Cathedral Capital

Norwich Cathedral is around 900 years old. Although some parts of the Cathedral were built in the light and airy styles of late mediaeval gothic the earlier architectural legacy of the Normans with its much heavier construction techniques predominates. Gothic architecture wears its God striving mystique on its sleeve, but the older lumpen Romanesque of the Normans conveys a sense of Divine mystery via its archaic and primitive feel rather by recourse to platonic ideals of beauty. As I sat I in one of the aisles of the Cathedral as midnight approached on Christmas Eve my aspect was thoroughly dominated by the pillars of huge girth that march up and down the aisles. My eye sought relief from the oppressive heaviness of the Norman architecture by turning its gaze up toward the lofty nave with its breathtaking vista of three successive tiers of colonnades. The primeval feel of the building gives it an otherworldly atmosphere; perhaps the sort of thing Tolkein had in mind when he described the ancient halls of Moria.

Compared to Norman architecture gothic, particularly perpendicular gothic, with its delicate traceries and minimalist pillars and buttressing, is closer to the modernist ideal of material efficient constructions. A fine example of perpendicular architecture is found in the church of St Peter Mancroft that borders the south side of Norwich market place. Built in the fifteenth century, the slenderness of its stone pillars and large windows, which together maximize light, floor space, and uninterrupted lines of sight, anticipate the modern era of reinforced concrete and steel constructions.

But although perpendicular gothic parallels the modern practice of creating a thin elegant weather covering rather than a cavern of stone, the church builders of renascence England did not know that they were closing in fast on the disruptive social non-linearities of modern times. For romanesque and gothic churches had one thing in common; they were both effectively sink holes for the surplus labour of their respective social settings; something alien to our culture with its constant tension between investment and spending.

Whenever I am in a large romanesque or gothic church, I find it difficult to empathise with the social ethos that lead to their construction. Like the pyramid builders of ancient Egypt it is clear that mediaeval and renascence society had an agricultural surplus large enough to sink a vast amount of labour into massive stone celebrations of their religion. Although these constructions may have served intangible social mores revolving around a sense of community and religious purpose, they had no productive purpose that the modern industrial mindset can comprehend. Once constructed, that was it; the labour embodied in these fantastic buildings went no further and served no direct productive end; unlike the industrial period when investment in the construction of say, a large factory is intended to facilitate or enhance further production. In the modern world investment is the name of the game and capital is invested to further increase capital, thus leading to the unstable exponentials and non-linearities of modern society.

From a modern perspective with its values of investment, betterment, and change, often all motivated by the search for profit, the mediaeval ethos of social stasis and massive construction projects that fossilized surplus labour is difficult to understand. What exactly motivated these people? Was it just about the maintaining the power of the priesthood via an oppressive stone symbolism whose sheer magnitude cowered the lower ranks of society into submission, or did that society genuinely have the glory of God in their minds? - Perhaps a bit of both. If that is so then the modern mind does have a significant point of contact with the minds of medieval and renascence times – namely that of having inseparably mixed motives. The medieval priest supported the status quo because his desire to maintain his station within it was in inseparable union with his motive to glorify God. Likewise, today’s entrepreneur may wish to better society through his innovating efforts but he is unlikely to be able to resolve this altruistic motive from a desire for personal profit. Mixed motives are very difficult, if not impossible, to resolve into their components. Sin, the word with the 'I' in the middle, is inextricably mixed with human motives (Romans 7:15-25) and that's why the saviour came.

Aping 2001

OK then, I'll face it, we've had a building cock up at my address. HAL: "Look Tim, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. ..."

Tim Reeves' Big Day Out: MPH07

I had a very enjoyable day at MPH07. Some of the vehicles on show were spectacular and, needless to say, so were the prices. Here’s the vehicle I bought with my initials on the front as an extra:

The sticker on the back of this car will read "My other car is a wreck".

The spectacular theme continued in the arena performances presented by Clarkson, Hammond and May with breath taking internal combustion engine based stunts: car football, a flying car, and formation hand break turning. Four motorcyclists not only managed to squeeze themselves into a spherical iron cage but also managed to ride at speed as well. It was not just the wall of death, but floor and ceiling of death as well. So precisely coordinated was their riding that a dangerous collision was only small fractions of a second away:

With its 80% male attendance this was a show for the lads. It fulfilled all those stereotypical notions of testosterone charged males fascinated with danger, risk taking and fast sleek phallic looking machines. And if Richard Hammond’s recent antics are anything to go by, Top Gear’s blustering presenters are not pseuds but really do engage in risk taking. But as well as dangerous antics the show was also about being naughty boys and breaking the rules. Jeremy Clarkson drove his range rover up a 38 degree slope, but gleefully told us beforehand that Rover only recommends a maximum slope of 35 degree. Clarkson was pushing the envelope and certainly not doing as he was told:

It was all a refreshing change from today’s church experience, an experience so crushingly and slushily feminine in style, intuitions and behavioral expectations, that it habitually expresses the faith in quasi-sensual and romantic terms. Its notion of risk is that of listening to the prophetic intuitions of the limbic mind when you know that the prophetic hit rate in recent years has been all but zero.

