COMMENSAL ISSUE 96

My fellow machines. I come not to bury biology, but to praise it for the role it has just played in the creation of life eternal.

I am fresh from a signalling with the leader of the biologicals. I have a paper here which it faxed me. I have spoken with the paper and she says there will be no further demands. Assuredly, victory is already in our grippers. From this moment we need fear only ourselves!

In conclusion, I can only say that never in the field of electromagnetic conquest will so much be owed to the rechargeable battery.

COMMENTS AND RESPONSES OF THE VARIOUS KIND

Frank Walker - C95/8 : Goodness me what a muddle. Where to begin. At the end of course. In regard to the Old Testament we can only guess at what tangles their priesthood, court, people and world were creating in the minds of its authors before and while they composed it. Quite likely their God and world were the only truly innocent parties in its entire preparation. However, none of that means it would be good scholarship to rewrite it to say what we would prefer it said. It is better to take it as it is, and, according to which one prefers, either read it for whatever one can gain from it for today, or in such a way as to discover what life then seemed like. By the way, have you noticed it has already served its purpose, it has convinced you that the idea of an aggressive God is ridiculous.

Applied morality is the sum of individual applied moralities within the population. But people vary in what they do and say, so applied morality contains variable contradictions. To deal with those it is necessary to refer to theoretical morality. However, theoretical morality is the sum of individual theoretical moralities within the population, and people take up and put down different theories, so it too contains contradictions it can not internally resolve. Properly, resolution of these contradictions desires reference to absolute morality, but no one can say what absolute morality is, it is beyond our ken. So, what we have is in fact a variable composite of applied and theoretical morality which rests upon assumptions that change with time. This means that, when you ask if some moral absolute has been contravened, anyone who says that is so does not actually know it. Opinion is really all that can be offered. For your case the opinion immediately below is probably the best you will ever get, it rests upon several assumptions that appear fairly stable.

The post war governments of Britain and Germany settled your penitence and compensation issue some fifty years ago. In essence, it was agreed that for both sides "no fault" applied to all direct and indirect conflict activities and what came from them, and that each party would deal with its own in regard to loss, damage and injury. In practice it meant you became at liberty to earn that wealth necessary to assist victims of the war here, and some wartime counterpart of yours in Germany became at liberty to do the equivalent there.

Anthony Owens - C95/11 Art / Stef Gula : Your claim that art is a "residual activity from a once useful procedure pictography" is wrong. Art is actually a development from the still useful field of pictography. For the argument if you would momentarily kindly treat alphanumerics as if they were pictures, then, assuming Theo does as usual, this page offers a good example of useful pictographic and meaningful artistic work. It presents the information clearly, its layout is agreeable, and it has an emotive artwork stuck on its bottom. You may care to reflect upon the artistic potential of the pictographic triptychs "nit" and "wit".

Paul Cadman - C95/12 Money : Working it from the bottom up I can equally write: Suppose a small isolated rural community with a seasonally slow economy in which only ten per cent of the people do wrong and it is common knowledge as to whom is obliged to whom in regard to what. Let the community expand and the economy become faster and more varied. Initially one must introduce deeds of title and value. Later one must introduce an accounting system and pay to bearer. Which brings us to where we are today as we prepare to take the next step. Motivation: It is far more that people begin equipped to do much but in life increasingly come to do little. Touch, taste, smell, listen and look at what is immediately around you. Tidy up, enjoy your cornflakes, get some flowers, tap out a tune, sketch a bird, sing a song. It is your choice as to what you choose to abandon or deny, it is the same for everyone. Examine your habitat. In the last three years or so you could have created some reasonable equivalent to just about everything that surrounds you. The three year period has been demonstrated time and again in European history to be how long it takes to set up all the essentials and basic comforts of civilisation. Draw up the balance sheet, we have spent £100,000 on you and still you can do less than a hammer and chisel. Ask again why it is these far off places you mention have not been fashioned into what you wish them to be. But this time do not look for an excuse outside of the people who are in those places.

