Moving, again, again, …, again

Tomorrow I'll finish moving the last of my junk out of my apartment, and I'll hand my keys to the leasing office, thus terminating my lease. This is my eleventh move in as many years since first moving into an apartment my last year in college. By now I'm well experienced with the process, though each move presents its unique surprises. This one is especially heavy, what with the bicycle and shoe racks, the tools I used to build them, and other accumulated clutter. This afternoon I asked Laura after she arrived home from work, Will you help me move the gardening stuff from my patio—

—Right now?—

—sometime this evening?

OK, let me change my clothes.

Cluttering my old apartment's patio were potting trays, two bags of dirt, one bag of vermiculite, and other remnants of Laura's and my attempt at patio gardening last spring. There was also a small trash can filled with the remnants of a not-so-successful experiment with patio composting. The trash can had finished its week-long quarantine exposure to the September Arizona sun to dry out and kill the maggots.

I'm not touching that, Laura said, pointing at the plastic green cylinder that once served as my bathroom trash can. Maggots are yucky creatures, but how much worse are they than what was in the trash can in years past? In any event, the trash can was my responsibility, to be handled later. For now, we moved our gardening implements to the grassy yard on the other side of my patio wall and set about planting our fall garden. We replaced the dirt in the trays with a mix of fresh potting soil and vermiculite, and we planted onions and carrots, each occupying one row in one tray, each about two feet long.

The vermiculite is a new trick. Organic gardeners make a point how soil is more than a medium for holding plants upright and that what goes on below the surface is richer and more diverse than what goes on above. Potted plants are particularly disadvantaged because they exist isolated in a monoculture, and in our case with no input other than tap water. It doesn't help that the old soil in our trays had compacted and compressed by about a fifth in less than half a year, either. Supposedly the vermiculite will help keep the soil looser, though like with the composting, this is all trial-and-error experimentation. From our spring harvest we received nothing but a few unfertilized blooms. Perhaps this time we'll realize a morsel.

Polytheism and salvation

For a while now, with the goal to continue these Monday religion posts, I've aimed to read next a book by a Catholic scholar about Thomas Aquinas. My reason is I've observed a trend of classical monotheists who imply or outright claim that non-monotheists don't really understand monotheism and it's their ignorance that causes them not to be monotheists. So it shouldn't surprise you to know that I'm a little fearful of the next assignment; I'm expecting it to be an endeavor of antagonism, one full of clearly's, in fact's, and obviously's I don't find clear, factual, or obvious.

In the meantime, A World Full of Gods continues to inspire me with new writing topics each week, enough so that I'm having to pace myself with the reading part to avoid backlogging the writing part. My enjoyment of the book comes despite my disagreement with the author, which I've come to realize is high praise of a writer's skills. Most people can write appealingly to readers in agreement; it's the ability to write appealingly to those who disagree that takes the most skill and is something worth aspiring to.

* * *

Early in A World Full of Gods, Greer claimed the core difference between polytheism and monotheism (and between polytheism and atheism) is that polytheism alone ranks experience above theology (and philosophy). In short: polytheism gives the benefit of the doubt to nearly all claims about the gods—even claims that on the surface conflict with each other. I've come to think of this as that P's believe it when they see it, whereas M's (and A's) see it when they believe it.

Greer takes this another step further and says most seemingly conflicting claims about the afterlife are true, too. Can souls live on after the body's death? Yes. Can souls reincarnate? Yes. Can souls become spirits that interact with the living? Yes. Can souls be brought back to life after death? Yes. Indeed, it's exactly the diversity of near-death experiences, as well as experiences of apparitions and of children with previous-life knowledge, that make a diversity of afterlives plausible.

Greer has written many books about the occult, so I'm not surprised he takes deathbed phenomena seriously. I don't. But though I usually find such talk about souls and the afterlife nonsensical according to my own Story of Materialism, what's interesting here is a greater point implied by polytheism's afterlife-diversity: polytheism is not a religion in search of a problem to solve.