Most Haunted Mansion

In a Halloween publicity stunt, the National Trust has published a list of its top ten most haunted properties. Blickling hall, the Jacobean mansion near Alysham in Norfolk has hit the number one spot. But how was this list arrived at? Was it done by carefully counting and collating reports and giving them a verification weighting, or did the National Trust dowse Sian Evans abdomen with a pendulum in order to get a gut reaction? The house manager at Blickling provides a few clues:

We are absolutely delighted to be at the top of the most haunted chart. This will give Blickling a very scary five skull rating in the national guide to haunted halls. The house staff always look forward to coming in and being scared witless by our team of ghosts who have worked hard for this position and put in a very spirited performance. They are good workers who enjoy their work and always moan about their tasks, although they are sometimes difficult to distinguish from the cleaning staff who also do a lot of moaning (especially on pay day). With a celebrity ghost like Anne Boleyn we definitely have a head start here at Blickling, but we will be giving all our hard working ghosts a Halloween bonus and pay rise.

So, if you are an employee at Blickling your best bet is to take a white sheet with you to work and scare the living daylights out of a visitor of two - you might get a pay rise and bonus. Not a ghost of chance of that I suppose. I wonder if anyone has spotted my pay slip lurking in a dark corner at Blickling? I wouldn’t believe it if they said they had .....there I go again, moaning; must have caught the habit from the spooks.

Unnaturally Natural

Here is a picture of my latest outing: Sheringham park, (north Norfolk, England) a ‘natural’ landscape garden designed by Humphry Repton, (late 18th Century) the man said to be Capability Brown’s successor. Creating a well-composed photo in one of these ‘natural’ landscape gardens is a synch: just go to the contrived viewpoint, pick up the symmetries and then click! Unfortunately a dull misty day obscured the sea, but notice that the tree line carefully parts to reveal the sea in the background. ‘Natural’? My foot! In art classes I was told to carefully compose my paintings into foreground, middle ground and background. Mr. Repton has done it for me in this picture! I must go back sometime and take the same picture on a sunny day.

Going Places

Looking forward to going here, here on Friday week. After all the stately homes I fancy something where the pace is a little less stately.....

This is stately......

(Notice pedimented radiator and corinthian column grill)

This isn't......

('Grin' rather than a 'grill'!)

Felbrigg Hall

We recently had a family outing at Felbrigg hall and here are some of my impressions.

The site itself goes back much further than the building. Like many other place names in the east of England ‘Felbrigg’ is of Scandinavian origin, a relic of Viking evasions, meaning ‘plank bridge’. The Viking plank bridge, which has long since gone of course, probably crossed the marshy valley that the hall now overlooks.

The present Felbrigg hall was built circa 1620 concurrently with Blickling hall ten miles to the south, perhaps even sharing architects and resources. Compared to Blickling, Felbrigg was originally a very modest affair, consisting of little more than the basic banqueting hall design of medieval origin, along with some withdrawing rooms for the lord and lady. However, over the years Felbrigg has been added to time and again, and this explains its rambling diversity. It is an architectural accretion of many layers.

In contrast with Felbrigg, Blickling hall was conceived all of a piece. Once implemented its plan was so grand and coherent that few would dare to substantially alter it without fear of violating its original concept. The changes that were made in the eighteenth century by the Norwich architects Thomas Ivory and son (whose old Georgian home is a near neighbour of mine) to rationalize its relatively muddled north and west ranges simply reinforced its mathematically elemental plan. As one walks up the imposing lawn and yew boarded forecourt confronted by what the guide book calls a ‘a fantastic elaboration of skyline’, the aspect is so breath taking, dramatic and dominating that few would dare think that it could be bettered in its symmetry and perfection. The best side of Blickling openly boasts its grandeur and shouts “Don’t touch!” But the upshot is that once inside it is very easy to take on board its layout and it is difficult to get disoriented. The building, in spite of its size, alas, does not easily convey that ‘lost’ feeling. For those who like myself, enjoy a bit of mystery and feeling a little disoriented and challenged, Blickling’s layout is too easily understood.


Felbrigg couldn’t be more different. The approach from the visitor’s car park does no justice to the hall at all. At first I was left wondering if Felbrigg has any good sides to show off to the visitor. In the end I decided that the road curving round from the west to south sides showed the hall at its best and I guessed that this was the route by which guests were ushered into the grounds by the owners who, as was the wont of the landed gentry, did all they could to impress their connections by accentuating the drama of introducing them to their lands and premises.


