Philosophy 313 Readings: Jan 5, 2014: "The Experience Machine" and others

Material covered: 

"Ethics," by Bonhoeffer, pages 30-39
"Letter to Menoeceus," by Epicurus
"The Experience Machine," by Robert Nozick
Selections from "Utilitarianism," by John Stuart Mill
Selection from "Brave New World," by Aldous Huxley

Study Notes: December 21-27, 2014: "The Book No One Read"

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 

• Article, "The Book No One Read: Why Stanislaw Lem's futurism deserves attention" by Lee Billings
• Essay, "Study of Leviticus 18-20 'Abomination'" by Dave Cornwell
• Post, "Surviving in an Alien Environment: Human + Christ as Medieval Natural-born Cyborg" by Ruth Evans
• Essay, "The Sword of Laban as a Symbol of Divine Authority and Kingship" by Brett L. Holbrook
• Article, "The Horizontal and Vertical Axes of Storytelling" by James George
• Article, "The Remarkable Queerness of Shinji Ikari" by Sam Keeper
• Article, "Tony Stark in the Integrated Circuit: The Iron Man films and Cyborg Feminism" by Sam Keeper
• Article, "Stark Modernism: Fine Art and Iron Man" by Sam Keeper
• Article, "The Thingiverse-- Model Reuse in the 3D Printing Community" by Jarkko Moilanen
• Article, "The Practical Guide to the Future of Medicine" by Dr. Bertalen Mesko
• Article, "Controlling Genes With Your Thoughts" by ETH Science Writer
• Article, "The Fermi Paradox, Self-Replicating Probes, and the Interstellar Transportation Bandwidth" by Keith B. Wiley
• Article, "The Stars Are Wrong: Why Cthulhu Needs To Go Away" by Sam Keeper
• Article, "AnimalTech-- Wearable Technology for Fido" by Clara Mancini

The Art Gallery: "Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)"

Alright. I'm going to start this out by saying that I'm not really sure where I'm going to be going with this. I would like for this to be a kind of "these are the stories that are coming out of these pictures" thing, but I'm not sure if that's what it's going to be. If it can manage to be that then I'll transfer it over to White Marble Block. Otherwise it'll stay here as... I don't know. As a thing. 

Jesus Christ, the Serpent

The snake was originally a symbol for Jesus Christ. The reason can be easily seen if we look at other cultures: the shedding of the snake's skin is a type of rebirth that associates the snake with healing, regeneration, resurrection, and eternal life.

The Golden Rule and charity

"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets." Matthew 7:12

More than any other law, I think that the Golden Rule is very relevant to emulating God's selfless love for ourselves and others. The glory of God is intelligence, and His supreme understanding leads him to have selfless love for every existing thing. Together these are His chief attributes, but just how often do we take for granted His love for us?

We are commanded to treat others as we would like to be treated; does this not include how we would like to be treated by God? As one prophet put it, "You should forgive and overlook: Do you not like God to forgive you?" We are all beggars, but if we squabble between each other for scraps how is it that we will be looked kindly upon by our Lord?

God exercised tyrannical dominion, if He exploited our flaws, if He removed Himself from us forevermore after impatiently counting out the four hundred and ninetieth time, how few of us would remain alive in the furnace of His wrath? And yet how quick are we to abuse our power, and how slow to forgive?

If we want others to love us- if we want, at least, for God to love us- then truly we should have love for others. God's love is not conditional upon it, but that is the only kind of love that we would want above all others, and we should act accordingly.

Fiction: Absent: One Lion

Elsewhere, a kingdom is still saved. Elsewhere, a war is waged and peace is won. A table is still broken, and four chairs filled. But for others, and by others.

Follow the leader!

In a recent devotional hosted by our mission president, President Swain brought up a favorite game of his childhood: follow the leader. He wanted to highlight a difference between how the leader in that game operates, and how Jesus Christ does.

