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.