The Devil & The Information Paradox

According to Christianity, long before the foundation of the universe was laid and the seeds of physical existence sown, there was a war in Heaven.  The archangel Lucifer led a revolt against God.  As punishment for this attempt to overthrow him, God cast Lucifer into Hell along with all the angels who followed him.  The question has often been asked: Why didn't God simply destroy Lucifer?  Why allow him to exist and eventually come to corrupt and cause trouble for mankind?

Well, to look at the story as a simple mythology, the obvious answer would be that the story represents the origin of Evil and its adversarial relationship with Good.  It is a cautionary tale of envy, pride, and defiance.  The story is not constructed around any sort of final, complete victory over evil, because the conflict is meant to be an on-going one.  The Devil is allowed to persist in the tale out of a certain necessity, because the story is told in retrospect.  War, disease, pain, and death are all still with us.  Evil still exists, and its agencies are still at large, engineering sorrow and disaster all over the world.  The story is not an ending but a beginning, with the battle lines drawn and the world itself at stake.  

But this sort of answer only works if you treat the story as a fictional one, and it considers the question above as a matter of plot-construction.  It steps outside the reality of the story.  It deals not with the action on stage, but instead with the scaffolding that supports the stage.  It doesn't really address the problem of why God didn't destroy the Devil.  It merely points out that you bought a ticket for four-hour play, and so the main conflict can't be resolved in the opening act. Needless to say, this answer is an unsatisfying one for those who take the story literally, those who believe this didn't take place on a stage, but in the open air of reality.  Aside from that, it only confesses the necessity of the plot hole.  It does nothing to fix it.  

Now, I'm not here to debate the literal truth of the story.  I can't say that I've reached the point in my life or my consideration of these issues to make any sort of claim one way or the other.  These things, of course, go far beyond the scope of the matter at hand, and hopefully I'll be able to get into these things gradually down the road and reach some kind of satisfying conclusions.  For the time being, I don't mean to offend or mislead anyone about where I stand on these issues.  All I can say is that I'm still in the process of working these things out myself.  For now, I only wish to make a hypothetical proposition concerning the problem above; a proposition that might even lead to some kind of real truth one way or the other.                     

So, the question was: Why didn't God destroy Lucifer and his followers?  I thought about this for a long time, and then it hit me...maybe he did destroy them.  Maybe the idea of being "cast out of Heaven" is really a metaphor for annihilation. But the problem is that destroying them created another problem. It created a void in existence.  Prior to this God had only created.  He had made Heaven and all the angels in glorious perfection.  Then this insurrection took place, and it had to be dealt with.  Out of necessity, God was driven to do something he had never done before, destroy.  This would have an unavoidable side-effect.  For the first time, something that was would be no more.  For the first time, there would be a nothingness. This nothingness would come to haunt existence, like an inexhaustible vacuum threatening to draw everything into its own annihilation.  Satan, the adversary, is the negation of Lucifer.  He is the nothingness, the void, the hole in existence that was caused when Lucifer was destroyed. His whole problem is that he doesn't exist.  He lurks about reality, trying to consume it and give himself substance.  He wants to exist again, even if it means destroying everything in the process.

There is something in the natural universe that provides an excellent example of the process at work here, the black hole.  When a star dies it collapses in on itself.  In scientific terms it condenses to an infinitely diminished point of overwhelming gravity.  This gravity draws everything that comes near it, even light, into it.  In effect, it is the void created in the absence of the star.  Relativity says that gravity is the manifestation of mass warping space, a curvature drawing matter in.  The black hole takes this to its extreme.  It's more than a curvature; it's a hole sucking things into the void.

These black holes pose a problem, known to scientists as the Information Paradox.  The Law of Information basically states that information can not be destroyed.  If you burn a log in the fire, even though the log is consumed, the information of that log still exists and could conceivably be reconstructed on the quantum level from the ashes, the fire, and heat.  Black holes seem to violate this law.  When they consume something, the information it was composed of seems to be destroyed completely.  But this impossible.  The information must persist in some form or another.  Scientists have proposed various solutions to this problem, but they're still working on it.

Likewise, God's initial act of destruction caused its own paradox.  Lucifer and his followers could be annihilated, but the fact of this annihilation could not be erased.  The information of their existence could not be destroyed altogether.  It was merely inverted into nothingness, consumed like matter in a black hole, but impossible to obliterate completely.  An afterimage of their existence remained, like a lingering shadow of a light.  This caused a small crack in the fabric of existence, a tiny seed of corruption.  It was a problem that had to be solved or it would eventually threaten to undo everything.