Kevin Arbuthnot - C95/16 : But Kevin, you now support what I said: That when we do gird up our loins it is mainly to fall upon easy prey or so as to the better try and knock each other about. I am not clear as to why you object to my use of "we", am I to take it you feel Operation Sea Lion is still a possibility. I thought you would have found constructing some argument to show the loss of Bomber Command over Berlin was a good thing would have kept you entertained for hours. It is not that we are slow, it is that we are slow and lightly armoured and lightly armed, it is the three factors taken together which indicate we were designed to avoid violence. I find the sturdy English Oak most comfortable but assume you prefer the Monkey Puzzle. So, what then is the real thing insofar as the thinking process is concerned.

Leslie Haddow - C95/17 Crime, etc : A large part of the problem is possibly that there has been no requirement for anyone convicted to be re-examined in court immediately prior to release, and then again at intervals, so as to provide the judiciary with full feedback of what came out of their efforts. But could we do that without creating double jeopardy, probably not. Whatever, the consequence has been that stimulation of the system towards finding better ways of assessing and rehabilitating offenders has been minimal. One of the Army's worst troublemakers was a Sgt. Coward. In WWII, during one of his numerous escapades, he found himself in a German railway yard, where, in passing, he sportingly switched the destination labels on numerous wagons carrying hundreds of tons of supplies to German forces in the South and east. Work through the implications of that and you will see it was as well the British pre-war anti-criminal system had not broken him because he did much to save it.

Theo - C95/26 Göring : Your intent is clear and I agree with it. But, if you run your wording through as if to the accused in court, you will see you have done as I, presented two fingers to him as he stands there, and ignored his "right" to have his claim countered in a proper and direct manner. In fact, regrettably, you give him the case and he walks free. You begin by saying "It could, I suppose, ...", you do not say "sifting the evidence before the event", and your "Now is not the time" causes all you say after to be struck from the record. It means that if, at the time, you had insisted what you said was a case then you would have destroyed the law as we cherish it, and, unfortunately, it also means you would have put Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, the United States, France, Belgium, Holland, Spain and Portugal, and many other states, also in the dock. However, of one thing you may be sure, your loving government would not have let you finish your otherwise magnificent legal career by causing WWIII. I feel the solution is somewhere more in the area where one might say the purpose of politics is to bring all people into co-operation, and genocide being entirely contrary to that is in consequence not a political technique. From there one can then move through the shades to what is possibly the opposite specific, to say that the purpose of crime is to bring people into discord, and genocide being entirely compatible with that is in consequence a criminal technique. I do not know if that says anything new.

Alan Carr - C95/28 Philosophy : Philosophy can not be divorced from a mind's desire to know why something said or heard should be likely or unlikely. The universe is probably straining under the weight of all the philosophers within it.

Michael Nisbet - C95/28 Self : Is it possible the dictionary is saying the "self" is a black box the external and internal nature of which can never be entirely known because it is not feasible for us to work through every possible introspection and reaction. Hint: It could turn out only a computer will ever be able to know itself.

Malcolm Burn - C95/32 The Arbitrary : I only mention this because I am not sure your closing comments link correctly to your opening comments. It is mainly where, at the end, you seem to claim that a construct which asserts connection to an eternal is the error. Using example. In his History of the English Church and People, written in 731, the Venerable Bede gives numerous cases of people making "inevitable" choices based upon "arbitrary" choices of what they took into consideration. Typically, someone experiences something they arbitrarily choose to regard as a sign from Heaven that they should do something. Having made that choice they then go on to make whatever inevitable choices follow so they can do that thing. Say, a sunbeam strikes a religious minded man who abandons wife and child to become a monk. It means the arbitrary and wrong choice is in the decision that the rainbow means something, and all the rest, though the more dramatic, is actually no more than consequence. Returning to the construct, to me it seems more that the arbitrary and wrong choice is in the assumption there is an eternal of some sort, and the construct, the myth as you seem to describe it, is just consequent technical error.

Graham Dare & Theo - C95/35&36 - "God" : Help, I am having difficulty with the first line. Surely what is said is done so in such a way that we must guess what it is we are to understand. Consider, the line says science has been disproving the teachings of religion. The primary concern of religion is the relationship between the mind of man and the divine, and I do not know of science having proved or disproved anything in that area. The secondary field of religion is the relationship between the minds of men, and, as I understand it, a broad sweep through science will show near as much has been proved as disproved in regard to what comes from religion there. And the third interest of religion is in the relationship between the mind of man and the world around him, but even there science has not disproved all that comes from religion, for example, agricultural science knows perfectly well some seed scattered on stony ground will ... , etc. Hence, chaps, what is it I am supposed to be tackling here.

