Mint the Coin!

I've just heard about this plan for the U. S. National Treasury to mint a $1,000,000,000,000 platinum Coin and deposit it in the Federal Reserve in order to alleviate congressional spending issues. Read about it here.

My opinion: this sounds equal parts amazing, ingenious, and absurd. Therefore the government should do it and I fully support it. I propose the following additions to the plan:

1) Since only one will ever be made and the plan is to spend as little money as possible making it, ideally it would not even be minted. Carving a minting plate for a single coin that will never be used? Please. The Treasury can just press out a flat disc of platinum, declare it to be a coin worth $1,000,000,000,000, and immediately deposit it in the highest security vault that the Federal Reserve has. What, we can't do exactly that because that could lead to really easy forgery? Fine - have them scratch a really simple design into it and keep its true appearance a secret! Or, you know, not worry about it, since it'll be useless as a unit of exchange - no bank would deposit it or give change, so it'd only be worth the value of the platinum it was printed on anyway - so there would be no benefit in forging it.

2) The next thing I fully support is that someone breaks into the Federal Reserve and steals it. Ideally this would be Nicholas Cage, but I am willing to be flexible. Certainly it'd be useless as a unit of exchange, but it's the principle of the thing! Everyone knows rare things are more valuable; it's a well-known principle of economics. This would be the only trillion-dollar coin in the world, certified as such by the federal government. This Coin, ladies and gentlemen, is the physical representation of the purchasing power and budgetary demands of the U. S. Congress! A symbol of American prosperity and ingenuity, or governmental excess, take your pick, it's the national zeitgeist in cold metallic form. Everyone should want one! Not everyone can have one, of course, which is part of the amazingness of the idea and further contributes to its symbolic nature. It is an object that invites theft, by anyone sophisticated enough to realize its true worth and skilled enough to accomplish the task. Clearly this is a job for Carmen Sandiego.

But, you ask, isn't this a reason why minting the Coin would be a bad idea? After all, part of the advantage of is supposedly the security of having only the one coin! Not at all: the government has an obvious fallback measure. In order to properly serve its purpose, the Coin must be kept secure in the deepest vaults of the Federal Reserve; if it ever leaves storage it will instantly lose all its value both to the government and to the person who steals it. If it is ever stolen, no one will ever know, so naturally the Coin will always remain in the vault.

3) There is one final thing that the Treasury can do. As rare, important, significant, and desirable as the Coin would be to Americans as a whole, it is sad that no one would ever see it. To alleviate these needs and create a further supply of funds for the needs of the government, I propose that the Treasury mint commemorative replicas of the Coin for public sale and distribution. This is, after all, well within its legal allowances.

I Want My Tears Back - Nightwish

The treetops, the chimneys, the snowbed stories, winter grey
Wildflowers, those meadows of heaven, wind in the wheatA railroad, across water, the scent of grandfatherly love
Blue bayous, Decembers, moon through a dragonfly's wings -

Where is the wonder? Where's the awe?
Where's dear Alice knocking on the door?
Where's the trapdoor that takes me there?
Where the real is shattered by a Mad March Hare?

Where is the wonder? Where's the awe?
Where are the sleepless nights I used to live for?
Before the years take me -
I wish to see the lost in me!

I want my tears back!
I want my tears back now!

A ballet on a grove, still growing young all alone
A rag doll, a best friend, the voice of Mary Costa

Where is the wonder? Where's the awe?
Where's dear Alice knocking on the door?
Where's the trapdoor that takes me there?
Where the real is shattered by a Mad March Hare?

Where is the wonder? Where's the awe?
Where are the sleepless nights I used to live for?
Before the years take me,
I wish to see the lost in me

I want my tears back!
I want my tears back now!

The Clockyard - Abney Park

There was a young boy, in a clockyard,
Building himself from the pieces he found
Screwing on what's been left on the ground
Hoping to finish enough, one day, to leave

The years flew by, and some gears fell off -
Fears and rust and tears he doffed
And bravely searched, while parts he scoffed,
But soon he found -

There was a young man, in a clockyard,
Building himself from the pieces he found
Screwing on what's been left on the ground
Hoping to finish enough, one day, to leave

The years flew by, and some gears fell off -
Fears and rust and tears he doffed
And bravely searched, while parts he scoffed,
Until he found -

There was a grown man, in a clockyard -
Building himself from the pieces he found
Screwing on what's been left on the ground
Hoping to finish enough one day to lead

He thought to himself, "If I wait too long
To find the pieces I need, then my chance might be gone
What I need might be outside the gate
But I will never know, if I continue to wait."

And then he had a dream:
An old man cried in a clock yard,
Giving up on the scrap that he found on the ground,
"I can't build myself from this scrap all around!"
The man woke up and said, "I must leave."

