What are the gods?

In Chapter Seven of A World Full of Gods, I struck pay dirt—I gleaned insight into what polytheism is about, what its gods are. But before I expound upon that insight, I wish to state my intentions with these Monday posts.

Two things for certain I believe: firstly, continuing education is a fine pursuit, and secondly, we oughtn't be modest about it. We should share what we learn. We should show it off, flaunt it. People who aren't interested needn't listen.

My purpose then with these Monday posts is to share what I learn, my goal then to stir the neurons in others' heads—if only a little. Any post receiving a comment stemming from a stirred head is a post that succeeded. It's not my goal to change anyone's mind, with the exception of people who believe they shouldn't question their own beliefs. But such exceptions are few, and they needn't listen.

The reason I claim no goal to persuade isn't to get your guard down. Rather, it's to apologize for the brevity of this post. I've had the benefit of reading a hundred pages of Greer's prose, in which he presents his case with many supporting details, presumably all with the intent to explain and persuade. I'm merely writing to explain, and I'm using far fewer words to do it. This creates gaps, and those gaps appear even wider if you presume the explanation is an argument meant to persuade. It's not. It's meant to stir.

Now, down to business.

As I said, Chapter Seven is pay dirt. From it I understand what classical polytheism claims the gods are—or I think I understand. They're not bearded men and stately women hanging out on a tall mountain in northern Greece—why else didn't Greeks climb Olympus, meet the gods, and resolve the issue once and for all?—but instead are more like the incorporeal nous of classical monotheism. Only, in the case of polytheism, the gods are numerous and finite. Here's a passage from the book.

Consider the ancient Greek idea that mountains and rivers are gods. Modern readers of classical literature often think that the ancient Greeks were talking about supernatural beings who were related to a given river or mountain, but who were distinct from what we perceive as a geographical feature. But this is not what the ancient Greeks were saying. To them, a mountain or a river was not simply a geographical feature. What we call the mountain or the river was the body, the physical expression or dimension of a more complex entity. That entity also had a self-aware personality; it could perceive, choose, desire and take action.

In other words, the gods are the consciousnesses underlying natural phenomena. This isn't a stretch. Right now I'm apt to personify Phoenix's summer, such as how it's going through a mid-life crisis and showing off to excess its still plentiful virility. Or maybe Summer is defensive about Autumn nearing too close to Summer's throne, and Summer is shouting his might. You needn't believe Summer is an actual, personable entity to understand my point that Phoenix is especially hot right now in late August, and my personification is simpler, though less precise, than describing the details of high and low temperatures, dew points, and seasonal averages.

But polytheists don't merely personify nature; they believe the gods exist. I'm personifying when describing the icy hands of the Methow River, which I fell into a few years ago, but that doesn't mean the river is alive. Personifying summer doesn't mean there exists a living Summer. Or does it?

It thus makes sense to ask whether at least some gods are embodied in nature or specific natural phenomena, or even to speculate that these gods may be the inner dimension, the dimension of awareness and mind, of the natural world. From this point of view, a god of weather could be conceptualized as the indwelling consciousness of the lower atmosphere itself, related to the complex physical structure of winds, clouds, topography and energy flows in exactly the same way that the human mind and personality relate to the physical brain and body.

Here Greer hints at that troubling question: how do we know any of the people around us are real, are conscious? How do I know? It's possible everyone around me is an automaton giving the illusion of having a mind. That they're made of the same organic compounds as I and give birth to other automatons only shows how complex and well functioning they are. So too do their well reasoned pleas that I think of them as living beings.

The answer—my working answer—is I don't know for sure. I can't even be sure whether I'm alive. But as with neutrinos' existence, the universe appears to work as though our consciousnesses exist. That is, my best guess is other people are alive. As far as mental frameworks go, ascribing minds to other people is a good one; so far it's explained human behavior my whole life—political discussions excepted, of course.

So why not accept a mental framework that ascribes minds to natural phenomena? Why give the benefit of the doubt—and, consequently, souls—to humans but not to rivers and mountains? This question hits upon our core assumptions in metaphysics and epistemology, and perhaps I'll give my own answer, for what it's worth, in a future post.