Much of what a religion has to say about life is implied by what it says about death. These days most religions in the world, from Western monotheisms to Buddhism, claim there's an improvement to be had by dying and therefore that there's a fundamental problem with living. Polytheism—or at least classical polytheism, with its broad beliefs in the afterlife—does not make this claim. According to polytheism, some individual humans may find themselves in trouble from time to time, maybe even most of their lives, but other individuals may be in no trouble. To the polytheist, religion may help people with their problems, but its purpose isn't salvation because people, as a whole, don't need saving.

To some extent, this resonates with me. In the last few years—long after I graduated college, I might add—has it been pointed out to me how unthinkingly teleological most modern thought is, from the most devout of monotheists to the most devout of atheists. The case of salvation is no different. There can be an essential problem with humanity only if humanity ought to be doing or being something different than it currently is. This presupposes an objective viewpoint. But if our planet's ongoing evolution is purposeless then humanity is what it is, so to speak, and it has no essential problem—only our individual, misguided expectations placed upon a finite existence.

Project: shoe rack

Today I took a 2x10 and some dowel rods I bought a few months ago and I made a shoe rack. It took six hours to make.

This is my second woodworking project, the first being the bike rack I made a few months ago. Unlike the bike rack, which is modular and capable of being disassembled, the shoe rack is one piece, more like regular furniture. Shoes rest atop one-inch dowel rods that span the length of the rack and which are held in place against the side boards with glue and pegs I cut from smaller, three-eighths-inch dowel rods. Four pegs on each side go through the side board to the exterior and provide additional hanging. In all, the rack fits twelve pairs of shoes, plus room for two pairs of sandals below. On top is a solid shelf, useful for stashing junk you take with you when you put on your shoes. And stay-at-home junk, too.

The shoe rack is no fine furniture, but I give myself a passing grade for shop class.

To you, I offer this post

A former coworker of mine, Steve, said a lot of nutty things, but one thing he said is some of the best general advice I've ever heard: to receive more of something, first give it away.

Steve was talking about reciprocity with other people, such as how if you want other people to listen to you and take your opinions seriously, you should first listen to them and take their opinions seriously. After listening to them for a while, they're likely to listen to you—probably without realizing it. Ditto for respect, trust, love, money, and nearly anything else you give and take with others.

Steve's advice helps me make sense of Chapter 8 of A World Full of Gods, which is about polytheist worship. According to Greer, The essence of Pagan worship is reciprocity between divinity and humanity. The polytheist universe is populated only by finite beings and entities, and this universal finiteness means all things exist through giving and mutual interaction.

Religion in the Pagan sense is a matter of exchange. While the gods are greater than human beings, they are not infinitely so, and humanity thus has the potential to bring something of its own to a relationship with divinity. Each participates in the relationship in a manner proportioned to their relative place in the cosmos, but the relationship is never merely one-sided.

The principle of reciprocity provides the proper context to the much-misinterpreted Roman religious maxim do ut des, usually translated I give that you may give. Too often, even by those alert to the complexities of Roman religion, this has been read as a commercial transaction in which Roman worshippers paid their gods in advance for some benefit.

This is unjust. What the maxim actually implies is the exchange of gifts as an expression of ancient rules of friendship and hospitality. Behind this conception lies a concept of an exchange of gifts between different orders of being as the bond that unites the universe.

While I don't doubt there were at least a few self-interested Romans who gave to the gods with the hope they were partaking in a commercial transaction, the idea of reciprocity makes sense of a puzzling question I've long had about polytheism—as well as other religions—Doesn't anyone care about track record? Just as with the recent, well publicized rain prayer in Texas and how it didn't immediately conjure an end to the state's drought, it must be ages since people first realized the gods don't respond predictably to offerings and beseechings.

Modern theorists of religion have wrestled with the habit of making gifts to gods, ancestors, and spirits, on the assumption that there are no obvious returns on the investment. To ancient and modern Pagans alike, however, the assumption is transparently false. If such beings exist and govern the natural world, their gifts are as obvious as food and drink on the table, rain on the fields, fertility in the soil, and the fact of life itself. The gods are primarily and superlatively givers of good things, and the world in which life takes place is their gift to us.

In other words, the polytheist doesn't make an offering to the rain god simply to ask for rain. Instead, he makes the offering to fulfill his end in his coexistence with the rain god, who has already provided the polytheist with a lifetime of rain.