Balance Slays the Demon - Poets of the Fall

Deep in the ocean of darkness, in the mirror of light, balance becomes a stranger... and in your fantasies, he rides a storm on your peace. Beyond the shadows he settled for more. There is a miracle illuminated.

Deep in the ocean of darkness, in the mirror of light, balance becomes a stranger
And in your fantasies, he rides a storm on your peace - wake up and smell the danger

Ever the light casts a shadow, ever the night springs from the light

In the end, it's never just the light you need,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
In the end, it's never just the dark you seek,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
Find the peace

Beyond the lake he called home, lies a deeper darker ocean green.

Like an evil twin, feel it scratching within,
Like an insane sovereign ranger,
And his beautiful face with his leathery lace,
So can't you see the play he's staging?

Ever the light casts a shadow, ever the night springs from the light

In the end, it's never just the light you need,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
In the end, it's never just the dark you seek,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
Find the peace

yranidrO dellac ,nwot rehtona ni ,niaga neppah lliw tI

In the end, it's never just the light you need,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
In the end, it's never just the dark you seek,
When balance slays the demon, you'll find peace,
Find the peace

Screaming, new darkness descends on this frail frame, I drown in fathomless black space. Will I never scratch the depths of this domain? I see not, yet nothing could be worse then the shades my mind calls herein, alone, in my own Wake the unravelling of reasons schemed.

Sleep - Poets of the Fall

Hear your heartbeat
Beat a frantic pace
And it's not even 7 AM

You're feeling the rush
Of anguish settling
You cannot help showing them in.

Hurry up then,
Or you'll fall behind and
They will take control of you

And you need to heal
The hurt behind your eyes
Fickle words crowding your mind

So...
Sleep, sugar, let your dreams flood in,
Like waves of sweet fire, you're safe within
Sleep, sweetie, let your floods come rushing in,
And carry you over to a new morning
Try as you might
You try to give it up
Seems to be holding on fast

Its hand in your hand,
A shadow over you,
A beggar for soul in your face

Still it don't matter
If you won't listen,
If you won't let them follow you

You just need to heal,
Make good all your lies -
Move on and don't look behind

Day after day
Fickle visions
Messing with your head
Fickle visions
Sleeping in your bed,
Messing with your head
Fickle visions
Fickle visions

The Cat and the Moon - The Lord of the Rings

It's a good day for nonsense! :D



There’s an inn of old renown
Where they brew a beer so brown
Moon came rolling down the hill
One Hevnsday night to drink his fill!

On a three-stringed fiddle there,
Played the Ostler’s Cat so fair
The hornèd Cow that night was seen
To dance a jig upon the green!

Called by the fiddle to the middle of the muddle where the cow with a caper sent the small dog squealing,
Moon in a fuddle went to huddle by the griddle but he slipped in a puddle and the world went reeling -

Downsides went up - hey! Outsides went wide,
As the fiddle played a twiddle
And the Moon slept till Sterrenday!
Upsides went west - hey! Broadsides went boom,
With a twiddle on the fiddle inn the middle by the griddle
And the Moon slept till Sterrenday!

Dish from off the dresser pranced,
Found a Spoon and gaily danced -
Horses neighed and champed their bits,
For the bloodshot Moon had lost his wits!

Well, Cow jumped over, Dog barked wild -
Moon lay prone and sweetly smiled!
Ostler cried, “Play faster, Cat!
Because we all want to dance like that!”

Gambol and totter till you’re hotter than a hatter and you spin all akimbo like a windmill flailing!
Whirl with a clatter till you scatter every cotter and the strings start a-pinging as the world goes sailing!

Downsides go up - hey! Outsides go wide!
You can clatter with your platter
But the Moon slept till Sterrenday!
Upsides go west - hey! Broadsides go boom!
With a batter and a clatter you can shatter every platter
But the Moon slept till Sterrenday!

Fi-fo-fiddle-diddle!
Fi-fo-fiddle-diddle!
Hey-yey-yey-yey-oh-ho
Hey-yey-yey-yey-oh-ho!
Hey-hey-din-dang-do
Hey-hey-din-dang-do!
Hoo-rye-and-hott-a-cott-a ho
Hoo-rye-and-hott-a-cott-a ho ho!
Hott-a-cott-a-hotta-ko
Hott-a-cott-a-ko-cott-a-ko-ho!
Fi-fo-fiddle-diddle-hi-ho
Fi-fo-fiddle-diddle-hi-ho!
Ho fiddlee-ding-galli-do
Ho fiddlee-ding-galli-do
Hoo-rye-hoo-rye oops-oops- ay!
Hoo-rye-hoo-rye oops-oops- ay!
Hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-mi-fo-fo
Hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-mi-fo-fo!
Hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-mi-fo-fo!

Downsides go up - hey! Outsides go wide!
With a twiddle on the fiddle in the middle by the griddle
And the Moon slept till Sterrenday!
Upsides go west - hey! Broadsides go boom!
With a batter and a clatter you can shatter every platter
But the Moon slept till Sterrenday!

