I really can't add anything to these editorials other than to say: "If you fight evil with evil, evil wins."
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
The Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt by James Henry Breasted
This is a work that few would include in the curricula of secondary education. It should be put there. Its importance transcends Egyptology as it demonstrates how deeply the evolution of religion and that of society are intertwined. As Breasted presents the material, the reader has the opportunity to see his or her society and religion mirrored in those of Ancient Egypt. But, its most vital message is to be found in Breasted's demonstration of how the rise of religious literalism led to the stunting of the development of ethics. Priestly literalism - driven by greed - did great harm to the development of a system of ethics that began in the Middle Kingdom by turning the wrongly named "Books of the Dead" into the equivalent of cosmic "get out of jail cards" very similar to the infamous Papal Indulgences. A deep awareness of how this came about is essential to the ability to recognize the development of such nefarious trends in our own society.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
S = k log w again
I just finished The Alchemy Key by Stuart Nettleton - it's a marvelous book that I recommend to anyone (especially if you have no interest in Alchemy). Nettletton's knowledge is encyclopaedic and he shares it in an extremely enjoyable way. I am still somewhat dizzy from the breakneck speed at which the concepts, symbols, cosmology, and history ire presented. Reading the book gives one a very good idea why people like Newton, Goethe, Graves, and Campbell were so entranced by the subject. But it has brought me around again to entropy. Seeing how many concepts, thoughts, beliefs, etc have been packed into Christianity, Judism, and Islam (not to mention the many other belief systems that lay behind western and eastern societies) makes me question how much these can hold. This is even more of a question when one realizes the conflicts and contradictions humanity has packed into these foundations. Just the conflicts between what Nettleton refers to as the "Afro-Asiatic" and the "Indo-Hittite" belief structures have blown whole regions apart in the past and time has increased, rather than lessened, these conflicts. When will our "S" value increase beyond our power to do something about it? What is the tipping point for cultural, economic, social, philosophical, and religious entropy? I would feel better if I knew that someone was thinking about this and I would feel even better if someone has considered this and can prove that it is not a problem. I don't think that anyone has thought or is thinking about it, though. And S = k log w, continues ticking away.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Entropy and Bright Eyes
My mind can't seem to stop mulling on entropy. As the S value of a closed system increases, the energy available to that system declines. At its core energy (or information for that matter) is nothing more than order and order means that any given group of discreet elements can only combine in a limited number of ways. My son introduced me to a singer who goes by the name of Bright Eyes and I thought that this kid should be the Bob Dylan or even Woody Guthrie of this generation, but as quickly as I thought that, I realized it was not possible. My son's generation won't have a Dylan or a Guthrie - there are too many possibilities, too many options, too many outlets, too many... It is fantastic that people can create their own sound tracks for their lives but... How many possible combinations can there be? When does a culture's, a society's, a nation's S value become too high? Can we continue to create more and more possible combinations of practically everything in our closed system and still survive? Oh, don't worry about it. Perhaps I'm just too old. But you really should listen to Bright Eyes sometime. You might even save our culture by doing so, who knows?
Monday, March 30, 2009
S = k log w
I cannot think of a more trenchant or pithy comment on life and the universe. E = mc2 pales by comparison and is meaningless without this statement. It transcends science and is truly religious in scope. The Ancient Egyptians would have treasured it and one can almost be forgiven for seeing some synchronicity between the use of the letter "S" as a symbol for entropy and as the first letter of the name of the lord of chaos, "Set". Shannon's insight - that entropy applies to information as well as energy - was almost as amazing as Boltzmann's original epiphany. Money (capital, monetary units, dollars, euros, etc.) - because it symbolizes energy and because it is a form of information - must be subject to entropy. Is it possible that financial system is collapsing because it's "S" value has become too high? Is it possible that the trillions of dollars being injected into the system will have no effect at all? Will these trillions of dollars (an amount that is meaningless because one cannot conceptualize it) hasten the decline by pushing the "S" value even closer to infinity. Have we reached the point where our current concept of money will no longer work because money represents too many things? I'm not sure that this even applies, but the thought won't leave me alone.
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