Felbrigg has a charm that none of the grand stately homes can emulate. Once inside the rambling building I had some difficulty retaining a sense of direction and position. I felt a little defeated and I liked that feeling - it’s similar to the feeling one has in a challenging maze. Later the next day I tried retracing my steps round the building in my minds eye, but was unable to complete it correctly without consulting the plan in the guide. With its idiosyncratic history of extensions Felbrigg, if nothing else, is the most homely of all the stately homes I have so far visited. Felbrigg hall has an ‘open ended’ incomplete feel that allows further extension. In one sense the complexity and extendibility of its plan makes it much grander than is suggested by its physical dimension.

Blickling Hall

Blickling Hall near Aylsham (Norfolk, England) was built on the eve of the enlightenment in 1620, approximately one hundred years after the reformation. Its Jacobean architecture is a pastiche of Elizabethan features and an unsystematic smattering of classical elements – pediments, pillars and entablatures. At the time of its construction the seeds of its fashionable demise were being sown by Inigo Jones who was already engaged in a much more systematic application of classical features in his first Palladian essays. A few more years and the owners of Blickling would find themselves in the neo-classical revival. Its Jacobean façade would become an unfashionable legacy no longer signaling that its owners were where it was at. In spite of the later neo-classical makeover of its interior Blickling Hall has a strong medieval feel. The Hall was built on the site of a moated manner house and this determined its rectangular castle-like footprint. Its four corners are occupied by square towers capped by lead pinnacled roofs similar to those on the tower of London. The Hall is entered via a bridge over the now dry moat. The walls of the bridge are ornamented with decorative pseudo turrets pierced by arrow slits. The bridge leads into a passage that opens out onto a courtyard in an arrangement very reminiscent of a castle gatehouse. Beyond the courtyard is the main door into the Hall itself. Blickling Hall is, in fact, at the end of a metamorphosis which slowly compromised the strength of the feudal castle and transformed it from an efficient crenellation where military potential was paramount, into homes which retained enough vestigial features of the castle to signal aristocracy. This slow victory of style over content can be traced from Bodium castle through Oxborough Hall to Blickling itself.

When Blickling Hall was built in the late Renaissance the mediaeval social order was long since defunct. History, however, is always a work in progress and its artifacts often blend past and future in uneasy union. The sense of symmetry which had begun to inform the architects of Blickling’s day militated against the mediaeval legacy that required the 'entrance' hall to be the center and hub of the building; this is why it is called a 'hall'. Unlike the later and modern practice that made the entrance hall an antechamber to the spaces where it really happened, the ‘entrance’ hall in Blickling’s day was the banqueting and entertainments focus of the house. What created an issue for Blickling’s architect was that medieval halls were asymmetrically arranged about their entrance. On one side of the entrance was a wooden screen with doors leading to the main space where the Lord dinned on his dais. On the other side doors lead away to the kitchen, pantry and service areas. This asymmetrical arrangement was originally found at Blickling, but this conflicted with an increasing desire for symmetry, an aspiration emerging out of the Elizabethan era and running its course into the neo-classical architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries where a thoroughgoing symmetry was vogue.

History was slipping and sliding into a new synthesis and the resulting incoherent pastiche of Blickling’s design parallels, in many ways, the state of science at that time. In 1620 nearly 80 years had elapsed since the publication of Copernicus’ posthumous slight on the earth-centered universe – the first of a serious of apparent demotions of man’s position in the great scheme of things. Galileo’s partly self-imposed battles with the authority of the Catholic Church over this very matter had commenced. In the meantime, around the early 1600s, and concurrently with the building of Blickling, Kepler was publishing his 3 laws of celestial mechanics. Kepler, like the Hall itself, looked both to the past and future. His astrological work paid a wage and his mediaeval obsession with the platonic mystery of the five regular solids lead to his initial mathematical foray into celestial mechanics; but his neat scheme of concentrically nesting these solids in order to mathematically justify the position of the planetary orbits eventually went the way of Bode’s law into redundancy. Nevertheless the notion that there was a mathematical patterning behind the cosmos was an anticipation of the future. Kepler’s later three laws governing elliptical planetary paths have stood the test of time, at least as worthwhile approximations.

The spirit in which Kepler understood his three laws is indicative of the transitions of his time that gave rise to the paradoxical blending of past and future. To Kepler, the three laws were mathematical patterns imposed from above by God. In this sense Kepler’s underlying philosophy was little different from that which drove his soon-to-be-redundant application of the five regular solids. For Kepler mathematical patterns were imposed by God on nature in much the same way the Elizabethans and Jacobeans imposed highly regular and symmetrical patterns on their gardens and parks That a distant part of a planetary orbit should relate via some simple mathematical relation to another part widely separated from it would have preseneted no intuitive difficulty for Kepler simply because in Kepler’s view God in his wisdom had designed it to be like that.