For the core of Pagan sacrifice is participation and celebration, not appeasement or renunciation. Making offerings to the gods is central to Pagan religious practice because it allows human beings to respond to the generosity of the gods with gifts of their own. Prayers are accompanied with offerings, or with promises of offerings to come, to reaffirm that gods and humans both participate in the web of reciprocity, celebrating their friendship with an exchange of gifts. Thus the old Pagan rituals of animal sacrifice were festive events for the entire community, more like a barbecue than like most modern religious rites. The gods received their share of the offering, and the rest was cooked and served out among the worshippers.

The polytheist gives to the gods not only because giving is good for the gods but also because giving is good for the giver. This reminds me of Christianity and how it advises us to forgive others for their transgressions again us, not only because forgiveness benefits the transgressor but because forgiveness benefits the forgiver.

This perspective leads me to wonder to what degree the modern world's slew of philosophies and ideologies centered on markets and rational self-interest are by-products of our world's increasing detachment from the natural world and related ideas such as the web of reciprocity. When most of what we consume is bought from strangers, prepackaged and paid for using money, each transaction ends with the deal squared, freeing both participants from further responsibility. But if detachment from nature is a fiction, as many ecologists are apt to point out, perhaps such arrangements are not so rationally self-interested after all.

Where's the Thursday post?

The Thursday post was out late, losing money while playing poker at a friend's house. (Meanwhile, Not Enough Laura was winning faster than Just Enough Craig was losing.)

For the next two days, the Thursday post continued procrastinating the inevitable by working on its web development project rather than its writing. Finally, the Thursday post decided it just wasn't going to happen this week.

An interlude about a limitless entity

A few weeks ago I asserted that it's impossible to conceptualize an entity that's both all-powerful and all-beneficent without diluting the meaning of the terms. An old friend of mine, Josh, commented how he thinks it's indeed possible to reconcile such ideas. I replied—as it's my policy to respond to all readers' comments—that my full answer would entail a post of its own. This is that post.

The context of the conflict is that people encounter what seem to be moral conflicts. For example, there are situations when you can be kind or honest but not both. Furthermore, these situations are not rare but instead happen most if not all days. Driving a car seems to force the issue every minute. How can an all-powerful entity, who thus has the ability to make the universe anything it wishes, also be the morally best possible entity if it rigged the universe to impose such conflicts? Why force people to choose between the better of two imperfect choices?

I admit this is a delicate topic, with many centuries of thought on the matter yielding their own entire branch of philosophy, called theodicy—and I further admit I'm going to ignore the reams of complexity that those centuries have heaped upon the question and give what seems to me is the straightforward, sensible answer. After all, it's part of my trade as a software developer to determine when leaky complexity has been heaped upon a faulty design and to figure out what needs to be removed to make the thing work. And yes, sometimes that means throwing away some cherished code you wrote awhile back.

The simple answer to the all-powerful, all-beneficent question is that such a limitless entity poses a paradox. Josh proposed a moral hierarchy as a solution, where some traits rank higher than others, but this solves a different problem. It solves the problem of choosing between the better of two imperfect solutions. The perfect solution, though only conceptual and impossible to realize, is that you get to have your cake and eat it too. In the example of kindness or honesty but not both, supposing that one of the virtues ranks higher than the other—say, honesty over kindness—means only that by choosing to be honest and unkind you have selected the better of two, flawed choices. A hierarchy of moral values allows for an entity that is all-powerful and as-beneficent-as-possible or instead as-powerful-as-possible and all-beneficent, but not both. Either way, the meaning of the terms has been diluted.

Another proposed solution thought up a long time ago is that the universe is indeed the best possible universe and that these conflict situations aren't conflicts at all. Rather, the conflicts play out—or can play out—according to what's in our best interests. So, for example, choosing to be honest and unkind is even better than if we could somehow be both honest and kind. Perhaps it's through the act of committing evil—or lesser good—that we gain some maximal good, such as spiritual fulfillment.

Yet another proposed solution to the problem is that the entity chose to give humans freewill—somehow, the best of possible choices it could have made—and because we're neither all-powerful nor all-beneficent, our choices require the universe to impose moral conflicts upon us. Yet another proposal asserts that these matters are entirely beyond our comprehension, that such a limitless entity is possible but we'll never know how.