I'm sorry, Jason

Jason P. had devised a weekly schedule with each day of the week assigned a specific activity. On Monday I work on an open source project. On Tuesday I run. On Wednesday I read. And so on.

After he finished telling me about his plan, I laughed. How could anyone stick to a regimen so rigid? The first Friday someone invited him to a Fun Time doing something Unproductive, he'd bail on whatever Friday Chores he had scheduled. And I struggled to imagine anyone reading one day a week and staying enthusiastic about it. But in hindsight I know I shouldn't have laughed. I had a friend named Jason.

Jason and I met as coworkers at our first real job after graduating college—and by real job I mean a stodgy, nine-to-five corporate gig writing software. I was a year-and-a-half ahead of him and thus less sensitive to it, but we both acutely grieved the loss of free time that was part and parcel with our job's compensation package. Everyone who has worked a job knows how this goes: you devote time and energy to readying for work, going to work, working at work, and going home after work, and by the time you arrive home you're tired and need a break. But it's during this break-time that your real life happens, and if you spend the time vegging out with television, computer games, Internet surfing, or whatever spins your scroll wheel then you've been broken. You're someone who consumes and doesn't produce. You've no art, no purpose.

We're most vulnerable to the artless life during the first few years following college graduation. Middle class American life doesn't demand much from us. You need only continue showing up and trying a little, and the world bestows upon you a material comfort that would have paid a king's ransom in earlier ages. But after awhile, the artless life gnaws upon our happiness. We seek to create and accomplish. Something. Anything.

It's easy to blame artless living on our jobs. We invest a lot of time and energy into them. But for Jason and I, post-dot-com circumstances shoved us face-to-face with an unpleasant truth. We had both been unemployed for several months before finding our jobs, and we had both squandered the trove of free time we had had during those months. With the sun always rising tomorrow, we had failed to seize any one day among the hundred, though later when employed we seized with the regrets of goals and projects not pursued when we had had the time. So we came to understand by counterexample that though it seems choring ten or so hours a day with work-related activities is a valid excuse otherwise, we're unproductive in our real lives because of the choices we make.

One reason I quit my job in June was to prove those unemployed months nine years ago were a fluke, that now I'll choose to be artful despite being given ample, unrestricted free time to tempt me otherwise. If Jason and I were still in contact with each other, it would be his turn to laugh. Today is Thursday. Today I post to Just Enough Craig, study the Greer book, and hack on my web application demo.

…as though they do

The cosmological argument, which I wrote about last Monday, is but one argument for the existence of God. It's also an argument for the existence of multiple gods. As Greer writes in A World Full of Gods: most arguments for the existence of one god also work in favor of multiple gods because nothing in the argument requires exactly one god. Indeed, the only monotheist argument that fails for polytheism without objection is the ontological argument, which rests upon the idea of one greatest conceived being. But the ontological argument is a strange flight of logic. I doubt many people use it to convince themselves of anything they don't already believe. It's so abstract—so philosophical—it doesn't seem to apply to real life. Suffice it to say I'm not going to write about it here.

But Greer's point goes further. Other theist arguments don't work equally well for monotheism and polytheism; some work better for polytheism. For example, take the moral argument. Claims that there exist objective moral values are incongruent with our experiences of the real world. Consider the case of someone having to decide between two virtues, say, honesty and kindness. Sometimes you can be honest or kind but not both. Sometimes we are conflicted. Such moral conflicts are hard to reconcile with the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent entity without diluting the meaning of omnipotence or omnibenevolence. But if the universe is as traditional polytheists say and the gods are limited and in contention with one another, then moral trade-offs probably result as a routine matter. That is, the world we see matches the world we expect.

A multiplicity of gods explains a lot about the real world. The atheist argument from evil, which argues against the existence of God based on the presence of evil, fails against polytheism because the gods' limitations allow for the existence of evil. Indeed, some gods may willingly be a source of our problems!

Can it be that simple? I acknowledge the polytheist makes defensible claims, but is he saying anything meaningful? What does it tell me that the heavens roil with a chaos that matches our own world's? How am I wiser by knowing this? Take the following passage in A World Full of Gods.

