.  We learn that hitting this particular series of targets activates a certain bonus over here.  We learn that when the bumpers are a certain color their scores double or triple.  We learn that hitting a ramp X amount of times triggers a new round that changes everything.  We learn.  We discover that there is an incredible complexity behind all this chaos, and as you learn, you move up into higher echelons of understanding where there are missions and objectives involving multiple, intricate combinations of the other rules you've discovered.  Systems upon systems.

With most games, it's usually a good idea to learn the rules before you play.  It's possible to figure things out on the fly, but you'll find yourself at a disadvantage.  But with pinball, no one knows the rules when they start to play, beyond the basic rule of survival.  Learning the rules and using them to your advantage is an essential element of the game itself.  The learning happens almost naturally, organically.  You pick it all up almost effortlessly, at the pace of your own skill and intelligence.  Not only is pinball an art form because it is a representation of the learning process, but also because, like all really true art forms, it provides the exhilarating, cathartic, thoroughly enjoyable, experience of it.

Now, I couldn't end this post without at least an honorable mention of Tommy, the eponymous Pinball Wizard from the song of the same name.  It was no random accident that pinball was Tommy's game of choice.  If you're familiar with the album, you'll recall that Tommy's blindness, deafness, and dumbness were a hysterical response to witnessing his father's murder.  It was all in his head.  The doctor confirmed this with his instruments.  Yet, the fact of his unawareness, his inability to grasp and understand the world, is emphasized again and again.  Pinball serves Tommy as a substitute for the world he has refused to relate to and learn about, just as it is often said art becomes a substitute for the artist's ability to deal with reality.

So, until the day someone shows up at my door with a bag of money in each hand, I'll go on dreaming of my own private gallery, filled not with Picasso and Van Gogh, but with Williams, Bally, and Gottlieb.            

Trying to Understand Relativity (part 9)

You might recall a while back that I proposed a wave model of time as opposed to the more traditional linear model.  The idea was that time wasn't a line that we traveled on, but rather a wave that swept us along with a crest composed of all the dynamic changes through-out the universe.  Another way of putting it would be to say that time isn't a line or a medium in which these changes occur, but rather that time is the changes themselves and nothing more.  Things are happening in the universe and we are witnessing them, and we call these happenings and the fact of our witness, "time."  In this view, if everything was cleared out of the universe or if all changes in the universe could suddenly be stopped, then time itself would stop.  In this view, there is no time without change and motion.

Ah, but now you've found a flaw in my logic, right?  If the universe was stopped and completely static, wouldn't it be so for a certain amount of time?  The problem is that this question presupposes an observer, who can witness the static universe and perhaps even measure its frozen state with the one working stopwatch in all of existence.  In such an event, it would be the observer and their stopwatch that would be in a state of flux, changing and happening.  The passage of time that the universe remains static could only be measured relative to the observer and the watch.  If we remove them from the scenario, then the universe could stop ...now...and then start again without any of us knowing about it, and the question of "how long" it was stopped becomes meaningless.  There would be no sense in which you could say that it was a fraction of a second or a million years without something else in a state of flux to reference it against.  At any moment, at any prior state of the flux considered in isolation and pulled from existence like a still photograph, we could claim that the universe "stopped" for an indefinite interval and it would alter nothing.  The claim itself would be nonsense.  We would simply being saying, "The universe was like this, and then it moved again."  In the wave model, there would be no point in trying to look for time between the gaps in these changes.  In the wave model, time is defined by the changes. 

Now, in that same post where I introduced this wave model, I also wondered, if it was true that I was on to something with this idea, then how did Relativity relate to it?  If time was nothing more than a changing, moving universe, then how could speed affect this? How did the constancy of the speed of light factor into this scenario?  How could extreme velocity actually bend time itself?  Well, I think I might possibly have an answer for that.  At the very least, I think I may be on the right track.

