Read Outside East Glacier.

A compelling piece on virtual rape.

Long. Quite long, actually, but worth every word if you ever spent regular time in chat-rooms, which, while not the same as MOO, are enough of a simacularum that you know what he's talking about. And if you didn't, it describes some of the magic (and strangeness) of it through the lens of a ... I don't even know how to describe it in ten words or less. Just read it, a'ight?

(via kottke)

Alright, I don't normally say things like this, but having just seen X-Men: The Last Stand, I just have the following to say:

The fact--no, even just the supposition--the supposition that Famke Janssen has heterosexual sex--with anyone, even be they old or creepy or even just simply non-me--the supposition alone that Famke Janssen has heterosexual sex makes the world a better place. A much better place.

That is all.

Anybody ever go to CTY or similar nerd-camp? (Lars, I'm looking at you...)

I'd like to know, 'cause it seems like the kind of think I wouldn't done if my parents weren't, you know, damaged and paranoid and didn't have summers off.

I'd love to hear stories about said nerd camps or other summer nerdery.

Scientists of Mars have made much important progress in understanding Earth's dominant lifeform... the automobile.

A classic to distract you while I'm busy looking for a job:

"Look at my button down striped shirt! Fucking look at it!"

My favorite thing about the Russians is that they feel free to let loose a wicked burn every once in a while.

King Floyd is the grooviest motherfucker to have ever ridden a damn groove. If you don't own his greatest hits--called "Choice Cuts" [iTMS] and featuring a steak on the cover (a concept so good I can hardly believe it's an actual album cover)--I feel truly sorry for you. From "Groove Me"--the greatest song in the history of time, I kid you not--to the explosive power of "I Feel Like Dynamite," to his boss-ass soul cover of Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle," to the rock hard groove of "Baby Let Me Kiss You" the disc just doesn't quit. I dare you not to move along with this record. I fucking dare you.

Damn.

So good.

So, as of today, or yesterday, maybe, I've met my original weight-loss goal. That's right, fifty pounds since February from 206 to 156, or, as it's more commonly known, just 3/4s of my heaviest. Also, I'm as small now as I was at the end of my freshman year of college.

These last ten have been easy/nice due to 1) sushi becoming availible from HEB--surprisingly calorie effective--and 2) those new microwave grill sandwiches from Stouffers. The Southwest Chicken is tres delicious. I know, I'm just as surprised as you.

So, as I said before, this was my original goal, but as you may also recall from the last time I talked about this, I'm gonna do ten more because that will put me right dead center in the "normal" BMI range--and how often can you say you're dead center? Plus, it's not that hard at this point to keep going, and damnit, I'm gonna be hott and not just acceptable. That is all for now.

This is part four of a six part series. Part one outlined the project, part two defined our terms, and part three concened itself with common objections. This section will outline objections I believe to be insurmountable. Or just objection that I find insurmountable. I'll have to see how it plays out.

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Part of the reason it's taken me the last three days to write this section--and this section was really the impetus behind this whole project. That and Zoroastrianism, but we'll get to that tomorrow (i.e. when the next section gets written)--is that I want to make sure I get it right. I don't think I've seen an argument quite like it anywhere before, so forgive me if the argument isn't as polished as I some day will make it; hopefully it'll stand up anyway.

I'd like to reiterate, before we get into this, that this is not about whether or not you should feel like there's something out there, that is, your answer to what I called Question Two (The Unasked, Unanswered Question) of popular modern American religious discourse, that is, "Do you feel like there's something out there?"
    And, surely, the people that answer "yes" ought to believe in God (or something like him/her/it) and the people who answer "no" just really shouldn't because if you try to do the other thing it's not going to end well for anybody (particularly you).
    So no one is trying to change your reportive answer to question two. And I'll admit, as I did freely in part one, that my answer is in the "No, I don't" family. But that doesn't mean that I don't have long, hard won thoughts and feelings on the subject from the years and years and years when I didn't know there was a question two, let alone that I could answer "no" to it. So, anyway, if your answer is "yes," good for you (as long as... well, we'll get to that tomorrow).

This is not about that. This is about how you think about the thing that you think is out there. And if you're comfortable with The Thing That You Think Is Out There being inexplicable and paradox-riddled, then this probably isn't for you.
    But if that niggles at you, if that eats at you that you can't make sense of it without resorting to some sort of intellectual dishonesty, e.g. "We can't understand his plan. We should try when we're at prayer and trying to do things in the world in his name, but we totally can't understand it when it comes to bad things happening to us," then this might just be something you want to continue reading.