Hey!

The Devil is a Liar - Seawind

This song is dear to me more for reasons of personal history than for contemplative purposes, but it's perfectly suitable for that as well.

(Also, my website is now apparently the only place online with the lyrics!)



How many times, in the back of your mind,
Have you heard a voice - calling to you?
Won't you come over here, let me talk in your ear -
I have something tempting for you...

I can give you all of the world,
With buildings that reach up to the sky!
Just sign your name in my book today,
And give me your soul when you die...

There are bunches of cars, and big black cigars,
People living their lives by reading the stars
Nobody's watching you now, you can take what you want
Wouldn't you rather have than have not?

Don't be a fool! 'Cause
I can give you all your desires!
Precious diamonds and rubies found so rare
Just sign your name upon the line
And give me your soul if you dare...

But don't you believe - you'll be deceived
You're playing with fire...
Because the devil is a liar

But don't you believe, you'll be deceived
You're playing with fire
Because the devil is a liar

He'll promise you all his kingdoms of gold
Then he'll leave you standing alone in the cold
He'll trick you and tease you
Entice, and then leave you a fool...

The devil's done a number on you, yeah
The devil's done a number on you, yeah
The devil's done a number on you, yeah
The devil's done a number on you, yeah

Every hour of the day, the game of life goes on
And you and I will have to choose the right way from the wrong
And just when you have made your choice, for the game you want to win
The tireless voice you know so well starts tempting once again!

He tells us... there's no God above
And only foolish people fall in love
But it's plain to see
The devil hates you and hates me

He'll trick you and tease you
And then he'll deceive you

But don't you believe - he's a liar
But don't you believe - the devil's a liar
Don't you believe, you'll be deceived, you're playing with fire,
But don't you believe, the devil's a liar
Don't you believe, you'll be deceived, you're playing with fire,
But don't you believe, the devil's a liar
Don't let the devil do his number on you, no...

Dandelions - Five Iron Frenzy

In a field of yellow flowers, underneath the sun
Bluest eyes that spark with lightning - boy, with shoes undone
He is young, so full of hope, revelling in tiny dreams
Filling up his arms with flowers, right for giving any queen!

Running to her, beaming bright while cradling his prize
A flickering of yellow light within his mother's eyes -
She holds them to her heart, keeping them where they'll be safe
Clasped within her very marrow, dandelions in a vase!

She sees love where anyone else would see weeds
All hope is found; here is everything he needs!

Fathomless, Your endless mercy; weight I could not lift...
Where do I fit in this puzzle? What good are these gifts?
Not a martyr or a saint, scarcely can I struggle through -
All that I have ever wanted was to give my best to You!

Lord, search my heart! Create in me something clean
Dandelions - You see flowers in these weeds!

Gently lifting hands to heaven, softened by the sweetest hush
A Father sings over His children, loving them so very much
More than words could warrant, deeper than the darkest blue
More than sacrifice could merit - Lord, I give my heart to You!

Lord, search my heart! Create in me something clean
Dandelions - You see flowers in these weeds

What Good This Deafness? - Trans-Siberian Orchestra

It's a pretty pathetic state of affairs when I can't even be bothered to post a song to think about in a week.



[From the shadows a beautiful spirit, Fate, and her deformed dwarf son, Twist, emerge to inform Beethoven of what he has already deeply suspected, that this is to be his last night on earth. They are accompanied by numerous spirits and ghosts from his past.]

[With each successive crack of lightning the spirits move closer and eventually Beethoven finds their distraction unbearable.]

Beethoven:
What good this deafness, when my whole life I have dread?
What good this deafness, with these voices in my head?
What good this deafness, when this prattle I must hear?
If I were blind, I'm sure they wouldn't disappear!

Twist:
Do you really want to believe what you're saying?
Do you really want to be here alone?
Have I interrupted a moment of praying?
While your life's decaying -
Your sins, are they weighing?
While you've been carving your stone...
All on your own?

Do you really want to sit here in silence?
Could it be that brooding is... part of your art?
Is it an extension of artistic license?
A moving defiance,
Of all of life's tyrants!
While you've been searching your heart...
...Alone? :)
...With us. :D
...In the dark! 8D

[Beethoven implores the spirits to leave him alone, but Twist tells him that as shadows they only exist by the light that Beethoven's life has cast and as that light is fading, it is only natural that they should cling to its last moments of illumination. As the clock strikes midnight their conversation is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of Mephistopheles. His presence causes all the other spirits to shrink silently back to the corners of the room...]

The Psychology of the Mundane

Congratulations. You are, most likely, not crazy.