Let's say that you have a box on your desk.  This box is completely empty.  It's an absolute void inside, and let's say that the box is made from some hypothetical material that experiences no atomic processes whatsoever.  The box is completely static.  There is no change, no decay, no entropy.  Like our example of the static universe, time can only be measured for this box relative to the changes in the flux you experience.  You go to bed; you wake up; you go to work; you come home, and you say that the box has aged a day simply because it has arrived at this same moment in time with you.  It has endured changes in the flux that you have experienced as a day.  Time is not happening to the box itself.  Nothing is happening to the box.  Time is happening outside the box, and the box is merely persisting through these changes.  We can measure the duration of this persistence only in relation to what has occurred outside the box.  The sun goes up; the sun goes down.  Seasons change.  People grow old and grey.  And all the while the box...just...sits there.

Suppose we were to look at this box from a different perspective, say from the perspective of an observer standing on the sun.  To them, the box is not sitting still, but rather it is being transported around the sun by a different frame of reference.  This observer would have the additional benefit of marking the box's passage through time by tracking its course around the sun.  If you recall my addendum to part 7, then you'll remember the scheme of interlocking frames of motion I established, the Earth round the sun, the sun round the galaxy, the the galaxies speeding away from one another, and so on.  Just as an observer in any one of these frames of reference would calculate the speed and the position of the box's transport relative to themselves, so too would they calculate the box's duration by measuring it against the changes in the universe's dynamic flux as they observe them from their vantage point.

This is where we bring Relativity into the picture.  Suppose we took this box and placed it aboard a rocket racing away from you and the Earth at near the speed of light, and let's say that given the speed it's going and the time dilation effect predicted by relativity, that as a year passes here on Earth, you see only a day pass aboard the rocket.  Stop to closely consider how you would interpret this experience.  You wouldn't look at the rocket and say a day has passed.  You would look at the universe from your perspective and say that a year has passed, and you have observed a day aboard the rocket span the length of that year.  This is how you would draw the conclusion that time was running slower aboard the rocket.  You would literally see things happening slower there.

Something curious happens though, if you focus exclusively on the box.  Considered in isolation, there is no meaningful way that you can say time is happening slower for the box.  There is no meaningful way that you can say that only a day has passed for the box.  As we established above, time is not happening to the box at all.  The only meaningful way that you can measure the box's duration is by comparing it to the passage of time that you've witnessed its persistence.  So, whether the box is sitting here at your desk, or rocketing away from you at the speed of light, you're forced to reach the same conclusion.  You've witnessed the persistence of this box for a year.  The only difference is that the box on the rocket has the misfortune of being imbedded in an extremely slowed environment.  The box itself has avoided the time dilation effect by virtue of its own immobility.  Possibly this is because technically you haven't witnessed time slowing down aboard the rocket, but rather you've witnessed the uniform slowing of all motion within that frame of reference to compensate for the relative velocity.  However, since, in the wave model, time and motion are interdependent, and the slowing is completely uniform and consistently even throughout the frame of reference from the tiniest particle to the most fleeting thought, you would still be completely accurate in saying that time aboard the rocket has slowed relative to you.  You might see a clock slowing down aboard the rocket, but that is literally and exactly what you're seeing, just a slowed clock.  And yet, you're also seeing it as evidence of slowed time.  A clock tracks the passage of time, but yet the motion of the clock itself is also a manifestation of time.

Click to Enlarge

This is just a first step, and it's all just speculation at this point, and to be clear I'm not trying to claim that there is some error or misconception in the theory of relativity.  I'm not trying to second guess Einstein.  I think even he would agree that slowed time would manifest itself to the observer as slowed motion.  Imagine being on Earth and watching a single day aboard that rocket transpire over a year.  Imagine how slowly you'd see someone perform their morning shave.  But the questions remain.  Is the time dilation caused by the slowed motion, or is the slowed motion encapsulated by the time dilation?  Is there more to it than than this, other factors?  How does near light travel relate to this? If time is interconnected with motion, then doesn't it made a certain sense that extreme motion might affect time?  Anyway, we'll see what happens down the road.        

Sartre's Defense of Free Will

Free will seems to make good common sense to us.  It appeals to our gut instinct.  It fits naturally and comfortably with our sense of ourselves.  It feels right.  But yet, it's a very difficult position to defend on philosophical grounds.  Try to make a rational argument for free will, and you'll probably find yourself stammering incoherently.  Finally, you'll end up blinking and shaking you head in confusion, as you realize that it's all a little more complicated that you thought.  Meanwhile, the advocate of determinism will stand there, smiling smugly with their arms folded.  They believe they have logic and causality on their side.