These three solutions all reduce to: It cannot be known. Why is it good for us to make imperfect choices? It cannot be known. What is freewill? Why is the universe better off having it than not? It cannot be known. Why can't we know? It cannot be known.

What does all-powerful mean? It cannot be known.

What does all-beneficent mean? It cannot be known.

What does it mean to dilute the meaning of a term? To say: It cannot be known.

The easy way out of this mess is to drop the claim that one can both conceptualize a limitless entity and not dilute the terms all-powerful and all-beneficent. After all, diluting the terms' meanings says nothing about the entity's existence—only our ability to make falsifiable claims about it.

For what it's worth, this analysis makes me more appreciative of religions that embrace mysticism.

Achilles' heal

At last, I've turned the corner with my Achilles' tendinosis injury. Or at least I think I've turned the corner. Though at first it seemed minor, this injury surprised me with a continual nagging that has left me less active than during those two months I suffered, half bedridden, through Valley Fever three years ago. But persistence is a common characteristic of tendon injuries.

Generally, when sick or injured, I try to adopt as a mindset the Stockdale Paradox: to continue believing in the happy ending without putting any deadlines on its arrival. For me, this is tough to do. Weeks ago, just after I admitted I was hurt and needed to take time off, I did what impatient analytical types are apt to do and I scrutinized my heel for change and extrapolated. It's feeling better three days straight, I would say. I might be running again by next weekend, only for that weekend to come and go and for my heel to have regressed. It's as though the brunt of healing doesn't happen until I've submitted to the injury and become prepared to do whatever it tells me—which of course means sitting out longer than expected, another reference to Hofstadter's Law.

Also, as far as tendinosis goes, Medicine is in the dark about diagnosis and treatment. Two years ago I hurt my knees during my California bike trip. It wasn't a serious injury—just a little pain and tenderness while riding, no doubt from overuse. The next day after returning to Phoenix I began taking ibuprofen for anti-inflammation. That week I resumed my normal level of activity, including commuting to work sixteen miles round-trip each day. I took the ibuprofen for about a week, and my knees healed fine, no problem.

Compare that to my current injury. While in New York, after a run, my Achilles' tendon began to hurt. It wasn't a serious injury—just a little pain and tenderness while running, no doubt from overuse. A few days later, after having returned to Phoenix, I began taking ibuprofen, and I resumed my normal level of activity. After nearly two weeks, my heel was much worse. I could no longer run or ride with my usual intensity.

I'm about 80% confident both injuries are tendinosis: both entailed isolated pain near joints following strenuous bouts of activity. Websites about tendinosis tend to agree that tendinosis is degeneration, not inflammation, and that anti-inflammatory medicine likely has an adverse effect on the tendons' ability to heal. But my (admittedly non-scientific) experience has been that anti-inflammatory medicine does help, though only when the injury is minor. (When the injury is major, the medicine only masks the pain and allows the sufferer to continue inflicting further damage.) I stopped taking ibuprofen for my heel after those two weeks, and along with resting my heel it began improving immediately. But recently that progress stalled, so I took ibuprofen again, for two days, after which my heel felt noticeably better. Small sample size, anecdotal evidence, no controls…am I refusing to admit I know nothing about these injuries?

Polytheism and the cosmic unity

I suspect many of you readers have found at least one problem with polytheism, but I further suspect most if not all of the problems you've found with it are on your own terms, using your own assumptions and values. But some of you who've paid attention these last few posts and stirred some neurons may have spotted a problem with polytheism on its own terms—a way in which it's rendered self-defeating. That problem is: Because polytheism ranks religious experience as more important than theology, what does it mean for billions of monotheists to have experienced a one, true God or some other cosmic unity?

There's no fully satisfying way around this. You can't claim both that religious experience is #1 and also that some people's religious experiences are wrong. Just as with having and eating cake, one of two must budge.