So here we are again at the beginning, and maybe we've gained a fresh start on the story.  But it's only a start.  I plan to go much further with this down the road.  For me, this idea, starting as it does with the premise that God was driven out of necessity to create an unavoidable problem that had to be solved, provides a possibility to shed a light on some of the conundrums of Christianity.  It gives a reason why there's still evil in the world. It provides a possible driving motive to the overall divine plan and a meaning to the purpose of our existence.  The universe, rather than being created on a capricious whim, might play a part in the solution to this problem.  The fall of man, which I touched on in an earlier post might not be just a regrettable misfortune, but instead an absolutely essential piece of the puzzle.  But these are all matters for future posts.  As I said, this is just a beginning.    

                                

Reinventing the Wii

Earlier this year Microsoft released something called the "Kinect" for the Xbox 360.  It's a kind of motion sensor that scans the player's body and allows the player's movements to control the game directly.  As a fan of the Xbox, I was mildly interested in this.  I was disappointed, however, when I saw some of the demos and trailers for the games.  The influence of Nintendo's Wii console was definitely noticeable in the style and content of the games; the cartoonish graphics and more "kid-friendly" game play.  Apparently the folks over at Microsoft are hedging their bets.  I'm sure it seems like simple, obvious logic to them.  The Wii is a big success, therefore if they follow the concept of the Wii, this new device will also be a big success.  Unfortunately, there's a crucial miscalculation involved in their reasoning, a miscalculation that could sink the whole thing before it gets off the ground.  

First of all, they are either grossly misunderstanding or deliberately betraying the demographic of their own customers.  Xbox games have a reputation of being more mature and adult than their Nintendo competitors, and customers generally choose the console for that very reason.  If there is any sort of demand at all for an Xbox motion controller, if there's any sort of void there to fill, it would be to have motion control coupled with typical Xbox style games.  If Xbox gamers wanted to play Wii type games, they would have already bought a Wii.  To me, the smart move would be to design and market this Kinect device to the segment of the population intrigued by the concept of motion control, but yet not interested in the kid-friendly Wii games.  They should go after the people still on the fence, the people waiting for this motion control technology to be used with the kind of games they want to play.  This should be fairly obvious, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who would agree, people's who's first reaction to the news of this Kinect was to imagine a motion controlled Halo or Call of Duty.  So why don't the executives at Microsoft seem to see this?  Why are they modeling their product after one that already exists?

Well, it's certainly not a new phenomenon.  I'm sure when some stone age company hit it big with the wheel, their competitor down the road immediately started producing the "Round Spinning Thing."  It seems to be the go-to philosophy in marketing, and yet it is and has always been hopelessly stupid.  I have a newsflash for any empty suit that ascribes to this sort of wisdom: YOUR PRODUCT WILL NOT BE SUCCESSFUL BY IMITATING ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL PRODUCT.  If people are looking for that sort of thing, they will simply buy the original product.  The imitating product will ultimately end up looking like a cheap knock-off (which, of course, it is.)  Microsoft is pushing their product towards the Wii demographic.  Don't they realize those people already own a Wii?  What would they want with the Kinect?  Are the million dollar executives sitting around the boardroom really this dumb?

This sort of thing is all the more frustrating when something I like gets remodeled to more closely resemble another product that's currently in the spotlight.  With each new edition Guitar Hero is turning more and more into Rock Band.  If I wanted to play a full band game, I would go out and buy Rock Band.  Guitar Hero should have stuck with their own concept and gone in their own direction with it.  They should have tried to provide something Rock Band wasn't offering.  As it is, they've practically ruined the franchise trying to ride Rock Band's coat-tails.  The latest installment came and went with barely a whimper.  And of course, this phenomenon isn't confined to the world of video games.  I could spend a whole post ranting about how one fast food chain after another has ruined their food trying to be more like McDonald's.    

Now, I have no problem with trying to make money or looking for the profitable angle, but this is the sort of thing that gives businessmen a bad name.  It is the epitome of the uncreative mind at work.  It's the studio executive that puts pressure on a director to make his movie more like the current leader of the box office.  It's the record executive the coaches a band to sound more like the stuff in top 40 charts.  There's no telling how much talent and originality has been stifled and destroyed by this kind of nonsense.  And the sad thing is, it doesn't work.  Sure, you might have a small-scale success with this approach, but it almost never results in any sort of multi-million dollar blockbuster idea.  The truly innovative always has to break its way through a thick wall of such stupidity to reach the public at large who are actually starving for just this sort of thing.  Those are the true success stories.  The people who's very job it is to give the public what it wants and needs, more often than not end up being an obstacle in the process because of their own small-minded lack of vision.

