True in a Dream

 I had a strange dream recently. I was at some sort of school carnival or fair, most of which took place in what looked like a high school or middle school gym, and there was a massive amount of food everywhere. However, things were complicated by the fact that there was a security robot that had a powerful death ray and I kept running foul of the robot. Why there was a military-grade, artificially intelligent robot capable of evaporating people in an instant doing security at a school fair never came up. I don't recall what it is I did first to attract its attention, but I then tried not to attract its attention, which made it even more suspicious of me. I tried all sorts of things, none of which worked. I woke up before I was evaporated by its death beam, but at various points a few chairs and other things went up in a burst of light, never to be seen again. The most surreal thing about the dream is that the dream was completely lacking in any anxiety or fear. I was at first a little irritated, then increasingly frustrated, as I could not shake the robot's suspicions, but even that was mostly quite mild. I just went through the school fair, enjoying doing school fair things and occasionally dodging or hiding from or trying to manipulate an artificial intelligence that was hunting me and could possibly annihilate me.

At one point in the dream, I tried to solve the problem by wrestling with the robot and rolling around the floor with it, like you would do with a dog. It did not work; the robot started hunting me even more relentlessly. Thinking about it in the waking world, this makes sense. If a dangerous robot were trying to hunt and kill you, and someone proposed that you solve the problem by rolling around on the floor with it, you would know that this would likely make things worse. But in the dream it did not make sense, and it was extremely frustrating that this unreasonable death-dealing robot was not placated by being shoved to the floor and rolled over and over in a good-natured tussle.

Nothing that happened in the dream truly happened in the real world. Indeed, if I said that something was "just a dream", you would know that I meant that it wasn't real. And yet if I were asked, "In a dream, did you in fact try to evade the death-ray robot?" it would be perfectly acceptable and reasonable for me to say that it was true, I did. We can recognize that something is true in dream even though it is not true in reality. Truth in reality is obviously in some sense 'more true' than truth in a dream. And yet, there's more to this, because we have to have some notion like 'truth in dream' if we are even to talk about 'truth in reality'. If say 'really true' or 'true in reality', this is contrastive. 'This is real' means, among other things, 'not merely dreamed', 'not merely imagined', 'not merely hallucinated', 'not something merely thought to be real', and so forth. By saying that it's rule, I am ruling out its being merely dreamed, and to do that I have to be able to compare what is dreamed with what is being called real. But for me to compare the two, there has to be something that is true in the dream that can be contrasted with what is real. If nothing were genuinely true in the dream, I could not say that the death-dealing robot from my dream did not really exist, because there would be no such thing as 'the' death-dealing robot from my dream; if you cannot have an accurate, i.e., adequately true, description of something, you can't successfully deny that it really exists. Truth in reality is known by ruling out things like 'merely true in a dream', and the 'true' in the latter case can't be a mere figure of speech for the comparison to give a coherent judgment about what is real. We get the same result if we say things like how it is true both in the dream and in reality that I have an interest in food; this can't be purely zeugmatic for the word 'reality' to mean anything here.

Thus we find that truth in reality is more properly truth than truth in a dream, that truth (in a dream) is not the same as truth (in the real world), and yet that truth in one case has to be comparable precisely as truth to truth in the other case. Being true in a dream is a different, less fundamental way of being true, than being true in reality. But, of course, there are many different 'ways of being true' in this sense: true in a dream, true in a fiction, true in a hallucination, true in a delusion, true in a model, true in an experiment, true in a possible world. And similar kinds of arguments can be run for each, because to say that something is true in reality is to say that it is not merely true in a dream and not merely true in a hallucination and not merely true in a delusion, etc., etc. There are different domains of truth, they are not all equally fundamental, and yet they are all domains of truth, related to each other as domains of truth. 