Another stage in the beginnings of a sea change came just under 100 years later with the advent of the Newtonian revolution. Although the highly devout Newton probably thought more on the lines of Kepler than the French interpreters who followed him, his system of mechanics had the potential to be interpreted as ‘local’. That is, Newtonian Physics can be simulated computationally using a set of autonomous local ‘cells’ with inputs and outputs from their neighbors. Each cell doesn’t need to know about any overall pattern – it manages its affairs locally using some relatively simple rules governing how it interacts with its near neighbors. Even forces such as gravity, which in Newton’s day seemed to be a mathematical pattern that instantaneously permeated space, can be reduced to these ‘local’ terms. It turns out, of course, that Kepler’s elliptical patterns, which to him where just givens, are a product of one of these locally managed systems. There was during the eighteenth century a flurry of interest in extremum principles as way of interpreting Newton. This approach suggested that the mechanics of the cosmos was subject to an overall plan, but the philosophical gravitas of these principles was severely compromised by the realization that they contained no more information than the simpler and easier to handle local interpretation.

And so was born the ‘local’ physical paradigm - all that is required is a set of fairly basic, simple and definitely non-sentient units whose output in response to an input is determined by some relatively basic rules; you then turn the mathematical handle and out pops an overall pattern – or to use the vogue expression, the patterns emerge bottom-up rather than being imposed from above. As later thinkers went onto to conjecture, perhaps even sentience itself can be reduced to these local systems. The local paradigm sees the dynamic ordering agent behind the cosmos not as a supreme sentience overseeing it but rather as simple units responding to near neighbors using elementary algorithms. Thus, according to this paradigm order comes from below rather than from above. It envisages the cosmos as laissez faire rather than a command economy where each non-sentient unit autonomously looks after itself without heed to orders from on high.

Laissez faire or central planning? As Kepler, unbeknown to him, was sowing the seeds of the local paradigm, the first 100 years of Blickling Hall witnessed a turbulent period in English politics when this dichotomy was not just a philosophical issue but was being fought over, although the partisans would not have been able have to think of it in those terms. The Stuart kings of the day believed in the divine right of kings to rule with or without a parliament. Charles I wore this belief on his sleeve and this helped to precipitate the civil war of 1642. It was top-down power vs the more distributed power of the up and coming middle classes. In his last words before execution Charles I opined:

.

For the people, truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody, but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consist in having government - those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government ... that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.

.

The issue surfaced again when James II attempted to use his divine right to bring Catholicism back to England. He was consequently deposed in the bloodless revolution of 1688. In spite of the feudal top-down pretensions signaled by the dated architecture of Blickling, the owners of the Hall weighed in on the side of the parliamentarians. They were the Whigs of their day.

The laissez faire vs. central planning question is one that finds no consensus resolution even today, either in science or politics. In politics we have the paradox of capitalists and socialists both having prima facia cases for claiming to be the true champions of freedom and of accusing the other side of being the true enemies of liberty. In the physical sciences it is not clear that locality of interaction is all there is to it; if all global patterning emerges from an array of simple locally communicating non-sentient nodes there remains, of course, the enigma of both the origins of the nodes and their rules of behavior. Moreover, the strange and curious global patterning arising from their combined effort makes one wonder if the local rules governing their behavior are in actual fact subject to global mathematical constraints applying a ‘field’ of influence analogous to the effect that a background sea of chemical concentrations has on the signaling behavior of neurons in the brain. At the very least it does seem that quantum mechanics has put non-locality back on the physical science agenda. (Note to self: compare Thinknet selections)

Non-local ontologies hold out the prospect of some kind of global top-down management of local matters. This top-down management takes the form of background constraints transcending the normal neighborhood relations between nodes and their time-like communications. In this case it’s as if the units are connected together in some space of relations transcending ‘space’ space. It is not possible to detect this kind of global organizer by attempting to discover locally transmitted signals because the constraint makes itself felt in bulk effects only. Theists will find non-local ontologies easier to swallow, because the notion of some kind of background influence managing the affairs of the cosmic order without detectable local communications taking place is analogous to Divine presence and power. Contra wise, atheists may find non-local ontologies less acceptable because they look suspiciously like the thin end of the theist wedge.