Determinism is the idea that choice and free will are an illusion, that all human actions are "determined" by a combination of environment, biology and conditioning.  Just as everything in nature has a root cause that leads to an inescapable effect, so too with every human action.  Just as the tides rise and fall not by choice, but by cause, so too, as the determinists would have it, whether a man goes to a doctor or refuses to see a doctor, it's all still determined by factors beyond him and beyond his control.  The belief that the decision was his to make is just a lie he tells himself.  It was all "determined" in advance by his childhood, his genetics, and so on.

If you're like me, you immediately get the feeling that something is dreadfully wrong with this idea.  It's not just that you don't like it.  You get the sense that something is being overlooked, but you can't quite put your finger on it solidly enough to form a decent rebuttal.  Well, I'm not one to let sleeping dogs lie, and I'm definitely not one to let such depressing claims about the nature of my existence go unaddressed.  Free will is a big deal to me, and I would pool all my resources into constructing and argument in its favor, if someone, thankfully, hadn't already done the job for me.  Jean-Paul Sartre has constructed such an argument, and it's far more brilliant than anything I could dream of coming up with.

Make no mistake about it.  I'm not proposing some radical interpretation of Sartre.  Free will always held a prominent place in his ideas, and he was clearly a firm believer in it.  However, a casual reader might not fully appreciate how central it was to his ideas.  In fact, free will is a big part of existentialism in general.  While the determinists had environment dragging human nature along behind it and human nature in turn dragging human being like some fatalistic daisy chain, the only objection the traditional defenders of free will could make was that there was some mystical element in human beings that rose above mere causality.  The existentialists took this whole argument and turned it on its head with their dictum "existence precedes essence."  This is really just a fancy way of saying that a human being is a work in progress.

Existence is given to us, but, the existentialists argued, its up to us to define the essence of that existence.  A chair is just a chair, but a human being is a creative process generated from within.  The determinists had the environment and society creating human nature, but the existentialists had the human being creating their own nature, day by day, second by second.  For the existentialists, a person didn't run away because they were a coward; they were a coward because they ran away.  To them, the action emerges first, freely chosen out of a kind of void of our existence and then it comes to define the person afterwards.  More importantly, the person is always free to redefine themselves by a new act.  A man who has defined himself as a scoundrel is free to choose to be a hero at the next opportunity.  We aren't bound and confined by our past.  The choice is always open.  Or as Sophia put it in Vanilla Sky, "Every passing moment is another chance to turn it all around."

Now this "existence precedes essence" might sound arbitrary and unsubstantiated, but it was the roads the existentialists took to get there that that made all the difference.  Different philosophers of the school approached the problem from a variety of angles.  Friedrich Nietzsche rearranged the furniture of morality around the creative act.  Soren Kierkegaard proposed a leap of faith, suggesting that there will always be a chasm of doubt between us and even the most fundamental things that we hold to be the truth, a chasm that evidence and argument alone will never be able to fully bridge, and so ultimately it comes down to making a choice, a "leap", an act of will.  

Sartre approached the problem on more....I guess you could say "psychological" grounds for lack of a better word.  He placed consciousness itself under careful analysis, and under his microscope he revealed things about its nature too problematic for the determinists to dismiss.  He showed that a human being is not a rock or a chair and so can't be held subject to the same causality.  A human being isn't just a different kind of thing.  A human being has a completely different kind of existence.

Following the road Sartre took is going to take much more than one post.  Consider this as just a preamble.  From here we'll take his ideas step by step, and I'll post new installments through-out this 2nd season(?) ...semester(?) ...whatever.  It may not be apparent at first how any of it relates to free will, but as the ideas build upon each other like layers of brick onto a foundation, the design of the entire edifice will start to come into focus.  It's a fascinating theory.  It's definitely my kind of theory.  It's definitely a nuclearheadache kind of theory.         