Thus it's perfectly valid to say of gods and neutrinos alike that while we don't know if they actually exist, the universe appears to work as though they do.

This sounds nothing like the religions I was taught growing up. The passage has a scientific flavor—I doubt the reference to neutrinos is an accident. Just as science doesn't prove anything but instead offers best guesses to explain what we see, is polytheism too offering mere best guesses? Again, polytheism shows itself to be founded on experience, not theology. As for what's gained by theorizing gods into existence, I hope that's covered somewhere in the second half of the book.

Go perk

Preferring to read than to listen or watch, I don't often sit through hour-long tech-talk videos, but several months ago I happened upon this one given by Rob Pike, and it captured my attention.

The lecture is about Newsqueak, a language Rob invented in the 80s, and its channels feature. Though I don't know Newsqueak, I know about channels because they're a part of another one of Rob's languages: Go.

Go is qualitatively different from all other traditional languages I know, such as C and Python. Most of this difference stems from channels and how they change the way I implement concurrency. In short, I have yet to use any conventional synchronizations objects, such as mutexes, in a Go program. As the Go documentation says:

Don't communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating.

The lecture linked to above explains what this means and how it works. In most cases, it's more elegant than what we write in traditional languages. It's also a fun way to look at an old problem.

The cosmological argument

What philosophers call the cosmological argument is what countless people have figured out for themselves through casual reflection on the nature of the universe. As the argument goes, the universe can't always have existed; it must have been created by something.

More formally, the argument may go as follows.

1. Everything in the universe is contingent—i.e., everything that exists has been brought into being, or has been caused, by something else.

2. The causes are also contingent.

3. Together, statements 1 and 2 conclude there exists an infinite regression of causes.

4. But an infinite regression of causes is impossible.

5. Therefore there exists a cause that isn't contingent—i.e., a First Cause or a Necessary Being.

Polytheist perspective

The CA is most often used to justify monotheism, but the argument doesn't rule out the possibility that there exist multiple gods. Statement 5 may be written in the plural: “Therefore there exist causes that aren't contingent—i.e., First Causes or Necessary Beings.” Nothing in the preceding four statements implies only one cause can be without cause.

Furthermore, the CA doesn't require of its First Cause that it be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, or possessing other limitless attributes. It need only be powerful enough, knowledgeable enough, and loving enough to create the universe. For all we know, the creation the universe may be a mindless task. The CA doesn't show the First Cause to be a deity or worthy of worship.

Counter-counterargument

An interesting twist in the CA occurs in subsequent counter-argumentation, whereby the CA is itself encapsulated within an infinite regression, shown as follows.

1. The CA is invalid because it's possible for an infinite regression of causes to exist.

2. But the infinite regression of causes itself must have a cause.

3. Therefore, there exists a cause that isn't contingent—i.e., a First Cause or Necessary Being.

The idea here is there exists a First Cause even within a universe that permits the existence of an infinite regression of causes. But this is only one possible conclusion. Another is that the cause of the infinite regression of causes is itself part of an infinite regression of infinite regressions of causes. We may continue proposing further infinite regressions, too, until we have taken things to their logical conclusion and have proposed an infinitely dimensional infinite regression. This hints of Cantor showing infinite sets having different cardinalities.

My opinion

I reject the CA because it isn't falsifiable. Does the universe permit infinite regressions? Who knows. Maybe the universe is like the implication of Berry's Paradox—i.e., infinite in one direction but lacking a well defined beginning in the other. Or maybe the CA is valid insofar there once existed a First Cause, but the First Cause no longer exists. Or maybe the First Cause is evil. And so on. In no way does the CA help make predictive statements about the universe and is thus of little use to me. But your mileage may vary.

Go peeve

Take the following Go program.

package main

import "fmt"
import "json"

type Foo struct {
    Wham int
    Bam  string
}

type Bar struct {
    gee  int
    whiz string
}

func main() {

    var f Foo
    f.Wham = 42
    f.Bam = "hello world"
    msg, _ := json.Marshal(f)
    fmt.Println(string(msg))

    var b Bar
    b.gee = 42
    b.whiz = "hello world"
    msg, _ = json.Marshal(b)
    fmt.Println(string(msg))
}

Before knowing any better, I would have guessed the program produces two lines of JSON, with each line populated by two fields. But what the program actually produces is as follows.