So anyway, the argument, with explanation is as follows:

1) God is a transtemporal consciousness.
    This is as laid out in our definitions. Given those definitions, transtemporality is not hard to come by, particularly under the umbrella of omnipotence, a power of God's which seems generally undisputed. (Although, I suppose omnipotence is less like 'a power' and more like 'the power' or 'all power.')
2) A consciousness is a thing which is reflective on itself.
    A basic Sartrean definition, and it seems sound. A consciousness is capable of examining itself.
3) To be reflective on oneself, one must be capable of change, either through response to stimuli or through choosing to accept and reject its component parts (or, rather, these are the same, as its component parts are also things that are acting upon it). Even broadening this to make it less objectionable, you can say that a consciousness must be able to interact with something. A thing that cannot interact, either with itself or with something else certainly cannot be said to be a consciousness.
4) Change can only occur linearly through time.
Explanation encompassed in explanation of 6).
5) Therefore, a thing must be able to move through time to be said to be conscious.
6) Transtemporality is not moving through time.
    This is important because the standard conception of transtemporality is that it consists of popping up in time whenever, either forward or backward, packing your linear-consciousness along with you, building up a set of experiences in much the same way we do now, with the possibility of returning to moments you've previously visited.
    What I'm positing as to transtemporality (and, more than admittedly, I'm not the first to posit) is existence at all points in time simultaneously, meaning all of existence will occur / is occurring / has occurred. It's like seeing every point on a timeline simultaneously. The entire breadth of everything simply ... Is. And Was. And Will Be.

Set aside, if you will, the following:
a) The ability of a transtemporality to interact with the linear world non-paradoxically. An active God model, much like Jean Claude Van Damme in Time Cop, produces more than a few paradoxes/other asst. problems quite quickly.
b) that even if we grant the possibility of a transtemporal consciousness that a transtemporality and a lineararity might not be able to understand/comprehend each other at a very fundamental level. I don't mean in a simplistic "well why don't you just do this differently twenty years ago?" kind of way--like the Bajoran worm-hole gods of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine--but in the fact that we will never understand--are incapable of understanding--at a fundamental level what it's like to be a transtemporality. We can lay out general logical rules for the way things ought to / must be w/r/t how a transtemporality could exist and the ways in which it might interact (or be unable to interact) with the world, but that's about it. And I think it's fair to say that that might be all transtemporality could say about us, even an infinite transtemporality. But that’s not the point.

Focus on the idea of a transtemporal consciousness itself. It is not that the consciousness would have to be very different from anything we would be comfortable describing as human (and, IIRC, we're created in His image in this way, right?). I'll say it right now: I don't think it's logically possible. And I'll tell you why:
    A consciousness must be able (per point 3) to move through time in order to reflect, grow, change and a transtemporal being can't do that.
Furthermore, a transtemporality can't be a consciousness because a transtemporality cannot think.
    To have a thought is a linear process. It is, essentially, building something and is inherently linear. It begins with a question and progresses toward an answer. It can’t be another way. To say that it’s another way is to say that it’s something different.
    The next question for us is: can there be a different kind of thing that’s like thinking but transtemporal? One that preserves the ability to create knowledge--or, even, have created knowledge--that is transtemporal? It's not just hard to comprehend, I think it's logically impossible.
    Think of is this way: the same way the past is immutable to us, what we call the present and the future might well be immutable to a transtemporality. This, at first, seems counterintuitive. We cannot change the past because we are not present in the past to change it. A transtemporality would be present in all three, simultaneously, so how could he/she/it not be able to alter any of them?
    Because a transtemporality is not present in the past, present and future. A transtemporality is present before/during/after Everything. He/she/it is not at two points, three points, a million points along the line of time, but rather has no idea--could not have any idea!--that it is a line. To a transtemporality, cause would be effect. Effect would be cause. Additionally, neither effect nor cause could be effect or cause.  Think of it: eternity is like a dictionary where all the words are not ordered, but simply piled atop one another, simultaneously existing not near each other, but within each other. At some point, it ceases to be a dictionary and becomes more like a transtemporal poem. But unlike poems you or I might read, there's no growth toward an idea or understanding. The entire universe is a mood piece. Nothing can be accomplished because everything's already, immutably been accomplished.
    "Ah," you might say, "you just smuggled immutability in there. Did you think I wouldn't catch it?" Yes. No. Well, maybe. But either way I plan on addressing it. To change something you have to have an understanding of the way it is and a different way that it could be, then, through act of will alter the world so it reflects the change you wished to accomplish. This is an inherently (inherently!) linear process. And in the same way you, as a linearity cannot embody a transtemporality--you can't know what you're going to feel before you even know what sets it off, for example--a transtemporality cannot embody a linearity, therefore  a transtemporality cannot think or act in the world (or even in/on itself) and indeed cannot be a consciousness.
-----
Therefore: God is either not transtemporal or not a consciousness.