The reason I feel comfortable stating this is simple. Insanity is, ultimately, a (non-quantitative) measure of normalcy based around how well a person is able to interact with other people around them. It can have a variety of causes, ranging from the individual's genetic heritage to chemical imbalances derived from their environment, to how they understand and behave toward their own personal history. Psychopathologists and abnormal psychologists have developed a variety of approaches to studying, explaining, and treating such problems, appropriate to the individual problems as they are discovered and recognized, but because of the diversity of the field and the nature of the problem it's difficult to speak of as a whole. How do you distinguish someone with actual mental problems from someone who's just rather strange?

To address this issue, four basic questions are used to determine whether a person is insane:

• Deviance: Are the person's thoughts, emotions, or behavior typical of their culture? (Note the specificity of 'their' culture. This is not used to condemn an entire culture or subculture that deviates from the rest of society; it's been a huge problem historically, as I'm sure you can imagine.)
• Distress: Is the person troubled or deeply emotionally affected by the way they think and act? Do they feel in control of themselves?
• Dysfunction: Is the person impaired in their ability to survive? Can they get by in life on a day-to-day basis?
• Danger: Is the person prone to violent or injurious behavior, to themselves or to others?

The vast majority of humanity is self-organized into social groups that promote their own utility and well-being, and most of those people who aren't have physical conditions or circumstances that prevent them from doing so. Therefore, most human beings are, by definition, not crazy. That probably includes you, no matter how really angry or lonely or loopy or rebellious or unsympathetic you've felt recently - if the biggest obstacle to obtaining everything you want in life is the unfair perversity of the cosmos, you're not insane.

So, if you're one of those people, congratulations. You're adapted to society. You're normal enough to get by. You're not less special. You're better off.

Okay. Now flip the coin over and stare at the other side.

If insanity doesn't mean a lot of things you thought it did, the same is true of sanity. Sanity doesn't mean you know what you're doing. Sanity doesn't mean your beliefs and thought processes are true to reality. Sanity doesn't mean you're rational. Sanity doesn't mean you understand. Sanity means you're adapted to society and you're normal enough to get by.

Society is a vast and amorphous beast, a picture puzzle where the pieces are constantly moving and being joined to other pieces and all kinds of different pictures can be created from largely the same pieces... a piece that is considered insane in one particular subset of society may be perfectly well-adjusted to another. And then we could consider phenomena like hallucinations in the sane which 10% of healthy, sane individuals will experience at least once in their lifetimes, despite being almost universally associate with insanity in the popular mindset.

But more importantly than any of that, as far as I'm concerned, is the sticky ethical morass of whether being well-adjusted to human society is in itself a good thing. There is a long, long list of psychological observations demonstrating that human beings do not think clearly or reasonably, do not understand the world around them, do not understand each other, and even do not understand themselves... when you think you have a pretty good understanding of it all, and so does everyone else. It's called cognitive bias.

The Road Goes On - The Lord of the Rings

There's a Road, calling you to stray
Step by step, pulling you away
Under Moon and Star - Take the Road, no matter how far!
Where it leads, no-one ever knows
Don't look back, follow where it goes
Far beyond the Sun - Take the Road, wherever it runs!

The Road goes on, ever ever on
Hill by hill
Mile by mile
Field by field
Stile by stile
The Road goes on, ever ever on

Mountain and valley and pasture and meadow
Stretching unending for mile after mile
Fenland and moorland and shoreline and canyon
Bordered by hurdle and hedgerow and stile

One more mile, then it's time to eat
Pick some pears, succulent and sweet
To the farthest shore - Take the Road a hundred miles more!
Sweet pink trout, tickled from a stream
Milk a goat, churn it into cream
Far beyond the Sun - Take the Road wherever it runs.

The Road goes on, ever ever on
Moor by moor
Glen by glen
Vale by vale
Fen by fen
The Road goes on, ever ever on

See the Road run past your doorstep
Calling for your feet to stray
Like a deep and rolling river
It will sweep them far away
Just beyond the far horizon
Lies a waiting world unknown
Like the dawn its beauty beckons
With a wonder all its own!

Númenna!
Auti i ré.
Yallume! Hilya!
Númenna!
Auti i ré.
Yallume! Hilya!
Hilya! Hilya! Auta. Hilya!
Númenna!
Auti i ré.
Yallume! Hilya!

Mountain and valley and pasture and meadow
Stretching unending for mile after mile
Fenland and moorland and shoreline and canyon
Bordered by hurdle and hedgerow and stile

The Colour of Insanity

Two excellent writers I follow have been independently writing on the same subject: Kyle (A Deeper, Darker Ocean Green), in Psychopath, and Nixie (Musings from the Well), in an entire series (!) called Disturbing the Disturbed. Both would like you to know that you are not a psychologist, you don't actually know what the signs of mental illness are because everything you've heard about them is the second-hand grossly-oversimplified theme park version, and, basically, you just don't know enough facts yet for your self-diagnosis to be worth sixpence.