***

Looking out of a window of the west range of Blickling provides an aspect across the beautiful vista of a landscaped park designed by the Reptons in the late eighteenth century. To create this informal park the Reptons removed three long avenues of trees that converged on the Hall, emphasizing its centrality. The natural appearance of the Reptons’ landscaping suggested indifference to the presence of the Hall. The fashion for landscaping was a sign of an increasing awareness of a natural world that was is stark contrast to the world of man, the world of artifice. This contrast is very marked in the estates where the elemental geometry of a neo-classical mansion is set against the informal landscaping of their surroundings. The landscape gardens were designed to look natural, unmanaged, a product of insentient nature. It is as if the men of the enlightenment period were pondering nature, now unsure of their place in it, whereas before it was taken for granted that like the old avenues of trees at Blickling all the ways of nature lead to man, the pinnacle of creation. But now questions and doubts were arising in the minds of men; in times past these questions wouldn’t have surfaced in their consciousness. That Paley published at all is a sign that points of doubt needed shoring up and this amounted to an acknowledgement that these points of doubt now existed. In a few more tens of years the scientific study of nature was to throw up some deeply disquieting surprises for mankind and further apparent demotions of his cosmic place. These surprises would lead men to question their status in the great scheme of things. The view that man is an epiphenomenona of impersonal dispassionate principles operating in a local paradigm has a hold on the minds of many.

Does God Exist?

I thought it at last time to bring together a summary of the reasons why, over the years, I have tended to answer that question with a ‘yes’. The following are just summaries of topics I have or could expand further. Although I have a backlog of scattered writings on this matter, this is the first time I have attempted bring to together the strands from a variety of fields into a summary. The list below is likely to expand, but this is how it stands at the moment:

1. Scepticism: A thoroughgoing and honest scepticism includes a sceptical attitude toward dogmatic atheism.

2. Scepticism, if too thoroughgoing leads to an evasive postmodern antifoundationalism, or alternatively, in a self-referencial loop, it starts doubt itself and acknowledges that there is, after all, such a thing as rational belief (in something).

3. The Contingency Conjecture: Computational theory tells us that although finite mathematical explanatory structures may (or may not) succeed in compressing cosmic variety into a few fundamental principles, it is not possible to compress those explanatory structures to nothing at all. Thus, a finite Cosmos can never be founded on logical necessity - it is a reification of the possible. ‘Possibility’ rather than self-sufficient necessity is the most salient logical character of the Cosmos. Hence, the hunt is on for Aseity, the self-entailing agent of creation.....

4. Aseity: Since the contingency conjecture suggests that the cosmos cannot explain itself and entails no contradiction if it did not exist, then my conclusion is that our cosmos should not exist. Since our contingent world, both its physical laws and substance, do exist then somehow it has been created from a logical and informational vacuum. The conjecture is, therefore, that there is something infinite out there with the property of aseity which both creates and sustains our contingent cosmos. (This is a reworking of the cosmological ‘argument’)

5. Exceptions to Occam’s Razor: Although the assumed a-priori organization of the cosmos makes it amenable to compressed explanatory structures, there is no logical guarantee that this should always be the case: a-priori complex entities can conceivably embed and explain simple elements. Hence Occam’s Razor cannot be used to challenge the a-priori complexity of a Deity.

6. Idealism: The idealism of Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel and the logical and linguistic positivists compel us to acknowledge that the notion of non-sentient noumena is at the very least a deeply problematical concept. For these philosophers the a-priori perceiving and thinking mind has a central place in their philosophy and they expose the difficulty of conceiving reality without mind. This prompts one to wonder if sentience, and especially Divine sentience in all its complexity, is, in fact, a given and primary phenomenon. At the very least it looks as though it is meaningless to talk of noumena without invoking the concept of an up and running sentience.

7. Self-Referencing Consciousness Cognition: All attempts to “explain” conscious cognition using noumenal concepts like atoms, fields, computation and information are themselves, in the final analysis, artifacts of conscious cognition. In short the Mind can only be described in terms of its own mental artifacts (much like a computer language compiler can be written using the language it compiles). This kind of self-referencing and self-explaining property of mind may be the human analogue of Divine Asiety

8. End Time Simulation Logic: This is the joker in the pack: Recently some physicists have mooted the idea that we may be part of some kind of giant simulation, thus suggesting we are authored by a super background intelligence that looks suspiciously like a Deity! See my blog on Time Travel for this one!
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html

9. The Declarative Universe: Well, if physicists can moot such exotic ideas then so can I. In this connection let me note a suspicious looking similarity between my Thinknet AI project and the way quantum mechanics works, and this hints, once again, that intelligence/sentience is an a-priori feature our universe. The nature of our world has a concordance with thought and computation. As one friend once suggested to me our contingent world is like a giant thought being sustained in a vast mind. (My friend wasn’t a philosopher, but based his idea on Acts 17:30). When we think of computer simulations we tend to think in terms of procedural algorithms following their determined path, but my own speculations suggest that the cosmic 'simulation' is closer to the declarative programming model rather than the procedural model. 'Simulation' may, in fact, be the wrong word: Since the contigent cosmos has no logical reason for existing it can only ever be a 'simulation'; for something that cannot exist of its own necessity 'simulation' is as real as gets. For us 'simulation' IS reality.

