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.