Go on, go and read. They are fascinating. Detailed. And right.

Don't fret, though. You're not less special because you're not crazy. In fact, you already have enough of your own psychological problems to get in the way of accurately understanding yourself and the world around you without having to claim psychological and emotional disorders as well!

So, next week, we get to talk about normal psychology and cognitive biases.

The Storm - Blackmore's Night

A timeless and forgotten place,
The moon and sun in endless chase;
Each in quiet surrender, while the other reigns the sky...
The midnight hour begins to laugh -
A summer evening's epitaph -
The winds are getting crazy, as the storm begins to rise...

...

Wild were the winds that came,
In the thunder and the rain!
Nothing ever could contain the rising of the storm!
In the wings of ebony,
Darkened waves fill the trees
Wild winds of warning echo through the air!

Follow the storm, now, I've got to get out of here
Follow the storm, as you take to the sky
Follow the storm, now, it's all so crystal-clear
Follow the storm, as the storm begins to rise

It seems to come from everywhere -
Welcome to the Dragon's Lair!
Fingers running through your hair, she asks you out to play!
For all of Nature's sorcery,
The most bewitching entity -
Heaven hath no fury like the rising of the storm!

Follow the storm, now, I've got to get out of here
Follow the storm, as you take to the sky
Follow the storm, now, it's all so crystal-clear
Follow the storm, as the storm begins to rise

Meet the New Year!

...same as the Old Year!

I want to start taking advantage of the fact that there is more than one day per week. Sunday will be a day for sharing music, and possibly other art, that I find worthy of reflection. This category will be denoted with the tag "Selah".

Poets of the Fall - War

Do you remember standing on a broken field,
White crippled wings beating the sky?
The harbingers of war, with their nature revealed,
And our chances flowing by

If I can let the memory heal,
I will remember you with me on that field...

When I thought that I fought this war alone,
You were there by my side, on the frontline
When I thought that I fought without a cause,
You gave me a reason to try

Turn the page - I need to see something new -
For now, my innocence is torn
We cannot linger on this stunted view,
Like rabid dogs of war

I will let the memory heal
I will remember you with me on that field

When I thought that I fought this war alone,
You were there by my side, on the frontline
And we fought to believe the impossible!
When I thought that I fought this war alone,
We were one with our destinies entwined!
When I thought that I fought without a cause,
You gave me the reason why!

With no-one wearing their real face,
It's a whiteout of emotion,
And I've only got my brittle bones to break the fall

When the love in letters fade,
It's like moving in slow motion
And we're already too late if we arrive at all

And then we're caught up in the arms race -
An involuntary addiction -
And we're shedding every value our mothers taught

So will you please show me your real face,
Draw the line in the horizon?
'Cause I only need your name to call the reasons why I fought...

When I thought that I fought this war alone,
You were there by my side, on the frontline
And we fought to believe the impossible!
When I thought that I fought this war alone,
We were one with our destinies entwined!
When I thought that I fought without a cause,
You gave me the reason why!

Can someone explain this?

Psychology and sociology experiments are unique among the sciences in that the test subjects who volunteer for them are generally capable of understanding the implications of the experiments' results. If the premise of the experiment requires deceiving the test subject in some way - as must be done sometimes, in order to simulate a situation for the test subject to act in - it may be that upon full disclosure of the experiment and its results, the test subject's reactions at the time may be cast in an entirely new light. This phenomenon is known as inflicted insight, and experiments which may cause it are strongly discouraged if not outright forbidden by ethics committees.

My question is - why?

What inflicted insight basically amounts to is exposing the less savoury or comfortable facets of a person's own psyche and forcing them to confront them. How could this be considered an undesirable result? The test subject believes something about himself or herself that is wrong, and the researcher is not only helping him or her to Know Thyself - in the best possible circumstance I can think of, I might add - but also preparing evidence that this problem is possible, for the scientific community, to better help other people who may have a similar reaction but were not fortunate enough to participate in the experiment personally.

Here's an example. The Milgram experiment is a famous one in which the unknowing test subject is asked to help with a simple negative feedback test for a 'slow learner'. Whenever the 'slow learner' - portrayed by an actor - gives an incorrect answer, the test subject is to press a button which, they are told, will deliver the learner a 15V electric shock that increases by 15V every time the button is pressed. The test continues until either (a) the test subject refuses to continue a total of five times (a list of four specific responses for the experimenter to use are prepared beforehand; after the experimenter has used all of them and the test subject still refuses, the test ends) or (b) the test subject uses the highest possible setting - 450V.

The hypothesized percentage of test subjects who would complete the test was 1.2% (with a range of 0% to 3%). While every test subject questioned the experiment at some point, 65% of them administered the final 450V shock rather than give up, and of the 35% who gave up none of them went to check the health of the learner or insisted that the experiments cease entirely with other test subjects. (They were informed of the true nature of the experiment afterwards during debriefing.)

