A Quantum of Divinity

Yes, I love this kind of stuff - seeking the points of intersection between points of view gets me thinking.  After all, it's in the centre that innovation gets sparked...

If space exploded out of nothingness to create the universe we inhabit now, this begs the question–Did the universe create God? –Gail S.

 

This is a completely unanswerable question, so forgive me for attempting anyway.

 

If you believe in a personal God—the kind of God who answers prayers, performs miracles, and speaks directly to people—then science has nothing to say on the matter. Such a God exists out of space and time and does not live within the laws of physics, so cosmological discoveries are irrelevant.

 

Einstein had a different view of God, one that is widely shared in one form or another by many other scientists who study the universe. “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings,” Einstein told Rabbi Herbert Goldstein in 1921. When George Smoot called his map of the cosmic microwave background “the face of God,” or when Leon Lederman refers to the “God particle,” they are speaking roughly in this context. Insofar as the laws of physics emerged at the time of the Big Bang, you could say that the God we know appeared then too. Then the question of “what came before the Big Bang?” becomes equivalent to the question of whether there is a deeper, more timeless form of God.

 

Recent theories about multiple universes that exist in infinite time (also described in my previous post) provide a place for God to exist before our universe—and after, if there is an after–if you choose to interpret them that way. Those theories could also explain how our universe began, and what came before the Big Bang. As yet these theories are untestable, though, so they still live in the realm of metaphysics as much as physics.

North Korea

While the People’s Liberation Army does not even conduct military exercises with the North Koreans — the government in the North forbids such contact with outsiders — Chinese military strategists adhere to the doctrine that they cannot afford to abandon their ally, no matter how bad its behavior, analysts here say.

 

Doesn't matter how many people say "the enemy of my enemy is my ally" - it's still not true.  Ignoring the bad behaviour of allies doesn't make it go away; it makes you culpable.  By continuing to ignore the threat of the North Korean state not only to its neighbours and possibly the US, but to its own people.

 

I remember living in South Korea during the September 2011 attacks on the US; to my Korean friends, it seemed a tragic but distant "over there" problem.  They lived in the shadow of a much more present threat.  I had the chance to set foot in North Korea at Panmunjom and look North Korean soldiers in the eye - they are made of the same flesh and blood as are their Southern cousins.  The gap between them is less a matter of walls, landmines and flags than it is one of culture, experience and fear, but both of these chasms can be bridged.

 

Someone just has to see the path and be willing to lead people forward.  China could be that leader; their leadership could build some positivity into China's brand and increase their international respect quotient in the process.  To do that, though, they need to stop looking at themselves as a future umbrella and instead see themselves as drops in the ocean. 

 

There stands a train station in South Korea with a sign that says "To Pyeongyang;" everyone will be a little better off when that train can leave its station.

 

Communication: People Need Symbols

"For me, The Dark Knight Rises is specifically and definitely the end of the Batman story as I wanted to tell it, and the open-ended nature of the film is simply a very important thematic idea that we wanted to get into the movie, which is that Batman is a symbol.

 

"He can be anybody, and that was very important to us."

 

Anonymous uses Guy Fawkes, partially to conceal the identity of members but also to create an identifiable brand.  We might think of this and cringe, but symbols are fundamental to the way we view our world.  Flags are symbols.  Uniforms are symbols.  Even letters are symbols, representing intangibles like sound.  Zero represents a concept, nothingness, that doesn't even exist in nature.

 

We communicate the world we live in through metaphor - images painted on cave walls, languages, parables, art are all expressions of the world as we interpret it - not as the world is in and of itself.  Like any telephone game, layers and personal experiences get added to the expression of what is over time until the metaphor we communicate is something entirely different than the thing it represents.  Thus, bridges have gender, ideologies are understood as uniform blocks, The Other is separate from ourselves. 

 

The invention and use of symbols is a powerful tool - essentially, the building block of communication.  Through symbols, we can record information across time, we can teach, we can conceptualize, plan, build, etc, but it equally creates a filter between the world we are a part of and the world we comprehend in our heads.  Call it a prison for your mind.

 

Cultures around the world have identified this concept, through metaphor, and have equally proposed solutions, which in turn become wrapped in metaphor.  We like to focus on the ever-expanding differences, but here's the thing - when you get passed the telephone-game of social adaptation, you find core concepts and symbols that are truly universal in nature, like the tree, the snake or the circle.