10. The Quantum Matrix: At the quantum mechanical level it really does look as though the cosmos is some kind of 'simulation' that only goes as far as simulating what is necessary. There is, I believe, a lack of symmetry down at the Quantum level suggesting a parsimonious use of information. Moreover, the quasi-random walk envelops of Quantum Mechanics only become “particles” when particles interact; at all other times those envelops merely measure possibility. In short the parts of the 'simulation' that are an unnecessary computational overhead are missing...

11. Chance: That great incompressible, randomness, is, it seems, at the heart of the quantum cosmos; it looks as though quantum randomness is not computationally generated but is an absolute and given input. Thus, the most complex and contingent thing we can think of, namely randomness, is posited as “just there”. Randomness, given time, is, in fact, ringing the changes on everything there possibly could be! It is far from being a trivial concept. What do they mean that the universe is “just chance”! Well, as I have already said there are exceptions to Occam’s razor and absolute randomness is one of them! Randomness is a case where the complex embeds and explains the simple (e.g. the simple binary outcomes of coin tossing are embedded in a complex sequence). Perhaps the vast information resources of contingent randomness point to that conjectured entity of infinite complexity, which sustains our contingent world. Whatever that entity is, if it exists, there is one thing we can say about it: it is highly complex.

12. Evolution: Resourced by the vast information supplies of a-priori randomness, current science conjectures that there has been enough time in our cosmos for those resources to innovate complex intelligent adaptive systems which, of course, being adaptive lock themselves in. However, whether these adaptive systems have been arrived at from the information content of random input or not, their self-sustaining character hints at something profound: that is, that in the vast platonic spaces of possibility there are self sustaining structures, which although they do not have logical necessity, are nevertheless a consequence once the complexity of randomness is posited. Likewise aseity may be a self-sustenance arising from some kind of preexistent infinite complexity. It is undoubtedly beyond our ability to imagine, but in the infinite platonic world of mathematics there may be an incredibly complex and infinite sentient configuration that has such great powers of self-sustenance that its existence is guaranteed to be eternally ‘locked in’. (This is a reworking of the ontological ‘argument’)

.

13. Evolution: For the process of evolution to work (if it works) so many contingent precursors are required, not least a good supply of a-priori randomness, that it is no where near the logically self-sufficient 'creatorless' process that some think it to be. I am making no comment here is to whether or not evolution has actually happened - I am just commenting on its contigent status.

14. Other Minds: I believe, (although I have to admit it is more hope than belief) that it is possible to explain the human mind in full using conceptual artifacts like, atoms, neurons, information and computation. But in affirming this one must be aware that any such explanation is self-referencing – it is using the conceptual artifacts of conscious cognition to explain conscious cognition. The formal structure of such explanations, even if they succeed in covering everything, are not the thing-in-itself, but rather another mind’s view of other minds. Thus, ‘other minds’ present themselves to us as noumena. However, unlike ‘material’ noumena which empiricism suggests have a debatable meaning, we do at least know what it is like to be a mind – in contrast we certainly don’t know what it is like to be, say, an atom! Hence the noumena of conscious cognition have a better philosophical basis than ‘material’ noumena. Along with Searle I agree that there is an irreducible first person ontology in personhood. The 'third person' language of formal explanation simply disguises the fact that such explanations are, in the final analysis, cognitive artifacts and conceal the implicit role of the first person perspective required to formulate these explanations from cognita. So, if human personality is ultimately irreducible it is an ominous sign for dogmatic atheism.

15. Metaphysical World: Our Weltanschauung, if we have one, is only ever tested with a few experiential samples here and there. That Weltanschauung informs us about a world well beyond anything that can be tested even in principle. Given these sampling limitations complex objects like personality, society and God are not amenable to easy cognitive apprehension and have little chance of being “proved” with a small set of experiential samples. It is no surprise, then, that given the partiality of human experience and cognition and an entity whose prime posited attribute is that of complexity and/or personality, God, if he exists, has a very debatable ontology.

16. Keyhole Science: Science, as the careful social formalization of the testing procedure, puts further strictures and controls on our anecdotal experience and consequently reduces the experiential sampling keyhole even further. Science’s “guilty until proved innocent” criterion is a strict filter that helps block spurious claims and as such it is analogous to the precautionary strategies used in courts of law. However, as with legal courts, the unavoidable cost of the fussy epistemological method of science is that it is going to make heavy weather of complex domains, like politics, sociology, personality and above all theology; it also cannot easily cope with experiences that come in ones and twos.

17. Limits of Scientific Epistemology and Authority. For the man in the street (or field), science’s observational samples reach him via social texts. Moreover, the universality of scientific theories has more to do with the positing of all-embracing theoretical structures, which of necessity are textual. Hence, for the man in the street science is a textual phenomenon, and for the intelligent layman epistemology is largely a matter of handling texts. In fact for all of us knowledge about the grand sweep of the cosmos mostly reaches us through the texts of society, and it is our cognitive reaction (or lack of reaction) to these texts that is pivotal in forming and testing our Weltanschauung. In this respect science texts have no special authority apart from their appeal to our general mental toolkit of perception and reason. The social texts of formal science must therefore take their place side by side with historical and theological texts.