{"Wham":42,"Bam":"hello world"}
{}

In other words, the first object is converted to JSON, but the second one isn't. The reason why has to do with what, in my opinion, is a design flaw in Go.

Go, like some other modern languages, tries to prevent style-and-format jihad from breaking out between developers by forcing them to use a specific style. Relevant to this case is that Go determines whether a member is public or private depending on the capitalization of the member's name. Lower case members are private; uppercase members are public. No argument.

Until now, during my tentative forays into Go, I've perceived this as a harmless quirk of the language. But when using the standard json package, it's not harmless.

The json.Marshal() function, which converts arbitrary Go objects into JSON-formatted strings, works only on public members. All lowercase members are ignored. In other words, you can't use Go and JSON and lowercase names—at least, not easily.

Normally, I don't care about style requirements imposed by languages. I adopt a when in Rome attitude and squash opinions about how code ought to be formatted, instead formatting my code the same as the language's standard library. But by using JSON it's nearly certain I'm interfacing between two or more languages—e.g., Go and Javascript—and in this case Go's quirks are imparted onto those other languages.

In Javascript I use camel-back notation for member names, thus matching the convention of the language. But I can't use camel-back for members of a JSON-derived object if that object is ever accessed in Go. Fortunately, Javascript is flexible and doesn't care how I name members, so I can make things work by using uppercase. But still this highlights one way in which imposing style on developers is problematic.

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By the way, I'm aware that today is Saturday, just as I was aware that I last posted on Wednesday and that this week's blogging schedule differs from my regular Monday-Thursday. I assure you the oddity has nothing at all to do with how I've lost track of what day of the week it is because of my unemployment. Rather, I wish to post three times this week. That is all. It shan't happen again!

Tribulus terrestris

After a breakfast of eggs and toast, I load my backpack with a water bottle, my camping knife, and a trowel. I strap my claw hammer to the outside of my pack, congratulating myself on having the foresight to bring such a tool. Then I put on my hiking shoes and don my adventuring hat and set out. It's 7:00 AM.

Among the various effects of having Achilles tendinosis is that my Tuesday mornings are free. This Tuesday morning I'm not biking; I'm walking—westward. Minutes into my walk, as I pass through a neighborhood of houses, my left shoe begins to scratch the ground with each step. I stop and balance on my right foot while lifting my left sole, and I pull out two goatheads. I place them on the sidewalk and smash them flat using my hammer. Then I re-strap the hammer to my pack and continue walking. Soon I arrive at my destination: the DC path.

A few weeks ago, I bought a new bike. It's a touring bike, meant to replace my previous touring bike, which was stolen a few months ago while locked up at a transit hub parking lot. I never fully liked that previous bike—I prefer my new one already—so the theft is no loss but the money and effort accompanying the purchase and breaking in of a new bike. As part of that effort, my first ride on it was to the hardware store to buy a bolt for its rear rack. In my experience, the bolts that come with rear racks are always too long and get in the way of the rear cassette.

The hardware store literally no longer allows customers direct access to its nuts and bolts, so I had a store employee help me find the right bolt. While doing so, she asked about my bike, which was leaning against a rack of plumbing parts. We talked about biking, and she said she had a problem with flat tires. “What do you do about flats?” she asked. I started my standard speech about flats, saying how some tires are better than others and which ones and so on. “Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires are good for casual riding,” I said. “Supposedly you can't even hammer a tack through them. That means you're just about invulnerable to goatheads.”

“You mean like the goathead that's stuck in your tire right now?” she responded. I looked down and indeed saw a goathead stuck in my rear tire. (The bike did not ship with Marathon Pluses.) I pulled out the goathead. Fortunately, it hadn't yet penetrated the inner tube.