Other variations on the experiment demonstrated that there was no significant difference behaviourally between male and female subjects, though female subjects reported higher levels of stress, and indeed there were only three factors that seemed to influence the outcome: compliance decreased when the subject and researcher communicated by phone (greater separation), when the experiment was conducted by an unknown institute rather than Yale (though the difference was not statistically appreciable), and when the subject interacted more directly with the victim. Experiments were also conducted in which the button was real and connected to a puppy, to eliminate the possibility that the subjects in earlier tests were subconsciously picking up that the button did nothing, with no change.

Such experiments would not be permitted today due to reasons of inflicted insight - taking the form in this case of "Here, mate, you just proved you would have electrocuted someone with a learning disorder because an authority figure told you to. And so did most of the other people who signed up to do this. Don't you think there might be something wrong with that?"

There is a coda to this story: a later survey conducted revealed that 84% of responding test subjects were 'glad' or 'very glad' to have participated, and 15% were neutral. Many in fact wrote letters expressing thanks.

Visual imagery

This is just something interesting I ran across.

You've probably heard of the notion that human beings were 'created in the image of God'. Biblically, the concept originates from Genesis, where the exact words used are tzelem elohim. 'Tzelem' means image, shape, form, &c; 'Elohim' is one of the titles of God (since calling him by name is grammatically verboten).

This may shed a new light on one of the other places where tzelem is used - in the second commandment "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below". Here, tzelem is translated as 'idol' (in other translations, 'graven image').

In my experience this commandment has been the subject of confusion among Christians I've known, including pastors and teachers, since on the surface it seems to be a restatement of 'you shall have no other gods before me', so this connection was something of a minor epiphany for me. God is specifically forbidding depictions of himself for worship, in any form - no balls of fire, no golden calves, no Nehushtan - follow that link, it's a really interesting one - possibly not even the crucifixes and nativity scenes we're all so accustomed to, though I'm not nearly qualified enough as a theologian to say that with any certainty yea or nay.

Why this unique ban? Because God makes his own idols, from clay, that no human artisan can reproduce, and one of them is you. I don't recommend worshiping them - that would violate the preceding commandment - but loving them, on the other hand, is specifically encouraged. :)

...an Eternal Golden Braid

Continued from last week, when we were discussing strange loops!

Quick review: a strange loop is anything that linearly relates to itself - if you pick some one action to perform on it, you'll eventually return to exactly where you were when you began.

Now - per the last example last post, human consciousness is itself a strange loop, as shown whenever you think about thinking, or think about why you think or feel the things that you do. So it should be no surprise that philosophy, psychology, mathematics, art, and so on can all be shown to be complex, tangled hierarchies full of strange, looping structures. Here's a couple more examples, for fun:

• Storytelling. Structures which return the characters to the place they started from at the beginning - physically, mentally, emotionally - are common throughout great literature. The Hero's Journey is a perfect example - albeit an overly specific, misleading, and rigidly stratified one. In the Iliad, the Greeks go to war; in the Odyssey, the last of them finally comes home. (In the beginning of the Odyssey, Odysseus almost gets home but fails.) There and Back Again. Don Quixote. The answers are always in the place you started, but you need the intervening book in order to recognize them.
• Feynman diagrams. Antimatter and matter are always created together in nature, and annihilate each other when they converge again. Feynman diagrams are just how scientists keep track of their interactions. Particle creation and annihilation is happening constantly, everywhere, and usually the two particles that formed together also destroy each other shortly thereafter - the diagram looks like this (incoming energy waves convert into two particles with mass, which move apart, collide again, and re-release the energy). You'll notice, though, that the regular particle is marked with a forwards arrow, and the antiparticle is marked with a backwards arrow - because one possible interpretation of the math is that there is only one particle and it appears to sometimes be an antiparticle because at that point it has begun moving backwards in time. In other words, the particle is 'creating' and 'destroying' itself, in a single infinitesimal moment, forever.
  
• Fractals. You can zoom in indefinitely and get the same image you started with, yes? Well, not for all fractals - the famous Mandelbrot Set, for instance, is unimaginably more complex than that.
• Let's talk (briefly) about the Mandelbrot Set. Do you know the coordinate plane? With an origin and a defined axis, you can locate any point P(x, y), x units left or right and y units up or down. One of the many, many things we can do with this is to apply a formula to P to define a second point - call it P1. Let's say that if P is x units right and y units up, we'll start at the origin, and move (x squared minus y squared) units right, and (twice x times y) units up. Then, we'll move it x more units right, and y more units up, and call that P1. X and Y can be absolutely anything, and we'll always get another point... so let's say that we take what we just did to turn P into P1, and do it to P1 to get P2, then P3, P4... and so on. We'll do it forever. (Mathematicians have sneaky tricks to find out what happens if you keep doing something forever.) If we keep going forever, we'll find that either our point is now racing toward the edge of the coordinate plane, an infinite distance away - or it's still meandering about, passing by our original point P every so often. Every point that hangs about when you do this is part of the Mandelbrot Set; in this picture, these are the points in black (the non-black points are coloured based on how quickly they run for the horizon). But if the point keeps doubling back on itself when we keep doing the same thing... the Mandelbrot Set consists of all of the points that generate strange loops from a given formula. Awesome? Awesome.
  