Hopefully, before this Kinetic idea goes under, possibly taking the Xbox 360 with it, someone will design a game that realizes the full potential of the technology and gives Xbox gamers what they're actually looking for.  Of course the designer will get a lot of blank stares and they'll constantly be told, "People don't what those kind of games."  I'm sure they'll feel at time like they're beating their head against a wall, and they'll have to fight tooth and nail with the persistence of a martyr.  All I can tell them is, don't give up.  Don't give in.  People do want your game.  Let's hope you can slip it past the idiots and into the stores.                        

    

The Coin Experiment

I have always been fascinated by the idea of time travel.  It's been an obsession of mine ever since I was a little kid.  I have some thoughts on the subject that I plan to post eventually, but in the meantime I have a thought experiment for you all to think about.  Consider it a kind of prologue; something to stir the water and stimulate speculation.  It's just something to bear in mind and something that will serve as a frame of reference when I finally get around to delving deeper into the matter.

Alright, the experiment begins with a large vault.  The vault has a combination lock on the door, and you are the only one that has the combination.  Inside the vault there is a time machine and a table.  On the table there is only a single coin.  Now, on Friday evening you set this coin so that it is facing heads up on the table.  You seal and lock the vault and leave for the weekend.  No one else can enter the vault while your gone, since no one else has the combination, and no one else is able to disturb the coin.  On Monday morning you return and open the vault.  Then, depending on what you find, you plan on doing one of two things:

1. If you find that the coin is still on heads, you plan to get into the time machine, travel back to Saturday afternoon and flip the coin to tails.  That being the case, the coin should have been on tails when you opened the vault on Monday morning, having already been flipped by yourself on Saturday.  However...
2. If you find that the coin has been flipped to tails, you plan to destroy the time machine, rendering it impossible to have ever traveled back to flip the coin.  But if that's the case, then how did the coin ever come to be on tails?

This is not a riddle.  I have no simple answer for it.  It's just a deliberately engineered paradox, either way you look at it.  Just some food for thought for the time being.      

  

Being John Malkovich: All The World's a Stage...

Being John Malkovich is an undeniably odd movie.  It begins with an out of work, avant-garde puppeteer who takes a filing job with a company called Lester Corp. located on the Mertin-Flemmer Building's 7th & a half floor where the ceilings are only about 4 feet high.  One day, behind the filing cabinets in his office, he discovers a tiny door which leads to the inside of John Malkovich's mind.  The movie piles up such strange details, one after the other, until it seems like an exercise in random absurdity.  But absurd though it is, there is nevertheless a certain logic to it, a certain method to it's madness.  You just have to turn the film upside down and feed it through the projector backwards and it all becomes clear.

Let's begin with Malkovich himself.  In the story he is the "vessel body", a conduit which the characters enter and are able to see the world through his eyes for a brief period before being dumped out on the side of the highway.  In this sense they are able to "be" John Malkovich, as they call it, and it's generally assumed that this is the "being" to which the title refers.  However, I believe that the title has another much more direct and literal meaning.  What if the movie is just simply about what it's like to be John Malkovich?  What if it's all just an abstract study of one man's existence?  What if we've been looking at all in the wrong way?

Imagine for a moment, a realm populated by ghosts.  These are not the ghosts of the living who have died.  These are ghosts who have never lived.  They are ghosts by the virtue of their own non-existence.  There are merely the ideas of people, half-formed and without substance in reality.  One day, they find out about a man; a man that can give them solid shape and real existence for a brief time; a man who can portray them; a man who can be them, and so also, in a sense, they can be him.  What would such an experience be worth to them?  Consider the customers lining the halls of the 7th & a half floor, waiting to take the Malkovich "ride".  They hand their money over willingly.  They show no skepticism about the ridiculousness of the idea, and they find the experience of being Malkovich for five minutes while he eats toast exhilarating.  Why?  The characters in the movie themselves speculate that it's the stepping outside of one's self that gives these mundane experiences such a sense of wonder.  But I believe that it's the taste of reality that being Malkovich gives them that drives their obsession.