//

I've thought of one way around all this: what if God has a temporal and a transtemporal component and the flow of information--or rather, dump of information--goes/went only one way from the transtemp. to the temp. incarnations (or whatever) of God?
    This is something like Jesus, but from the beginning to the end and with the full breadth of God's power/awesomeness, save it's been neutered by it's transtemporal progenitor so as to avoid the problems inherent in transtemporality and God. All I can say about this is: 1) do any of you really believe this is the way it could be? and 2) this fails an important simplicity test. We like things to be elegant. We liked it when Indiana Jones just shot the swordsman rather than fight him because it's an elegant solution. We use Occam's Razor every day to solve problems ("Is it a massive conspiracy to deny me my mail or did the postman simply take the day off without a replacement?" "Did she not call because she forgot, or was she, perhaps, abducted by aliens?" et cetera) and we understand that the elegant answer is usually at least much closer to being correct.

So, what I have to say is this: a transtemporality, wishing (well, wishing / having wished / who will be wishing--if this is even a thing a transtemporality can do (have done, will be able to do)) to interact with the world creates for itself a version of itself that is linear but everlasting which cannot pass information to itself (because, see, it already would've passed the information to itself if it could) and it cannot pass information to (because, see, that would violate the secondary being's lack of transtemporality) except with what it has dumped into it at the secondary being's creation in order that it might do the things that the progenitor-being wants without violating its inability to interact with the world? Setting aside if it's even possible (it could very well violate in the same ways as laid out above the ways in which a transtemporality cannot think/act), it's very, very, very deeply inelegant.

//

Part five: "What then, is unobjectionable, if I may ask, Mr. Smarty Pants?" to come soon.

Kendall: did you know craigslist has personals?

Me: Yes, I did, indeed. They are often horrifying. Usually something like: "S/W/F, Seguin, seeks porcine same for nude bacon grilling."

Kendall: HA!
see, i was unaware.  and now intrigued

Me: It's pretty fun for the first hour or so, then you start to feel dirty and disgusted. At least, I did.

This is part three of a six part series. The Introduction and Definitions, pts. 1 and 2, respectively, were published earlier this week.

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Today, in more or less list format, we're going to cover the common objections to the ways in which the modern American Christian God is believed in. Some of these are more interesting than others, and some of them I really want answers to, and some of them I'm going to take apart myself, but mostly I'd like to get them both a) out in the open and b) out of the way so we can get to the serious objections I have tomorrow (and by "tomorrow," you, of course, know I mean "whenever I get around to writing the next section").

Continue reading "A3: Common Objections" »

If you've not been visiting Righting Poemry, may I suggest that you, you know, do so? And, like, participate if so inclined and stuff like that? At the very least read along because, personally, I'm now the most productive I've been since I left college. Some of it's better than others; I am proud, for example, of Span (2) (as long as people get that it's not actually about bridge building), my latest version and Noah's excellent reworking of Lunar Dream (and, yes, I know, it's a dozen men that've walked on the moon. Ten worked better for the sonority), the sonic density of Poesia con Stelle, the tremendous images both in Christina's original and my take on to my always never lover, and my most recent, Two Tiles.

If you hate them (or love them, I suppose), well, let me know. If you're confused about what Righting Poemry is, well, you're apparently bad at reading my blog, but you can catch up on what the projects all about either at length or more concisely. If you want to participate, contact me and I'll give you the password so you can join in.

This is part two of a six (maybe) part series. Part one (the introduction) was posted earlier this week.

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I seek in this section to explicate the notion of their Christian God that most people hold, in the most general of terms. God is immortal and infinite. These seem like they would be uncontroversial: God has existed and will continue to exist without end and is capable of being everywhere at the same time. Without these, most conceptions of God seem to fall far short of the Awesomeness imbued to the Hebrew/Christian God.

It seems that the rest of God boils down to three main points: omniscience (knowing all), omnipotence (being all powerful) and transtemporality (existing at all points in time simultaneously). There's good scriptural evidence for each of these, if we're going to take a scriptural approach, and, further, on the face of it these seem like logical qualities for an ultimate being to embody.

In an effort to be intellectually honest: not all of those qualities are believed in in the way that I've listed them above. Transtemporality would seem to be the weakest, and indeed, it might even be misleading to call it something like a base-quality of God.

Continue reading "A2: Towards a Descriptive Definition of God" »