I finished my business at the hardware store and continued thinking about that goathead. This was a new bike, and I had scarcely ridden it one mile. “Where do these things come from?” I wondered. I had biked only through a neighborhood and along the DC path. Come to think of it, the last two times I biked along that route I had gotten flats. At the time I blamed my bad luck on the cheap Panaracer tires I had been using, but maybe the problem is the route itself. And if the problem is the route, then it's probably the DC path, not the neighborhood streets. With that, I rode back the way I came, slowing down on the path to look for signs of puncturevine.

The DC path is not the same as the canal path. The canal path is the main thoroughfare for cyclists and pedestrians and lies between the canal and the diversion channel, the latter being a concrete trench fifty feet wide and twenty feet deep. The DC path, wherever there happens to be one, is a secondary path sandwiched between the channel and the backyard fences of houses and businesses. The path I was on then isn't landscaped; the only places anything can grow are the raised beds next to the backyard fences. But the beds are mostly barren dirt with only the occasional weed or bush. “Where's the puncturevine?” I wondered as I slowly rode along. And then I realized: those weeds are them.

Tribulus terrestris. Goathead. Devil's thorn. I had never before identified it, having seen it only in photos. In person the leaves looked much smaller. And it's not so much a vine as a broad, flat patch that grows along the ground. It's a handsome plant, actually, with dark green leaves and small yellow flowers. But then on closer look there are the seedpods: dozens of light green goatheads maturing on the plant, waiting to be dropped on the ground, dozens more already on the ground and awaiting a shoe or tire on which to hitchhike.

Most of the weeds along this path were puncturevine, amounting to thousands of goatheads in all. My stomach knotted sickeningly. I mounted my bike and continued riding home, stopping at the end of the path to make sure no goatheads had stuck to my tire. “Never bike here again,” I told myself.

But though I can't bike the path, I can still walk it. This Tuesday morning I walk it armed with weeding tools. Why wait for the bureaucracy of a utility company to do the right thing? Arriving at the first patch of puncturevine, I hop onto the raised bed and pull my trowel from my pack and begin digging.

Two or more gods

Grand Archdruid John Michael Greer is a self-professed history geek. Falling somewhere between carrying out impeccable research and possessing an encyclopedia knowledge of world history, Greer includes countless historical examples to infer parallels with the present in his blog, The Archdruid Report. But if Greer is so smart and knows so much history, why is he a polytheist?

Growing up, what I learned about polytheism is what I think most of us Westerners learn about it: A long time ago most people were polytheists, but eventually they grew up and became monotheists or atheists. How then can someone both intelligent and knowledgeable choose to believe in multiple gods? Where have they been since Plato and Epicurus?

As part of my ongoing effort to learn about topics I know little or nothing about, I've begun reading Greer's book, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism. As I expected, it's no wishy-washy, touchy-feely account of polytheism; it's a hard, logical case for the existence of multiple gods. To correct a lesson I learned long ago: Polytheism is grown up, or at least as grown up as any of the religions I know—including my own.

Though I'm not yet halfway through the book, it has inspired me with today's post. But firstly, I apologize to those who think it's distasteful to discuss religion in mixed company. And secondly, I'll state my bias: I'm an atheist. I've been an atheist most of my life, from the moment I was born, with only some teenage experimentation as the exception. And now, with my disclosure over (along with any chance of me ever being elected to public office), here's something I've learned about polytheism.

In general, the core difference between a polytheist and a monotheist is that the polytheist draws his theology from religious experience while the monotheist judges religious experience using his theology. Which you rank as more fundamental—theology or religious experience—dictates how many gods you believe in. As Greer writes, “religious experience is inherently polytheistic” because different people experience different gods. If you take everyone's religious experiences at face value then you must be polytheist. Therefore, those of us who are either monotheist or atheist do not take all religious experiences at face value. We rank something else more fundamental than religious experience alone.

My Achilles' heel

These days I'm sporting an Achilles tendon injury on my left leg. It started a little over two weeks ago while in New York as a result of running and walking too far without being in good enough running and walking shape to withstand the stress. In the beginning, the injury was a small nuisance whereby the tendon was stiff and painful only for the first few steps of the morning but otherwise OK, and it has since blossomed to hurt most of the time—even when walking and biking. Though the cause of the injury is overuse, which is a euphemism for “having been insufficiently conditioned for all that running and walking in New York and then having been stupid enough to continue worsening the injury,” the cause is compounded by the Five Fingers shoes I wore. Thus, I can credit this as my first Five Fingers injury—though I'm still fond of those shoes.