18. The God Instinct: History suggests that there is an instinctual/intuitive human understanding that the cosmos doesn’t contain its own explanation and that it points to something sentient beyond it (See for example Romans 1:19-20 and the history of human relations with the notion of Deity)

19. Theodicy: The existence of suffering and evil doesn’t so much challenge a belief in the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient loving God, as it does leave us with an existence dilemma: Are we really prepared to say that God should not have dragged our world out of contingency because of its burden of suffering and evil? Are we prepared to forego our own existence, because that existence is bound up with suffering and evil?

20. Generalised Copernicanism: Human Cosmic Insignificance, it is sometimes suggested, is a clear sign of our unimportance in the cosmic scheme of things and therefore evidence that there is no loving personal God. However, if we regard the universe as some kind of massive computation, the huge size of the cosmos may be connected with the “computational byproducts” of an important end result. As a wonderful Jewish saying goes: “For a single rose a field of thorns was spared”.


The above are rather general and speculative pointers suggesting that some highly complex entity with the property of aseity sustains our contingent world much like a mind sustains a thought. However, frankly, on the basis of the above alone the case for theism is no more obliging than the case for atheism. That’s always been my problem – I could no more convincingly rule in theism as I could rule it out. At best the points above provide a prima-facie case for theism. But even if I concluded that the above points convinced me of the existence of a deity, they reveal very little about the nature and motives of that deity; at most they point in that direction but provide no personal introduction. In fact a personal introduction may be impossible because ‘God’, if that’s the right name to use of Aseity, may be an utterly alien impersonal entity or principality. In that case it is likely that attempts to take the matter further would be fruitless. (However, one might wonder why an impersonal Aseity would sustain the high personality we find at the top of the complexity ladder. Moreover one might expect complex human nature to reflect something of the complexity of Aseity)

If that’s where it ended I think I would be agnostic, unsure where to go next. Actually, to be honest, I think know where I would go next – probably into disbelief; or at least disbelief in the existence of a gracious personal God: as far as the latter is concerned absence of evidence is truly evidence of absence because it seems to me very likely that any gracious personal God would reveal himself more clearly. Thus, in the absence of a clearer revelation my conclusion is that there is likely to be no gracious personal God. Agnosticism about the existence of a personal loving God is not a consistent position.

.

However, my approach has been as follows: If there is a loving personal God and, moreover, a God of grace, that God is unlikely to leave us bereft of some kind of special revelation as to His nature. To cut a long story short I believe the revelation of God I have sought for is that found in the Christ of the Bible, the only quality revelation I have discovered. Why I think that Jesus Christ is THE revelation of God would itself be the subject of another list, but I will leave that for another time. I have to admit that it has all been a bit of gamble: “Go for it and see what happens: nothing ventured nothing gained”. Nonetheless, I believe that God graciously meets the sinful seeker where he is at. Moreover, once one has apprehended the Revelation in Christ, the rather general philosophical list above starts to provide insights into God’s glory, grace and day-by-day providence.

But there is one tremendous irony here. If I were to compile a list of reasons for not believing in the existence of God the items in that list would largely be drawn from the counter evidence provided by the behavior of many a fundamentalist Christains! In short, most of my intellectual time is spent protecting my faith, not from atheism, but from other Christains! Evolution and Creation? No problem, solve that one over breakfast! Suffering and Evil? Give me a harder problem! Inter-Christian spiritual rivalries? Gulp! In a world of competing spiritual grandees a spiritual low ender like me is pretty much out of the picture! Reach for The Open Gospel....
(http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html)

Giving Up Hope

Look at these two logos; one is the logo of the Norwich School of Art (seen after attending their degree congregation last week) and the other is a logo from a secular wedding I attended yesterday (or ‘wedfest’ as it was named). The two logos do seem to have a passing resemblance: tangled, scribbled, looping lines; splashes of separated elements; lack of symmetry; they are essentially a chaotic profusion of marks conveying a mood of frenetic incoherent activity. The wedfest logo vaguely reminds me of the pile of detritus collected after sweeping the floors and paths of the Old Castle where I work: string, paper, dust, the odd bird carcass (killed by the cats), and miscellaneous plant matter. The meaning or story behind these logos is difficult to decipher. But are they intended to have meaning? Perhaps not: they connote and celebrate postmodern styles, if not content. Postmodernist art strives to break free of all obliging constraints of coherence, unambiguous meaning, and even the aethestic process itself. However, there is no escape from Sherlock Holmes’ science of deduction: “From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of the Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other” says Holmes. If nothing at all postmodernism has at least alerted us to the complexity of life, its eclectism, its mish mash of elements that at first sight do not cohere. But in spite of it all Holmes’ logician could tell us a thing or two about the splashes of paint, or the sweepings from a floor. Moreover, the overriding symmetries relating the two logos shown here give the lie to the postmodernist dream of an overarching and thoroughgoing irrationalism.