We don't even have to stray very far abroad to get this result. Physicists work in at least three kinds of domains of truth -- 'true in a model', 'true in an experiment', and 'true in the physical world'. They run back and forth among these. It is true that they sometimes seem to conflate them. But they cannot be the same thing, because if you conflate 'true in a model' with 'true in the physical world', you not only get faleshoods, physics cannot even get off the ground, because then there's nothing actually to do with the model. If 'true in a model' and 'true in the physical world' were the same, your work would be done in just making the model; but we actually have to test our model by comparing and contrasting it with the physical world. As one of the many jokes about this goes, all models lie but some lie truthfully, and much of physics is about finding the truthful liars. Truth in a model cannot be the same as truth in the physical world; but to engage in physical inquiry using models requires being able to compare what's true in a model with what's true in the physical world; and the very nature of physical inquiry requires that 'true in the physical world' be more fundamentally true, in some way, than 'true in the model'. It's the same generic pattern. The same thing happens with 'true in an experiment', which has to mediate between 'true in a model' and 'true in the physical world', but can't reduce to 'true in a model' (because you actually have to do the experiment, not just make the model) or to 'true in the physical world' (because things can go wrong in an experiment that make it erroneous, so that what is true in the experiment does not fit what is true in the physical world).

I think there's a case to be argued that 'truth in a dream' is the first basic way we experience this analogy of truth; we learn the difference between dream and reality much earlier than we learn about such esoteric things as hallucinations, delusions, models, experiments, possible worlds, and so forth.  The biggest rivals for this position are 'true in imagination' and 'true in fiction', but I think the circumstances of dreaming set it off more sharply and clearly from 'true in the real world' than we find with truth in imagination or in fiction. Truth in imagination and truth in fiction are subtler concepts. If that's the case, then if we had no dreams, it's possible that we might not really have any science or literature, either, not because the latter are just dreams, but because they are not -- without dreams, we might never have started learning how to contrast things with 'what is real', which both science and literature do. Perhaps it is even the case that we dream because, by contrast, it makes it easier to know the world, so that animals who dream are harder to fool. In any case, the comparison and contrast with dreaming plays an essential role in our understanding of reality and what it is to be real. Because we can think about what's true in dreams (and in fiction, and in imagination, and in a model, and so forth), we can think more easily and directly about what's true in reality.

Dashed Off XVI

 Everything is sublime insofar as it suggests either the cosmos or God.

Times cannot be distinguished except by means requiring causal inference.

Schellenberg: S is inculpably in doubt about the truth of G if (1) S believes that epistemic parity obtains between G and not-G, and (2) S has not knowingly (self-deceptively or non-self-deceptively) neglected to submit this belief to adequate investigation.
-- One problem with this is that it's unclear that actual epistemic parity (as opposed to simple uncertainty) ever occurs for anything.
-- Schellenberg massively underestimates the issues raised by the possibility of self-deception -- conduct in other contexts is not adequate for rejecting self-deception as a diagnosis in a given context, and reluctance is also not a sign of non-self-deception except under very peculiar conditions.
-- (1) essentially shows that using 'doubt' in Schellenberg's argument presupposes an already existing isosthenia argument.
-- In other contexts, 'adequate investigation' generally means 'investigation adequate to discover the truth'.
-- Schellenberg's argument seems to confuse self-deception with unusual negligence.

"Without the Naam, cursed is the body, which shall be taken back by Death." SGGS 192

Proof is inherently normative.

Civil society is simultaneously political, economic, and cultural.

Every human soul has both austere-seeming deserts and riotous swamps.

The world of the Fall is a world of starvation. In every age one finds humanity starving of something -- of meaning, of order, of social connection, of reason, of daring, of many other things in ever-varying proportions. Sometimes this is through bare lack. Sometimes it is because it is, by some structure of incentives, hoarded and rationed. Sometimes it is because people have developed a habit of gorging themselves on some non-nutritious substitute. But everywhere there is starvation, in every age.

?: Is there a relation between universal application of excluded middle and the thesis that being is univocal?

excluded middle as applying in matters of being with respect to a given genus or order of being

'What is must be explained by nature or by cause' as PSR

natural change is when natural things
(1) change
(2) according to a principle inherent in themselves (nature)
(3) to determinate end
(4) that is the same for things with that kind of nature, when not interefered with.
-- (2) rules out extrinsic motion, (3) rules out chance, (4) rules out violent motion

divine discipline and satispassion

the capacity of modalities to serve as symbols of other modalities (e.g., 'always' for 'necessary')

identity: definition :: noncontradiction : proof :: excluded middle : division :: sufficient reason : explanation

"The One who created the thing, understands it; He has fashioned all of this. / Says Nanak, the Lord and Master is Infinite; He alone understands the value of His Creation." SGGS 206
"I cannot describe Your Manifestations, O Treasure of Excellence, O Giver of peace. / God is Inaccessible, Incomprehensible, and Imperishable; He is known through the Perfect Guru." SGGS 207