Moving on.

Strange loops can be bewildering at times because our minds are adapted to a conventionally categorical, hierarchical way of thinking - the classic riddle of shallow philosophy, "the chicken or the egg", writ large. The two hands cannot actually be drawing each other, after all! That looping sort of cause and effect makes no sense to our ordinary perception.

So it's very helpful that Hofstadter addresses this. None of the loops we've discussed, he points out, are actually self-sustaining or self-perpetuating. Rather, we can restore part of our usual understanding of things by noticing that every point of the loop has both an internal cause - somewhere else in the loop - as well as an external cause, generally one single one for the loop as a whole. You stand on any step of the Penrose staircase by climbing there from a lower step - and because Penrose conceived of the staircase. Characters reach the fulfilment of their stories with the unnoticed aid of their author. A quine is produced by being run, but only because it was first run on a computer. (The bits that make up computer memory are also strange loops, tiny tiny circuit segments that continuously feed themselves their own voltage as new input.) The trigonometric functions, and fractals, and especially the Mandelbrot Set, were discovered by expanding upon math that was already known. Particle-antiparticle pairs form from errant energy waves nearby in the universe. The Liar Paradox needs someone to say it or there is no "I" to be lying and not lying.

You'll notice I skipped humans, because the human mind is more complex than any of these - it is a self-modifying strange loop. In this sentence, I am now making you aware of the fact that you are thinking about strange loops, such as this sentence and your thoughts. You've just added an additional metarecursion onto that cycle, and you can keep doing that to potentially infinite degrees, limited only by your boredom! But for the moment I'm going to tie whatever cycle you're currently on back to this sentence by noting that by thinking about that uppermost layer and the process by which your mind reflects on itself you've constructed a strange loop of strange loops. With my help, of course. This blog post provides initial external instigation. ;)

My point is, though, that your mind doesn't necessarily need the external instigation. I have no idea how many strange loops that cycle in the last paragraph, for instance, and you might have easily realised the loop of loops without my assistance. This is because your mind is a more complicated, tangled, crazy, and wonderful place than you may have ever realised before! :D

I'm not going to be able to finish this in only two posts. Next time: we have to go deeper.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

I just realized I've never actually discussed Gödel, Escher, Bach in detail here before, and then I went and made reference to it in my last post. Shame on me. It's awesome.

Gödel, Escher, Bach is a book by Douglas Hofstadter, whose subject cannot be really concisely explained. It's about everything. At it's core, you could say it's mostly about human consciousness. And music. And math. And art. (Kind of as implied by the title. You remember Kurt Gödel, right?) And puns, and palindromes, and Möbius strips, and vinyl records that destroy the record players that play them, and the holism/reductionism dichotomy, and computer programming, and artificial intelligence, and Charles Babbage's parable of Achilles and the Tortoise, and... and, it's amazing and you should go read it. Skim the parts that are too jargony for you, if you must, but keep going through it.

Let's talk about a construct that Hofstadter introduces, called a "strange loop". It's a shorthand way to talk about things that linearly relate to themselves. It'll probably be clearer if I discuss examples instead of trying to define it:

• You've seen M. C. Escher's lithograph of the endless stairs? (The artwork is called 'Ascending and Descending', by the way. The structure itself is called a Penrose staircase, after the fellow who actually invented it - if you can tell me who famously used the correct name, you get an imaginary cookie.) That's a strange loop. You start anywhere on the stairs, and do nothing but walk up - linearly, one direction - and you still return to the point you started from.
• A quine is a computer program that, with no input, produces its own exact source code as output. This is a strange loop - you proceed linearly down the generations of output, and each one is still the same code with which you began.
  
• The trigonometric functions are a strange loop. For the function y = sin(x), the rate at which y changes with respect to x changing is y' = cos(x). The rate at which y' changes is y'' = -sin(x). The rate at which y'' changes is y''' = -cos(x), and the rate at which y''' changes is y'''' = sin(x) = y. Applying one procedure over and over takes you back to the original result.
• The Liar Paradox - "I am lying right now" - is a strange loop. The thought process goes, if you are lying, then that statement is a lie, so it must not be true that you are lying right now, so you must not be lying. But if you're not really lying, then when you say you are lying you must be telling the truth, in which case you really are lying. Paradox.
  
• The way your mind itself works is a strange loop. This is the process called introspection - you are able to recognize that your brain is producing thoughts, and this recognition is itself one of those thoughts.