Now, think about what an actor does for a living and reconsider the description I gave of Malkovich's function in the story.  I said that he's "a conduit which the characters enter".  Isn't this a fairly accurate and concise description of an actor's job?  He portrays characters on the stage.  He channels the idea of a person who exists only on paper.  He allows this non-existent person to be him for a brief period until the curtain drops and he takes his bows.  But being an actor is more than just a job.  It's not a switch that can be turned on and off.  An actor is an actor even when he pays his bills or eats his toast.  Some have even suggested that it's a sort of psychological defect, and actors have no personality of their own, only pieces of a personality borrowed from the characters they inhabit.  They might even find themselves slipping involuntarily into character in the back of a taxi cab.

Given this unpredictable nature of their ability, it's conceivable that an actor could find themselves overwhelmed by one of their characters, locked into a performance that they can't control.  It's possible that the strong, aggressive, and compelling personality of the character could come to eclipse their own.  Haven't we seen actors who fall into a certain routine in the later years of their career, trapped in a self-imposed type-casting?  Couldn't an actor drop out of acting all together, grow a long beard, and declare that they want to become a hip-hop artist....or a puppeteer?

No, it's no mistake that John Malkovich was chosen as the title character.  He is specifically known, not merely as another movie star, but as a serious actor.  He appears to be the object of the movie, but he is actually it's subject.  He is the protagonist.  The other characters are just that, characters, existing only in Malkovich's mind and on the written pages of the script.  Turn the film sideways and they recede into two dimensions, mere optical illusions of depth and substance on a strip of celluloid.  Note that Charlie Sheen, the only other "real life" person, is also an actor.  The two of them are the only real people in the movie and beyond it's frame as well.  As I said, the movie is quite simply and quite literally just about what it's like to be John Malkovich.  In it's own strange and surreal way it explores the reality of being an actor.  At one point Malkovich goes through the door and descends into his own mind and finds himself in a hall of mirrors where everything and everyone reflects himself, an actor portraying himself portraying himself.  In a sense the entire movie is Malkovich going down his own hole.             
                  

I Had a Childhood Phobia

There was a time when I was about three or four that I was deathly afraid of quicksand.  It seemed like every time I watched TV someone was falling into quicksand.  It was always the same scenario.  They’d be walking through the jungle and the next thing they’d know, they were up to their waist in quicksand.  Then, after they had discovered their predicament, they would begin to panic and struggle, only making things worse.  There was usually one guy who had somehow avoided falling into the quicksand.  He would kneel down on the edge of the solid ground and offer his hand to the others who were sinking.  More often that not, he would be pulled into the quicksand himself.  For a three-year-old child this sort of thing can be terrifying.  It took a certain root in my mind.  The sudden unreliability of the solid ground beneath my feet; the memory of the shameless, desperate horror on those peoples faces as they were being dragged down to some unspeakable fate beneath the Earth; these things all stuck with me.  In my mind I can still see a picture of a screaming man up to his chin in quicksand with a butterfly net over his head.  In short, I developed a phobia.

I wondered where these people went, if they sank completely into the quicksand.  By the looks on their faces I figured it had to be to where Devil was.  There was a certain logic to this, as Hell was under the ground.  So I asked my brother about it.  He considered the issue and told me, “No, they don’t go to Hell.  They just go to a big room filled with sand.”  That was worse, so much worse.  Now, instead of the fiery pit, I imagined a quiet room with candles and landscape paintings on the wall with a growing pile of sand in the middle of the room being fed by a stream of sand flowing through a hole in the ceiling like the grains in an everlasting hourglass.  It was an unbearable thought.  Hell seemed like a busy place, at least.  But the idea of spending all eternity in this quiet room of sand, so desolate and lonely, so empty, was a nightmare.  My fear grew worse.

One night I stayed up to watch an old vampire movie and my thesis on quicksand expanded to include mud holes.  In the movie this man was out in the woods walking across a dark piece of ground in a clearing that was scattered with fallen leaves.  Suddenly he began to sink.  Two men stood a ways off just watching the man sink into the mud.  The sinking man cried out for their help but they did nothing.  The man held up a crucifix and called out curses to the men watching him die.  The last shot was of the man’s hand holding the crucifix just above the surface of the mud.  Then the hand and the crucifix sank away and the man was gone.  So now there was something else to watch out for.  Mud holes.  Whenever I was outside playing and I saw a muddy patch scattered with leaves, I avoided it as if it were cursed ground.