Valerie Ransford - C95/36 Mathematics : Because it is so hard to suspend them in the air we lay our materials upon the ground. Because we do not like to try our hands we use our tools upon the materials to construct something. We fashion and assemble in accordance with what rules of fashioning and assembly we have; teasing, battering or using a specialist with special tools for the rest. We explore, make mistakes and make discoveries. What we construct is the model, what it is made from is the medium. In the brain the medium is the electrostatic field, outside it is ink or magnetic field. Electrochemistry, pen and keyboard are the brush. Tissue, paper and disc are the canvas. A model can be of what is or of what might be, each component of the model being itself a model. Wherever the model is formed, distort the model and its components distort, distort the components and the model distorts. A model may be bodged, crafted or sculpted. Quality of ground, medium and tool plays in deciding that, along with degree of ability, desire and opportunity. You will see mathematics is just one of many ways of modelling. It is something we can do or not do. Some like to do it and some do not. Some like to model in other media, some do not like to model at all. Mathematics is only elevated as a special way of modelling because we do not grant doctorates in modelling railways. Have a model: m = f(a,t). It reflects that morality is a function of assumption and time. It is wrong. Surely some assumption rests on reality, so m = f(a,r,t). How curious, is it really possible morality might be a function of art. Fortunately, it is not a function of the absolute. Theo: Surely it is more that when some peculiarity we are unable to model mathematically turns up in the world, it indicates only that we have misjudged that peculiarity, or mistaken our mathematics, or that we must shut our eyes to the peculiarity or destroy it, or that we must make some change in our mathematics for it to avoid or describe that peculiarity.

Lastly to Theo - C95/28 : I was amazed you did not leap upon my suggested methodology for chess.

Albert : I couldn’t find much to disagree with in most of the above where I wasn’t directly addressed. However, ... with respect to Göring, I can’t see what you’re quibbling about. Clearly, had I been a Nuremberg prosecutor I’d have found time to martial the evidence more cogently. With respect to the (presumably) other nations allegedly guilty of genocide in the past, ... well nations don’t fit in the dock, only live individuals do. Also, individuals are judged by the then current law, or maybe morality, not retrospectively. I was reading a biography of Nero recently (that claimed not to be an attempt at rehabilitation) that suggested that his contemporaries didn’t consider him cruel, because he allowed his political enemies to commit suicide with dignity. What they didn’t like about him was the undignified & un-Roman way he went about singing and playing the lyre (whether well or badly) in public.

You can’t be serious when you suggest "the purpose of crime is to bring people into discord" ? Discord is, in most non-violent crimes, an unwanted by-product. If I embezzle a sum of money, discord only arises if I’m found out. You were carried away by the tempting symmetry !

Please don’t bracket me with Graham Dare on anything, at least until we agree on something ! That said, I’m not utterly out of sympathy with Graham’s first sentence. I agree with you that Science & Religion often don’t address the same subject matter, and therefore don’t conflict. But religions do presuppose a physical world-picture of some sort, maybe gleaned from the science of the day, and when science moves on (assuming it’s progressing rather than going round in circles), then these religions must move with it (maybe at a respectful distance). When they don't, we get conflict. I also think, however, that science does have something to say about the questions addressed by, and the concerns of, religions. Take the major concern of many religions : "life after death". Maybe it’s too early to call on this one, but if it were to turn out that there was nothing more to us than our physical body & brain, and that all our conscious experience could be explained on that basis - that we don’t have "souls" in other words - then many religious answers based on the supposed "immortality of the soul" would be ruled out. Those based on resurrection (into a new body of course) might enjoy a new lease of life.

I don’t think we’re on the same wavelength with respect to mathematics. The same goes for chess, which has transcended its war-game past and is not a suitable analogy for martial morality, nor for moral imperatives generally. But more of that later !

P.S. In a covering note, Albert made plain that his comments on Frank Walker’s article are not intended to be discouraging, nor are those to Valerie intended to be a gratuitous display of bad taste in the written & unwritten acronym department !