People tend to think of strange loops as tricksy, exotic, complicated, mind-blowing things, but in reality, they're everywhere. People just tend not to notice them, or to think too hard about them, when they encounter them in real life. It's both frustrating, and depressing.

I'll elaborate on the significance of this next week, but in the meantime, you can go to another fantastic strange loop by following this elegant and finely-crafted link.

Moment of clarity, possibly?

I just finished 'I Don't Want To Kill You', by Dan Wells. Brilliant, but mostly unrelated. Now I'm thinking about why I find mentally-ill people so sympathetic; it's apparently a bit unusual. Mom, at least, has never hesitated to give voice to the fact that she finds it disturbing and wishes I wouldn't; I don't find it disturbing at all, and unlike some of the other things I enjoy or at least don't mind, I'm not even entirely sure why it might be seen as disturbing. Sociopaths, schizophrenics, malignant narcissists, what-have-you are all in basically the same position as the rest of fallen man but even worse off, because their suffering is, I don't know, an intrinsic part of who they are? (This is kind of a part I can't express well, but it gets down to the idea that personality disorders are harder to treat than broken bones.) It frustrates me to have Mom worry that this kind of concern is itself psychologically unhealthy. (Of course this may all just be justificationary reaction on my part, but I'm increasingly unconfident in that and will continue so until I know otherwise.)

This leads me back around to "I Don't Want To Kill You", because of why I love John Cleaver so much as a protagonist. Not only is he suffering from sociopathy, but he is consciously aware of, and fighting, it. Self-awareness is key. It's a meta-recursive strange-loop thingy, which as I concluded from Godel, Escher, Bach is both an intrinsic component of the human intellect and even more intrinsically a divine attribute, and therefore a part of how man is made in God's image. It is, consequently, absolutely and totally mind-boggling to me in a violently facepalming why would you do that screaming kind of way why anyone would consciously do that, yet circumstantial, testimonial, and, yes, internal evidence suggests that it happens all the time. Forgetfulness and apathy, mostly. But even that aside, it often seems people don't even try. Or think that they're already doing it - I know I'm not the only one who's noticed this. This empathy business doesn't seem to be all it's cracked up to be, frankly. Can't people honestly examine and question themselves? Why is 'DOUBT' such a scary word?

This is where my chain of reasoning breaks down, because the moment of clarity has passed, I am falling asleep, and my attention and thoughts have been drifting into other places even since I started writing this. But, it seems to me, I can try to bring this to peoples' attention. Help to complete that particular strange loop, raise self-awareness, whatever. I'm sure conscious rejection is possible, if inexplicable, but I can help prove the choice to more fully resemble the image of God. I need to write about it, because that's what I can do and what I seem to be decent at. And that comes back to casting traditional 'them's in a different light, playing Devil's Advocate in person, writing stories that enable readers to question whether that are themselves mad, or villainous, or absolutely in the right. Pride is pervasive and in need of deflating.

This moment of clarity, of course, is foremost just a restatement of what I already believe, albeit one that has seen multiple pieces of that net suddenly 'click' together, as well as one that demands rather more action from me than I usually give it. (Sloth is definitely my worst vice.) It's not really all that clear, even, considering how often I point out I'm unsure of some bit, which rather lends support to the idea that this is just a rationalization of my own preexisting behavior. That said, I can not think of a single thing that would contradict this and show why it might be wrong, but, of course, "the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it", &c. (Side-question: does the darkness understand the darkness? The light presumably understands both...) ...and there I go fixating on meta-recursion again. Plus I've implied a distinction between those who are self-aware and those who are not, which given my loathing for "Us-vs-Them" categories makes me quite a hypocrite. And that sentence establishes me as a self-aware hypocrite trying not to be, which I happen to think is the best kind of hypocrite to be, placing me back in the "good-guy" slot in my own mind... though the fact that I feel wrong considering myself a "good-guy" could just be showcasing a symptom of depression that I should be trying to avoid... but that statement is itself just a rejection of responsibility on my part...

Given that entire last paragraph, I'm really praying that this note at least started out on the right track.

A return to abnormalcy

I seem to know a surprising number of Christians who are fascinated by things most people find repulsive - because they are disgusting, eerie, unusual, horrifying, creepy, what-have-you - and, conversely, a disproportionate number of people I know who enjoy these sorts of things are Christians. This is more than a matter of those being the sorts of people I tend to know, though that's certainly the obvious explanation; rather, when I meet people who like the macabre, as often as not they turn out to be Christian after-the-fact, and when I meet Christians I often eventually discover that they have this fascination.

It's hardly a universally ironclad rule, but it is an interesting recurring pattern. I wonder if there is causality involved somehow in this correlation? It does seem to me that once a person has accepted that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, it's quite difficult to fear anything else.