 

The differences aren't a bad thing - they add diversity, complexity and through co-morbidity, opportunity.  It's social evolution, an exact mirror of what happens with biological evolution.  It pays, though, to always stay grounded in where the diversity stems from.  The predecessor of symbolism, that nebulous Centre, is the emotional starting point of our communication big bang.  From the centre stem all things; therefore, from the centre, all things can be unravelled, understood and rebuilt.

 

Those of us yearning for a connection with something greater than ourselves, meaning to life, etc. and look for an external diety or an external paradise are caught in a cycle of conceptualization.  The answers we seek aren't boxed definitions at all, but rather the absence thereof. 

Meaning is not found without; it's felt from within.  Those who become too enchanted by symbols lose the opportunity to divine the understanding they can otherwise unlock.

Free Will in the Land of the Blind

Many people have tried to define what media bias is, and attempted to measure it, but I want to try to answer a different question here: not how we can decide if the news is biased, but how each of us actually does decide — and what it means for journalists.

"In the Land of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king."

Ready for it?  You don't really have free will.  At best you have semi-free will that is heavily influenced by factors beyond your control, whether you're conscious of it or not.

It's a topic that makes people squirm (or get angry); the idea that you don't have internal control can be a terrifying one.  How many people are more comfortable with the notion of a War of the Worlds than they are with the concept of Invasion of the Body Snatchers?  There's a reason why it's the Zombie Apocalypse we fear most.

The truly amusing part is that every hyper-confident element of society thinks they're exempt from this risk; they have it all figured out, they're the one-eyed kings, the Shauns of the Dead.  When disaster strikes, they're the ones who will escape - not be part of the zombie horde.  It rarely occurs to them that maybe, just maybe, there's another veil to be lifted, another connection they haven't quite made, but could.  Yet almost cyclically society becomes so fearful that these folk, the people in whom we have placed our trust don't have the answers that even they start to doubt that anyone knows what will happen next.

A bit of doubt is a positive thing; it keeps you questioning, challenging, pushing boundaries and peeking around corners.  The more conscious you of are of the things that shape your perception, the more clearly you see; it's through that level of transparency we truly understand who we are and what we're part of.  It's not the destination, but the journey, etc.

We don't live in a two-dimensional world of black and white; life is more like a sphere reflecting the full spectrum of light.  If you go inward deeply enough, you see where everything connects, at what Lao-tzu called Tao.  Science is still trying to quantify that space through the quest for a Theory of Everything.

In terms of cognition - it's there, at the centre, that you don't gain control but become control.  From the centre, all things are possible:

     The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
     When his work is done,
     the people say, "Amazing:
     we did it, all by ourselves!”

That's a path open to all of us - we just need to be conscious of the terrain.

UPDATE 15/11/14:  Fear the stirogi, fearsome not-quite-humans with a hive mind?  Exactly.

Shine a Light on China

China’s economy remains less than half the size of the United States’. Yet Europeans believe that China is the world’s leading economic power. Few other people make this mistake. What explains this perception–anxiety about the future?

A good question that perhaps goes deeper than we give it credit for.  While both Europe and China have emerged from feudal origins, there has been a distinct difference in socio-cultural approaches.  As both have pursued dominance throughout history, the West's attitude has been to "make the world England" (with a few notable exceptions), inward-out.  God gave the world to Adam and Eve to do with as they please (though he did kick 'em off of his lawn).  Perhaps the best example of this, apart from the exportation of British culture along with the British Empire, is the ongoing export of Christianity through colonization. Given the intent of this policy, it's no wonder there is fear about the rise of Islam.

The East, on the other hand, has pursued the concept of "All Under Heaven" - perceiving the space that is and then expanding to fill it.  If you look at Eastern religions, there's a stronger connection to the past and to the whole, resulting in a completely different comprehension of time and mankind's place in the world than has developed in the West.

Western anxiety over China is ultimately like being afraid of the dark - we always fear what we don't understand.

The traditional solutions of destroying or assimilating the unknown were never very efficient and have only become harder to implement as military, populace and social complexity have escalated.  To really beat your enemy, you need to understand them.  When you know yourself and know your enemy, victory is guaranteed. Of course, when you truly understand your enemy, understand them well enough to defeat them, that's when you also love them.   

 Instead of destroying the beloved, we try to strategically comprehend and exploit the differences between us - which, done correctly, results in mutual gain.  There's nothing more strategic than altruism.

The end result is specialized collaboration; which, ultimately, is the trajectory of social evolution.