Greer budges a little and provides an answer in the pay dirt chapter I wrote about last Monday. He points out how most of us—myself included, upon first reading the chapter—are confused about the term ineffability. Ineffability is not (as many of us believe) an absolute quality but instead is a relationship. Specifically, it's a relationship between an idea and some given language whereby the language can't fully describe the idea. For example, quantum physics is ineffable in the English language. (And if you think it isn't, then you don't understand quantum physics!) We can approximately talk about atomic and subatomic particles using such terms as wave-particle duality, but our grasp of such small scales is incomplete and hazy. Just as planetary orbit was ineffable in the ancients' languages because they lacked laws of motion, quantum-scale motion is ineffable to us today. But someday quantum physics may not be ineffable. (Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.)

Saying that something is ineffable—that is, ascribing ineffability as an absolute property of that thing—is equivalent to claiming that that thing can't be described in any language. That includes all possible languages—forgotten languages from the past, languages we'll know only in the future, and languages we'll never realize. Can we know something is indescribable in all of these languages? Computation theory deals with this very problem from a purely logical perspective, what with Turing completeness and so on. In short, limitations indeed seem to exist in the most powerful languages, which would make some things ineffable in all languages, but we can't be sure that any proof of such limitations isn't an artifact of the language we're using to make such a proof. So it's inconclusive.

Within this wiggle room Greer has his answer. Religious experiences may be fully describable in a language, just one we don't possess. (A theory of mind is a candidate for such a language.) Religious experiences, including those of an exclusive God or other cosmic unity, may be imprecise ways of talking about phenomena that are in actuality precise, just as planetary motion turns out to be precise though it was once ineffable to all known languages. Thus, while religious experiences may rank higher than theology to the polytheist, religious experiences may not signify literal meanings—they may be interpreted in many ways. As for experiences of cosmic unity, here are Greer's own words.

As we have seen, people experience and revere many different sacred entities, some personal, some not. The fundamental unity of the cosmos is one of these, but not the only one. Many people worship it, and many have experienced in it one way or another, but the same is true of other sacred presences and powers. Nor is it automatically true that a cosmic unity is necessarily a better god to worship than some entity closer to human existence.

Go channels

Between learning Go, learning JavaScript, and learning web development—what with JSON and AJAX and the difference between PUT and POST and so on—I'm most intrigued by learning Go. With everything else, I'm learning a lot of stuff, detailed but straightforward. With Go, I learning a new way of thinking about synchronization.

Go provides two main features for synchronization: goroutines and channels. Goroutines are a lot like threads, only they're scheduled by the Go Runtime on top of one or a few system threads. But you, the programmer, may pretend goroutines are threads. Channels are new.

Superficially, channels are synchronous queues built in to the language.

ch := make(chan int)
 
a := func() {
    ch <- 42
}
 
b := func() {
   fmt.Println(<-ch)
}

go a()
go b()

In the above code, there are two concurrent functions, a and b, and one channel, ch. The function a sends the value 42 on the channel, and b receives the value (42) from the channel and prints it. Either the send or the receive operation on the channel will block until both the send and receive are ready, at which time both the send and receive occur. (Channels can be asynchronous, but that's another topic.)

In the example above, the channel sends and receives values of type int. But channels' power stems from how they can be used with any other Go type, including functions and other channels. This allows programmers to structure their programs wholly differently than in traditional languages. Consider the code below.

type Request struct {
    // other data go here
    respCh chan *Response
}

type Response struct {
    // other data go here
}

func main() {

    reqCh := make(chan *Request)

    go func() {
        for {
            req := <-reqCh
            // handle request here
            resp := new(Response)
            req.respCh <- resp
        }
    }()

    req := NewRequest()
    reqCh <- req
    resp := <-req.respCh
}

This is a thread-safe request handler. A goroutine (running an anonymous function) continually receives requests on a channel. It returns a response to each request on a channel contained within the request. This is a concise server-client model, scalable as is to many concurrent request handlers and many concurrent request senders. Also, consider how the Request type could contain function closures that execute within the context of the request-handling goroutine.

ch := make(chan func())
ch <- func() {
    fmt.Println("Print this in another goroutine.")
}

Closures make it so that the request handler in the above example doesn't even handle the requests directly; a closure in the Request could contain the details. This opens up numerous design possibilities even in simple programs—without using mutexes or other traditional synchronization primitives.