In this game, the aim of the leader is to make it impossible for you to follow him. When you are incapable of doing as he has done you are eliminated from the game, and only when everyone has been eliminated does the leader win. As the followers, our goal is the same no matter who is our leader- to follow exactly- but unlike other leaders in this game Jesus' goal is not to eliminate us. No matter how often we fail, in fact, He won't eliminate us. The only ones who do that are ourselves, when we give up and refuse to try again. 

Ice Cream Trucks

In my second proselyting area there were many ice cream trucks in a small area. It was not uncommon to look down one end of a long street to see an ice cream truck and then to look down the other end to see another operating at the same time. In my current area we do not have so many ice cream trucks, but we do have a more memorable one.

There are two ice cream trucks that I am aware of, to be exact. One is much like every other ice cream truck that I have come across. Imagine an ice cream truck in your mind, and it won't be far from this one. The other is run by a woman from India, and it is, I must say, a very sketchy ice cream truck. It is a regular van, actually. Pictures of ice cream are crudely pasted onto the side of the van, and the passenger seats have been removed to make room for a large cooler. Her approach is heralded by music, as all ice cream trucks are, but she plays Silent Night, Jingle Bells, and other songs.

I am pretty sure that she is playing a single Christmas CD over and over.

It is the music that she plays which strongly convinces me that this woman does not know very much about why ice cream trucks do what they do. She has decided to run her own business, and that is to be lauded, and for some peculiar reason she has decided to sell ice cream. Unfortunately, the extent of her research seems to have been looking at ice cream trucks already in operation and copying what they do without understanding the principles behind these actions.

Similarly, when we act without understanding, we can look just as ridiculous as this ice cream truck lady. Of more concern is that we can at times be ineffective, sometimes to the point of actually hindering our purpose. There may be someone who is concerned about the quality of the ice cream, because of the appearance of her truck, and so does not buy (I myself must say that the ice cream is just as good as anyone else's, however), just as we may not always get the result that we want when we do not know how it will get us that result.

It also makes it difficult to not sacrifice the spirit of the law when we do not know what the spirit, or principle, is. Without understanding the principle, we cannot adapt to changing circumstances.

Fiction: Two Fishers

Two sat alone in a boat, a fisherman and a fisher of men. They sat with their backs to each other, poles in hand, and the silence of the cool night air was broken only by their low voices and the occasional plop of a fishing line.

Giving comfort to those in need of comfort

"O Lord, my heart is exceedingly sorrowful; wilt thou comfort my soul in Christ. O Lord, wilt thou grant unto me that I may have strength, that I may suffer with patience these afflictions which shall come upon me, because of the iniquity of this people." Alma 31:31

In my very first area, serving in the Holladay North and Olympus Stakes, I had occasion to meet a young woman who had grown up in the LDS Church but had fallen away almost as soon as she had left the nest, going straightway from Rome to Vegas, so to speak. Some years later she chanced to get a glimpse of her lie from the outside and decided that she needed to put it back in order.

Meeting with the missionaries was one part of her journey back, and I was fortunate enough to work with her for almost the entire time that she received lessons from us. In that time we also received some insights from her. On one occasion she told us of when she had come to work and found that her schedule had been changed without her knowledge: she would be starting an hour later that day than she thought. Because of her tight budget she decided to stay rather than go home and come back later.

While waiting for her shift to start she sat outside on a bench. Shortly thereafter a homeless man sat down beside her and began to talk. There wasn't much direction to it: He would talk about his current problems, then his childhood, then again to something else. And she listened, and she responded with words of comfort, with whatever she could give, and that she responded at all was comfort to him, to know that someone was listening for the first time in so long.

And she realized that she was acting as a proxy for Christ at that moment, that she was His hands there. We are all prodigals and sojourners from our eternal Home, but it wasn't until she related that story and her realized that I grasped that image in my mind and realized, myself, an aspect of His mission and how to follow Him in this aspect. Sometimes, to lift a burden, you just need to listen.

Your turn: When have you had opportunity to help someone with something little and only later realized how much they needed it?