So why do I bring this all up?  Well, I was thinking about this recently, along with other similar episodes during my childhood when I developed strange preoccupied fears, and I noticed a principle or common theme that connected them.  There was also a situation a few years back with someone I knew who had also had a problem with a fear that was overwhelming their life.  The details of this situation provided further evidence of my theory. Out of all this data, a pattern emerged that suggested something about the nature of phobias.  I'm not sure at this point whether my theory has any relevance to chronic, life-long phobias or even phobias in general, but it does seem to apply to those temporary and inexplicable phobias that seem to become almost an obsession for a brief period of time and then evaporate, leaving the sufferer to wonder why it all ever bothered them so much.  Hopefully, you, the reader, have some idea of the sort of thing I'm talking about.

The common wisdom on the subject of phobias generally maintains that the phobia is usually related to some tragic event involving the object of the phobia.  For instance, if someone has a strange fear of balloons, then the assumption is that something bad must have happened to them involving balloons.  Since it's not "normal" to be afraid of balloons and since there's nothing inherently threatening or dangerous about the balloons themselves, then something unusually traumatic must have happened with balloons or at least in close association with them.  In any case, the assumption is generally that the balloons themselves are closely connected to the root of the fear.  My theory suggests that the relationship between the object of the phobia and the root of the fear is a bit more complicated and indirect.

Again, I want to repeat: I'm not sure if my idea applies to chronic phobias, and I don't mean to be presumptuous about the psychological histories of people who have such phobias.  Because of this, the balloon example above might have been a badly chosen illustration since it involves a chronic phobia, but I used it because it was a simple and recognizable form of phobias in general.  A better example, possibly more appropriate to my idea, would be someone who becomes briefly obsessed with the idea that they're going to choke on the their food.  Or perhaps someone who becomes gripped by the fantastical notion that there's a man lurking behind their garage.  I'm talking about those strange fears that seem to come from nowhere or seem to be planted by apparently innocuous little suggestions; the things that grow from a remark casually dropped in a conversation or a passing event that would normally seem inconsequential at the time, and finally come to take an insidious root in the mind.

So, let's return to my childhood fear of quicksand.  At the time that I developed this obsession, my parents were separated.  There was a whole chaotic whirlwind of events involved in the situation. I won't go into all the details, but the important point was that as result of these developments my little world felt very uncertain and insecure.  Employing a metaphor, you could say that it felt like the ground was giving way beneath my feet.  Naturally, I didn't make this connection at the time, nor did I have the introspection at the age of three to fully comprehend how I felt about my parents separating.  All I knew was that I was terrified of quicksand.

No, it wasn't until recently that I was able to see this connection.  My first reaction was amusement.  I wanted to laugh at the poetic appropriateness of it.  But then I took a deeper look.  As I said, I thought about other, similar situations, and I saw the same pattern.  Then someone close to me developed one of these kinds of fears.  I knew all the details of their predicament, and again I saw the same pattern.  There seemed to be too many corroborating circumstances to just dismiss the whole thing as simple coincidence.  I felt like I was on to something.

It seemed that I had discovered a common thread in these cases.  It worked out the same way every time.  It started with a traumatic event or an extremely distressing situation in the person's personal life.  During the ensuing period of emotional crisis, the seemingly unrelated little seed of the fear would get planted in the manner suggested above.  This fear, which is oddly always more "abstract" than the actual source of the emotional distress, becomes the fixation of the person and the real, personal crisis gets pushed to the back burner.  Although this fixation appears to be completely unrelated to the crisis, it is actually a metaphorical or symbolic representation of it.

It is almost as though the mind has an immune system to it, similar to the body's.  Emotional trauma and distress lowers this immunity, making the person susceptible to infection.  It might seem like an incredible coincidence that something could just happen to come along and provide a conveniently symbolic representation of the person's distressed state of mind.  That's probably the most incredible part of this whole idea.  But really, it's no more incredible than the idea that the germs just "happen" to be there when a person's physical immunity is vulnerable. The seeds of these fears lay all around us.  In a normal, healthy frame of mind we shrug them off without giving them a second thought.  There is no soft spot in our mental defenses for them to penetrate.  Someone tells a story about a ghost in their basement; we're momentarily "creeped out", but then we go on about our business.  But for someone else, someone in a state of emotional stress, the idea of this lurking subterranean presence might hold a particular, peculiar fascination that takes hold of them for months to come.  It just might take the perfect, solid shape of their state of mind.  

So the next time you find yourself disturbed by something you can't shake, something you can't get off your mind, consider where you are in your life.  Consider that what's bothering you might not be hiding out there in the bushes, but may instead be something more personal and more real.  You might find that it's a smaller problem than you thought, if you're willing to face it and deal with it and put it behind you.  You might save yourself a lot of sleepless nights in the process.