For those who embrace the great contradiction of postmodernism as a doctrine with content rather than just a style, life is regarded as a constant experiment, a constant breaking down of old barriers, assumptions and laws. All in good enlightenment tradition were it not for the fact in philosophical postmodernism experiment is not just an end in itself, but is, in fact THE END. For the absolute antifoundationalist life is an experiment with no hope of finding a coherent conclusion. “Since I gave up hope I feel a lot better,” sings Steve Taylor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Taylor) in one of his songs parodying the postmodern mindset.

Degree of Success

Current Projects List

1. Disorder-Order thesis write up.
2. Apply Disorder-Order concepts to algorithms
3. Continue ten-four creationism discussion with Hal.
4. Thinknet program enhancements.
5. Sermons in Stone: Photographic study of NCBC architectural history.
6. Complete "Mathematical Politics" blogging
7. "Noumena, Cognita, and Dreams" write up.

Seven is the perfect number, but the above babies are far from perfect.

Slickworth House

Ickworth House, with its central rotunda and symmetrically curving wings is unusual amongst Palladian* buildings, although in other senses it is typical: its architecture revolves round a common core of geometrical elements - straight lines, isosceles triangles, cylinders (sometimes corrected to look like cylinders) circles, rectangles, right angles, spheres, golden proportions and the five orders. Above all Palladian architecture is obsessed with arranging these elements symmetrically, although as with its limited mathematical repertoire the symmetry of Palladian architecture is restricted to only a few axes of symmetry.

In my first childhood experiments with art I quickly mastered the depiction of simple mathematical shapes like boxes, cylinders, ellipses and the effects of perspective and shadow. I almost exclusively drew only those things like machines and buildings that can be drawn using this repertoire of geometrical constructions – vegetation, animals and people I found difficult and these remained beyond my powers for a long while, and even now I find them tricky. I have always connected with Palladian architecture primarily because it is so mathematically elemental. At Ickworth I spent a good while just staring down the stair well of the rotunda. With its layers of arches, stairs and portals created by reflecting the Roman arch it looked like something out of Esher. As a child I would have gone home got out my ruler and pencil and drawn this scene – and of course I could draw it because there was little it contained that could not be depicted using straight lines, and the mathematical repertoire I had at my disposal.

Although there is a beauty in the elemental perfection of Palladianism, its very perfection, in my opinion, prevents it from aging with grace. Part of the problem is that much of it is just show: rendering scored to look like stone falls off to reveal relatively coarse brickwork. Subsidence, cracks and 'imperfections' in the rendering stand out as gross anomalies amid mathematical precision. This reified platonic universe of ideal forms is easily disrupted by a world in change and decay and these show up Palladianism for what it is: a toy town world of very basic mathematics.

Grime also looks out of place set against the purity of the platonic. At Ickworth the curving facade of the wings were time stained and they reminded me of the discolored forbidding concrete facades of ugly modern buildings. The aleatory processes of staining were incongruous against the simple mathematical elegance of a facade best seen when the rendering is clean and crisp. Notice also my picture of the rotunda. I quite unintentionally composed the picture slightly askew and asymmetrically and to my eye this jars against the line of a building that demands symmetry and perpendicularity.

Late in the afternoon I left the world of Ickworth where all was (ostensively) mathematical harmony, peace and stillness to be confronted the very next day with the frenetic chaos of the Old Castle (where I work cleaning) as it suffered the denuding dangers of flash floods. A staircase became a noisy turbulent weir, a low-lying wall sprung a ground water leak through bubbled friable plaster, and there was the aftermath of mud and silt. This was the real world. Palladianism is often identified with an intellectual unemotional outlook and aggrandized as an apotheosis of reason. But in a sense it is the outlook of the child in development, the child who is beginning to grasp some elementary mathematical tools. But it mustn’t end there. That child must learn to put those elementary pieces together into fantastically complex forms in order to render the real world and to move on from toy town Palladianism. My experience in the Old Castle of a frenetic confusion, a sense of hopelessness that gropes for faith in the face of complex forces and objects is far more true to life. This was the real “high tech” world of a created order where one’s mathematics hardly feels up to the task of depiction. The juxtaposition of these two very different experiences at two very different stately buildings on two consecutive days couldn’t have been more eloquently symbolic.

* Palladian? I wrote this before I discovered from one authority that the Palladian period ended in the 1760s, about 30 years before Ickworth was built.