"All evil springs -- it is a good old saying -- from enjoying what we ought to use (wealth and material comforts) and using what we ought to enjoy (intelligence, love, beauty, religion); in other words, from reversing the true relation of means and ends." Bosanquet
"The reformatory theory, in its purity, *is* arbitrary and cruel. Revenge may be exhausted by a term in prison; it is the work of reformation to the duration of which no sane man can profess to set a limit."
"The true place of deterrence and reformation in punishment is simply to determine the method and degree of details which no estimate of moral guilt can supply."
"But the very work of love in punishment is to stamp and brand the evil, by exhibiting it in its true light."
"Every judgment exhibits a whole in its parts, and parts as contributory to a whole."

To name is to relate to a classification.

the poets as the collective font of honor for the human race

Despite the name, a critic is not a judge of values but a discoverer of them in the work; where judgment enters is in that doing this requires finding promise of values and fulfillment or lack of fulfillment of that promise.

the experience of elementary benevolence (the suitability of the natural world to life and joy, as a sort of companion)

The legal system is more fundamental than the state; the latter is a child of the former.

Sometimes one must learn how to begin to be belonging.

Have and habere are not etymologically related.

All doing presupposes a possibility of doing; this possibility must be either due to some other doing or necessary. There cannot be an infinite regress in possibility of doing that is due to another doing; therefore there must be some possibility of doing that is necessary. But all genuine possibility resides in some actuality. Therefore there is a necessary actuality.

necessisimilitude

The possibility of believing that God exists (or does not) presupposes the existence of God.

"To know is primarily and principally to seize a non-self which in its turn is capable of seizing and embracing the self: it is to live with the life of another." Rousselot

"Intelligence is a form of life, and of living things it is the most perfect." Aquinas

"If, then, intelligence is perfect and supreme life, it is because it can reflect upon itself and because at one and the same time it can know reality and know itself." Rousselot, closely following SCG 4.11

If Kantianism about the categories were true, every mind would be a god.

"Now the more intense is the life of an intellectual being, the less limited is it to the narrow circle of itself." Rousselot
"By definitinon it is necessary to know oneself to know truth as such."
"The human soul is intelligent because it has a 'passive capacity' for all being; God is intelligent because He is the active Source of all being."
"Just as science is demonstrative reason's substitute for the pure idea, so system is a substitute on the part of intellectual imagination for science."
"Symbol lies at the very limit of systematic construction. There is no change of method, and all symbolic philosophies conceal a dialectic enthymeme. The major premise is furnished by the principle current in the Middle Ages that the world of sense somehow represents the world of spirit; in the minor some sensible thing is taken for its power to represent in a particular way the reality of the spiritual object in mind."

The joy that is an act of charity is not a forced smiling.

Genuine understanding opens up to the doing of good and the contemplating of beauty.

No one loves his neighbor who does not love the Church.

truth as being insofar as it can be in another; truth as being insofar as it is not merely present but can be re-presented

"The truth is the first of the mercies that Jesus offers to the sinner." Robert Cardinal Sarah

It takes worlds of a thousand kinds to lay bare the human heart.

"Wars are always lost, and The War always goes on." J.R.R. Tolkien

Unus homo sustinet plures personas.

active and passive sovereignty

The liberty that is most relevant to civil society is a jural status, which comes with a norm, recognized by society, of being an originary social principle and not merely instrumental to another. It is in this sense that even an infant may be a free citizen.

three orientations of a person in society: the good, the right, the holy

The compulsion exercized by a state is in fact the incentivized voluntary cooperation of persons.

household - neighbor-society - civil society
neighbor-societies: proximal, tribal, contractual
-- we can then have 'neighbor-societies of civil societies', i.e., leagues and realms

"An institution may have grown up without special ordinance, or may have been called into existence by an act of public will. But it has always the character of being recognised *as if* it had been 'instituted' or established to fulfil some public or quasi-public purpose." Bosanquet

All kinds of sameness reflect in different ways the divine unity.

The divine sameness is that which both absolute and relative sameness, both real sameness and rational sameness, both symmetric sameness and asymmetric sameness, reflect.

It is easy to forget that stock phrases become stock beacuse people like using them.

Martyrdom is merely crucifragium; we are all in a dying way.