Love is a celestial motivator

"Therefore, if you do not remember to be charitable, ye are as dross, which the refiners do cast out, (it being of no worth) and is trodden under foot of man." Alma 34:29

On an online community called Less Wrong, where folks try to improve the way that they think in order to be, well, less wrong, a returned missionary named Calcsam discussed his idea for the "governance structure" of a rationalist community whose members would, on a regular basis and in person rather than over the internet, support each other in all spheres. The entire thing was explicitly modeled after the LDS Church, right down to the manuals.

Less Wrong is a predominantly atheist community, notwithstanding the presence of such members as Calcsam, and one poster responded with something to the effect of "Sure, Mormons would sacrifice all that time and money to this kind of thing because of the perceived rewards and punishments, but atheists never would." I don't think that this is quite true, to begin with. A man named Eliezer Yudkowsky is the most prominent member of the community and himself an atheist. He is also someone that cares an awful lot about everybody, which fact hit me most strongly with a single sentence that Brother Yudkowsky used at the end of one of his blog posts: "I want you to live."

But this is merely the clearest expression of a love for others that I detect in Brother Yudkowsky across the board. He does not want any person to die or suffer, and he is willing to put in significant work to this end. You could argue that it is the purpose of his life's work, in fact. And that love, the potential to have which is part of our divine birthright, is why an atheist could do it. Fear shouldn't be a part of it, nor greed.

But this brings us to, well, us (that is, the LDS). Why do we do these things? I can't say for everyone, only myself, but even if I could there would be little point to doing so. What I want to do is ask. You see, there's no point to doing any of it if you don't do it out of love, and as Latter-day Saints we need to hold ourselves to as high of a standard as anyone else. When the two great commandments are centered on love, how can we think to get into the Celestial Kingdom of God by living for that purpose? That is to say, Jesus Christ lived not for the glory that we give Him but for others, and had He lived for the glory He would not be worthy of it. Similarly, our own motives must be not for reward but out of love, and so I ask you to look inside yourself and determine where you fall, and if necessary get onto the Lord's side of the line.

Not who you think it is

"He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not." Isaiah 53:3

When I think of The Lord of the Rings and notice a Christ figure, who do I imagine?

Not Gandalf, who can come to mind so easily because of his fall at Moria and his transition from Gandalf the Gray to Gandalf the White.

Not Frodo, who sacrifices so much in order to dispose of the One Ring, which is Sin in this view.

The One Ring is sin, yes, but of the many characters who so imperfectly represent Christ there is another that comes more prominently to mind: Gollum.

Certainly "there is no beauty that we should desire him," but it goes a little past that. When it comes down to it, Frodo cannot do the deed. He stands at the edge of the Crack of Doom, having traveled so far to rid himself (and the world) of sin, but at the last he cannot do it. There are sins of ours that we are disgusted by, but there are yet others that are, ah, precious to us. Pet sins, so to say. When I am angry, for example, it is not rare for me to like that feeling, to have to step outside of myself and give a reminder that yes, it may feel good to be angry at someone, but it still isn't right.

We don't have to worry much about sins that we don't like. The ones that we're warned of all of the time are the sins that we enjoy, and because we enjoy them it is so hard for us to get rid of them. And sometimes even if we hate that particular sin it is still difficult to be rid of it. I am sure that many recovering addicts will agree with me on this. Ultimately we cannot get rid of everything on our own.

Luckily for us, and for Middle-Earth, Gollum-Jesus is available. Yes, it is painful for Frodo-Everyman when his finger is bitten off, but is this pain not infinitely less than the alternative that would have come? Frodo has lost the Ring through the action of his intercessor, that painful benefactor that led him to this place to start with, and he can return to his home at last.

As a final note, Frodo could not have stood at Mount Doom without traveling through Mordor (with eagles or without them, still would have had to cross the territory). Without the Atonement of Christ we cannot be rid of sin, but even with it we cannot only say "Jesus is awesome" and then sit on the couch. As C. S. Lewis says we cannot call ourselves Christians if we fail to take "the slightest slightest notice of what he [Jesus] says," and what He says is "Come, follow me" and "Come unto me." If He has traveled through Mordor and stands at Mount Doom, then, we cannot stand at the Shire and think ourselves about to dispose of the One Ring forever.