The Flat Earth Society

The world is filled with people who have all kinds of crazy ideas, theories and beliefs, most of them not as well thought out as mine, of course.  These people operate on the fringe.  You never seem to actually meet people who believe these things, and when you run them past most people you know, they tend to agree that they sound crazy.  Yet, these people must be out there.  Apparently, there are people who believe that alien lizards are secretly controlling the world.  Still others believe that the government is brainwashing you with messages hidden in bar codes.  But if I had to give out a prize for the absolutely craziest, stupidest, and most flat-out ignorant idea floating about out there, the award would go hands down and without a doubt to the The Flat Earth Society.

These people believe exactly what their name suggests.  They do the geocentric theory one better, and claim that the Earth is flat.  Their membership is small, naturally, but the fact that anyone at all believes this in this day and age is appalling and astonishing at the same time.  My favorite part about their belief is that while other crazy ideas focus on either one narrow aspect of reality or propose a shadowy phenomenon operating behind the scenes and only subtly apparent in the world, the Flat Earth concept represents a completely warped view of the universe.  As a bonus, if you click on the image below showing their model of their world which basically resembles a giant roulette wheel, you'll be able to read the text below the image providing bible verses which "condemn the globe theory."  You knew religion had to come into this sooner or later.

You might be thinking that that's an old picture, but regardless of that, rest assured this group is still quite active.  Some newer images I found also show that they haven't changed their basic model much over the years.  They still locate the Arctic, or what the rest of us in our ignorance designate as "The North Pole", at the center of their flat, disc shaped map.  Antarctica, on the other hand, is a snowy ring that circles the circumference of reality's outer limits.  I'm not sure how they account for the cold climates in these places under their model.  I didn't find any mention of that in my research, and I suspect that they never thought to address the issue.  At least they had the foresight to place the Antarctic on a steep slope.  If you're going to designate an edge to the world, you should at least have the decency to make it fairly inaccessible.  We wouldn't want people unwittingly stumbling into the void.  That was thoughtful of them.

Not all their arguments are based on scripture.  Oh, no.  They've actually got some "science" to back them up.  Their evidence includes such gems as pointing out that all the people and even our oceans would immediately fall off the world if it was round.  After all, you don't see oceans on the side of a beach ball.  Yes, they actually make this argument.  I don't suppose that there's any point in explaining how gravity works to these people or that there's no "down" in the cosmic sense.  Clearly it's beyond their comprehension that water falls off a ball because it's pulled there by the Earth's gravity, not because it's falling "down."  Likewise, they obviously don't understand that things wouldn't fall off the Earth simply because maps of the solar system depict things facing certain directions.  The empty space beyond The South Pole isn't "below" or "under" the Earth anymore than the space is "above" The North Pole.  If we favored "overhead" depictions of the solar system, would they be scoffing that the Earth would fall into the sun?  This is the kind of idiocy that makes witch trials sound downright sensible.

The motion of a round Earth is also problematic for them.  They argue that we would be thrown out into space as we rounded the celestial corner.  This one is a little more subtle.  If the first argument employed a toddler's logic, then this one at least employs a ten year old's logic. Granted it's a ten year old that's had a large rusty spike driven through the comprehension centers of the brain, but at least it suggests a basic understanding of inertia and motion.  The problem is that these concepts are completely misapplied.  For one thing, inertia pulls on the occupant of a swerving car because the car is deviating suddenly from a straight path and there's a struggle between the occupant being compelled to continue on that path, and the pull from the sudden shift in direction.  The Earth moves in an elliptical orbit.  None of its turns are a sudden deviation from a straight path.  Plus, once again there's the play of the Earth's gravity in this and the fact that it can't be transposed to some arbitrary place below the Earth and...but why am I even trying to refute this nonsense?

The funny thing about these arguments is that they're based in The Flat Earth Society's own idiotic misunderstanding of science.  It would be one thing if they had a coherent understanding of the heliocentric model and they were able to stand toe for toe against it.  As it is, they've constructed a straw man even more brainless than the Scarecrow himself.  They see gravity as merely something that makes things fall downward, and under this view a round Earth is unfathomable to them.  They're not engaged in a battle with science, but rather with their own gross ignorance of it.

Wikipedia reports that at the close of the last century, there were at least 3,000 members of the society.  Again, it's a small minority, but they are out there.  Think about that the next time you're standing in a long line at the grocery store.  There could be someone in that line with you that actually believes this garbage.  It shouldn't be hard to spot them.  Look for the drool on the front of their shirt.