The universe and all in it has God as end. Normally things of the world reflect this finality by being, order, and intelligible and sensible beauty, but at times they do so in a more specific way, and tehse are signs and wonders.

Beliefs are ways we shape ourselves and therefore the world.

Joseph : active life :: Mary : contemplative life

All poetry is a kind of xenoglossy.

Society arises out of an ordered cooperation to which one can be loyal or treacherous, and this is what social contract theorists were crudely trying to depict.

People often have a weirdly spiritualized view of metaphor, as if it were an airy meaning that had to be made earthy; but the reverse is true -- metaphor is just the stony turned breathy.

If determinism is dependent on the way things are at time t, whether or not an actual system is deterministic can depend on the clock, and presupposes, as prior, the measurement of time.

Fictions educate us in fiction, which all human beings need to know.

Civilization requires more of a creed than just faith in civilization.

Comboio de Corda

 Autopsychography
by Fernando Pessoa

The poet is a feigner
who so completely feigns
he comes to feign what is a pain,
a pain he truly feels,

and those who read what he writes,
feel good in that pain so read,
not the two that he had,
but the one that they do not have.

And so on the railroad track
is circling, to find sense,
this toy train
called a heart.

My rough translation.

Music on My Mind

 

Van Canto, "Rebellion". Originally a Grave Digger song. (I like the video, which was made just by Van Canto asking fans to film themselves singing along with their version. The original singer from Grave Digger sent in one, and can be seen briefly here.)

From Above and From Below

 Man, together with all creatures, is placed in existence and hence set outside divine being as a be-ing by itself. By his origin man, along with all creatures, has his being "from above." Because he is given a nature that in some sense is left up to him and to the totality of the be-ings that his nature is woven into, he, along with all creatures, has a being "from below."  But since he is given an analogy with divine being that sets him apart from all nonpersonal creatures, he is "from above" in a way different from all nonpersonal creatures.

And in virtue of this higher being, which is his personally spiritual being, a "being born of the Spirit" (a life of grace) is possible for him.... 

[Edith Stein, Potency and Act, Redmond, tr., ICS Publications (Washington, DC: 2009) pp. 410-411.]

Visitant at a Venture

 Surmise
The Track of a Human Mood
by Alice Meynell 

Not wish, nor fear, nor quite expectancy
 Is that vague spirit Surmise,
That wanderer, that wonderer, whom we see
 Within each other’s eyes;

 And yet not often. For she flits away,
 Fitful as infant thought,
Visitant at a venture, hope at play,
 Unversed in facts, untaught. 

 In “the wide fields of possibility”
 Surmise, conjecturing,
Makes little trials, incredulous, that flee
 Abroad on random wing. 

 One day this inarticulate shall find speech,
 This hoverer seize our breath.
Surmise shall close with man -- with all, with each --
In her own sovereign hour, the moments of our death.

Floods

Here in Central Texas we have recently been slammed with severe flooding -- what is likely the most severe freshwater flooding incident in the United States in at least half a century. The death toll is currently around 80 and slowly rising; it might well reach 100 by the end. Most of the deaths occurred in Kerr County as a large thunderstorm system (distant after-effects of Tropical Storm Barry) essentially parked itself over the Guadalupe River on the evening of July 3; over ten inches of rain fell and the Guadalupe River rose 23 feet overnight. This is a problem given that the river runs directly through the town of Kerrville, and even worse given that Kerr County is camping country, and is in the middle of summer camp season. (A summer camp for young girls, Camp Mystic, was entirely flooded, and there are still several girls missing.) The same thing happened, on a smaller scale, in western Travis County on July 5. Meteorologists had been expecting rain but not major flooding (they knew the rain was coming in but didn't expect it to stay more or less in one place), so people were caught off guard. 

It was a lot of rain; I live on the other side of Austin from all of this, safely up near the top of a large ridge with reasonably good drainage, and for most of July 5 my backyard was a pond an inch and a half deep. In places harder hit, rescue operations are still going on, and there is still chance of more flooding until Tuesday.

A major reason such a bad situation has not been even worse was the Texas Military Department, which ended up saving over five hundred people. The Texas Military Department is one of the oldest and most prestigious state agencies, founded in 1836 when Texas was an independent republic; the Texas Military Forces today primarily consist of the Texas National Guard and the Texas State Guard. It has a significant number of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters that it was able to mobilize for air rescue.