After a few Web searches, I've learned that I have the symptoms of Achilles tendinosis. This is degeneration of the tendon, not inflammation. With that I've learned one useful fact about treatment: anti-inflammatory medication, such as Ibuprofen, is detrimental to the healing process. Instead, treatment requires relative rest and, optionally, stretching and icing. “Relative rest” sounds a lot better than just “rest” because it means I continue to be active, though only with activities that don't aggravate the injury. In other words, swimming is OK. And I ought to be doing more swimming regardless.

Another benefit is that I can apply some of my own wisdom and save money by not competing in a couple of races I was planning to do. Through those aforementioned Web searches, I learned that my grade 2 or 3 tendinosis requires one to three weeks of relative rest. Add to that Hofstadter's law. Add to that the lesson that it's unsafe to ramp up training too fast, and the result is that I won't be in good form until this year's races are over. I'm not complaining or pleading for sympathy. This will probably lead to the better use of my free time.

Infinite confusion

As any kid who has learned about infinity will tell you, infinity plus one is still infinity. “Even infinity plus a million?” Yep. “Even infinity plus infinity?” Yep. It's easy to think there's only one infinity. But there's not. It turns out there's an infinite number of infinities.

This remains one of the most interesting ideas I learned in college. In my discrete math class my freshman year, the professor went over Cantor's diagonalization argument, and I still haven't gotten over it. Briefly, the argument goes as follows. (And by “briefly” I mean I'm not going to include proof.)

There are an infinite number of whole numbers. If you add to the whole numbers all rational numbers, you still have the same number of numbers—infinity—because you can map each rational number to a whole number, one-to-one. But if you add to the rational numbers the irrational numbers—e.g., π, √2, etc.—you will have a greater infinity of numbers than with the rationals alone because you can't map each irrational number to a rational number. You'll have irrational numbers left over.

The neat thing about Cantor's argument is that it proves there's no possible one-to-one mapping from the irrationals to the rationals. Thus, some infinities are bigger than others. QED.

If that doesn't make you suspicious of your intuition about infinity, there's Berry's Paradox. It goes like this.

There exists an infinite number of whole numbers, and there exists a finite number of syllables (in English). Therefore, there exists an infinite number of whole numbers that can't be described in English in fewer than, say, twenty syllables. The question is: What is the smallest whole number that can't be described in fewer than twenty syllables?

A description is an unambiguous expression or name. Let's start from the beginning.

Number	Description	Syllables
1	“one”	1
2	“two”	1
3	“three”	1
4	“four”	1
5	“five”	1
6	“six”	1
7	“seven”	2
8	“eight”	1
9	“nine”	1
10	“ten”	1
11	“eleven”	3

Eleven is the first number whose name is more than two syllables, but it's describable as the “fifth prime,” which is two syllables. So:

11	“fifth prime”	2
12	“twelve”	1
13	“thirteen”	2

And so on. The key is that we're describing numbers, not just naming them. Any unambiguous description will do. For example, “one hundred twenty-one” (six syllables) is also “fifth prime squared” (three syllables). “One thousand one hundred eleven”(nine syllables) could be described as “four ones” (two syllables);—if we allow such shortcuts. But no matter how many shortcuts we allow—no matter what grammar we decide upon—because there are a finite number of syllables, eventually we'll run out of whole numbers describable in fewer than twenty, and that will be our smallest whole number that can't be described in fewer than twenty syllables.

But there's a problem. “Smallest whole number that can't be described in fewer than twenty syllables” is itself an unambiguous description of a number—a description that itself is fewer than twenty syllables. Thus, the smallest whole number that can't be described in fewer than twenty syllables can be described in fewer than twenty syllables by using this description. Paradox!

What's neat about Berry's Paradox is that it defines an infinite set of whole numbers for which there exists no smallest number—no first number, no “beginning” number. This is another property of infinity that runs counter to intuition.