Obviously, in the broader country politically brain-damaged people try to tie the problem into their pet political issues, but although there is some question of whether the relevant authorities were too slow to issue warnings, there's really no way to prepare for having several months' worth of rain unexpectedly dumped on an area overnight.

UPDATE (July 8 morning): Currently the confirmed death toll stands at 104, with something like twenty-five more people known to be missing.

UPDATE (July 8 evening): The confirmed death toll is now at 111, and with better colligation of data from different sources, there are something like 170 people missing.

UPDATE (July 9 afternoon): The confirmed death toll now stands at 119.

Tote Edoxe tois Apostolois kai tois Presbyterois

 Then the Ambassadors and Seniors took thought with the whole assembly, having selected men from them to send to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas: Judas called Barsabbas and Silas, men eminent among the brothers, having written by their hand:

The Ambassadors and the Seniors, brothers, to those in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, brothers out of the nations, cheers. Since we have heard that some having gone forth from us agitated you by words, disrupting your souls, telling [you] to be circumcised and to keep the law, to whom we had not given orders, we took thought, having become unanimous, having selected men to send to you with Paul and Barnabas, to whom we are devoted, people who had handed over their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus we have sent Judas and Silas, that they by word may report on the same. For the Holy Spirit and we took thought to lay no further weight upon you, save these essentials: to keep distance from the idolatrous, and from bloodshed and strangling, and from whoredom. Watching yourself with respect to these things, you will do well. Be strong.

[Acts 15:22-29, my very rough translation. 'Ambassadors and Seniors', of course, is a very literal translation; it is usually translated as 'apostles and elders'; 'assembly' could also be translated as 'church'. It's interesting that edoxe and its cognates, here translated as 'took thought', keeps coming up in this short passage -- it's found three times (the apostles and elders took thought with the assembly, then this is said again in the epistle, and then the content of what they have decided is marked by 'the Holy Spirit and we took thought'. Because it's actually in passive form, it's often translated as 'it seemed to' or 'it was supposed by'. 'Cheers' is also very literal, although I note that 'cheers' is in many parts of the English-speaking world used as a greeting or sign-off in exactly the way chairein is. Chairen and similar words are common in salutations in letters in ancient Greek.

The epistle is quite condensed. My suspicion is that it is deliberately so; the whole point of the letter is not to decide the matter by letter but to authorize Judas Barsabbas and Silas to speak authoritatively on the subject. There's a nice parallelism in the letter to emphasize that, in fact: as people who had no orders from the apostles and elders had agitated the Gentile believers with their words, so Judas and Silas, who are commissioned by the apostles and elders (literally, sent, but it's the verb that gives us the word 'apostle', and it often means a legal authorization to represent, as with an ambassador), will resolve the matter by their words. The letter is a letter of commission, not a doctrinal letter.

It's difficult for me to know how to translate the summary of what Judas and Silas will be speaking of, because it could be translated as laying a very strict charge or as simply providing a general warning. That is, while it's literally said that they should distance themselves from the idolatrous, bloodshed and strangling, and harlotry, as in English, this could mean either that they should abstain strictly and entirely or that they should avoid it as much as possible. Likewise with what is here translated somewhat literally as 'watching yourself'. It would make sense in context that they are being charged to avoid these things entirely, and this is both a very plausible translation and the way it is usually understood, but it is technically not what is explicitly said, and it could also be that the apostles and elders are deliberately not tying down Judas and Silas to an exact position, if it turned out that they discovered unusual circumstances that required a more nuanced approach.

Because of the immediate dispute, the three things to avoid are often given by commentators a specifically ritual significance -- the nations are to avoid certain pagan religious practices. But I can't help note the similarity between this list and later lists made by Jewish rabbis of things that must be avoided by Jews under any and all circumstances (idolatry, murder, adultery) and of laws that are binding even on the Gentiles. I think the point is that these are fundamental defilements, whatever the circumstances, and to be avoided by anyone who reveres God. If this is the case, the point of the apostles and elders is that what is required of the Gentiles is not to circumcise according to the law of Moses but to be God-fearing by avoiding what God regards as an abomination.

The ending, Errosthe, means 'Have strength' or 'Have health'; it can also just mean 'farewell' or 'goodbye'. Are the apostles and elders just signing off, or did they pick this particular farewell for a purpose rather than as a mere formality, to encourage the Gentile believers to be strong? It's impossible to say on the evidence.]