Pieks, piekories, and emps.

What does your piek do for you? What is it capable of?

First off, there are three types of limitations on your piek. The first type is shared by all (healthy) pieks, the second two are particular to your piek. To a limited degree, it's like someone's hand. There are some things that any healthy hand is, at least technically, capable of, but not everyone has the skills to get their hands to do such things, and not everyone has uninjured, well excercised hands. Hands, however, have varying potentials, even when healthy and well trained (some people have stubby fingers that can't fit into some places, some people are double jointed and can bend in interesting ways), while pieks don't have such a difference. If you've got an uninjured piek and are willing to do the necessary 'excercise', it can do anything any other piek can do. Individuals may have a better trained piek, but nobody is equipped with any piek that has any more potential than the stock-issue 'healthy piek'.

For the moment, when I talk about what a piek 'can' do, I'm talking about what it has the potential to do, if it has sufficient health and training, not the things that some piek is able to do without any further training, or regardless of health. My 60mpg car with a 10 gallon tank 'can' go 600 miles without refueling, even though if I took it out right now, I'd only get 500 miles (since the tank isn't full.) If I start using the 'is currently able to' sense of 'can', I'll try to make it clear beforehand, so as not to be confusing and claim things like "My car can go 600 miles without refueling, but it can't more than 500 miles without refueling."

So, what can a healthy piek grasp? As a rule of thumb: verifiable truths. If you've got something that can be evaluated based on 'what fruit it produces', the piek can figure out that it's a good thing. If you've got something whose truth can be tested, it's within the realm of the piek to discern if it's true or not. This doesn't necessarily mean the test is easy, or has to be performed. If you take a million apples, and cut each of them neatly in half, your piek can show you that you'll have two million apple-halves, whether you actually perform the verification or not. It doesn't take a particularly skillful or strong piek to show that randomly laying about and killing people isn't a good idea, either. Such a thing would 'produce bad fruit', and the piek doesn't need to actually see the fruits to see the pattern that would lead to them.

An alternate rule of thumb is that a piek is limited to grasping patterns, but I mean 'pattern' in a very broad sense, here. Flipping a coin may result in random collections of heads and tails, in which case it's none of a piek's business whether a head or tail comes up next, but there's a pattern to how often heads come up as opposed to tails, and it's entirely within the grasp of a piek to claim that there'll almost certainly be about as many heads as tails that get flipped. The apple issue is, again, a matter of patterns: When you cut some number of things in half, you end up with twice as many halves as original things. While it may be difficult to see all the patterns relevant to the issue of randomly killing people, enough are readily apparent to the average piek that our species hasn't wiped itself out yet.

It may not be clear that these are only alternate views, and not really different things. If so, think about when you can have verification. The idea of verification, of judging something by its fruits, is based on the idea that there's some kind of reliable relationship between the thing and its results. That is to say, that there is a pattern. And, on the other hand, when a pattern holds for something, there must be other patterns which don't hold, and so the claim "this pattern does hold and this other one doesn't" ought to be verifiable by checking something that should be true for one pattern and false for the other.

Another approach to understanding what a piek can do is to think about what one can't do. Pieks can't grasp things that depend on special revelation. Take, for a weak first example, whether a particular piece of stale, preserved bread underwent transubstantiation a hundred years ago or not. If I understand the idea of transubstantiation correctly, the end result is stuff that to all appearances is bread and wine but which are, fundamentally, human flesh and blood. As far as I've been told, there's no way that anyone could reliably pick out bread that had undergone the process from bread that hadn't, unless the information was revealed to them (they were present for the process, planted a tracking device in the bread, someone who was present told them, one of the gods told them, etc.) Even if someone was told by allegedly reliable sources that a piece had/had not undergone the process, they wouldn't have a means of verifying that it had happened. Contrast this with the question of if the bread was hollow, rather than if the bread was transubstantiated: whatever I'm told by the Historians of the Stale Bread, there's also the potential to verify the hollowness (or lack thereof) which can be done by anyone, and requires no special trust or personal revelation.

For a second example, pieks can't distinguish between the intended interpretation of what someone says and any of the alternate interpretations, since it's generally the case that only the speaker (if anyone) is privy to the particular nuances of their intention. In cases where people do a good job of being unambiguous in their communication, this isn't much of a hinderance, because the difference between the intended interpretation and alternate ones is small if it exists at all. Unfortunately, even in these cases, time can render good communications into insufficent ones. Many are familiar with some version of the quote from Christian scriptures "to him who gives you a slap on the right side of your face let the left be turned", but how was this intended? Perhaps it was meant to be a demand for respect, perhaps a call to utter pacifism, perhaps an attempt to claim that an earlier bit of Jewish holy law was meant to be against vigilante action, rather than for it. Which of these, if any, was the intended meaning of the speaker is only really verifiable by one person: the now long-dead speaker. Presumably, people can still recieve divine revelation which makes clear the intended meaning, but this only supplies personal affirmation, not the kind of verifiability necessary for the issue to fall within the domain of the piek.

On the other hand, which interpretation or interpretations are worth using is very much within the grasp of the piek. There are consequences to pacifism, there are consequences to having or not having vigilantism as an element of a social structure: these things bear fruits. The patterns involved may not be particularly simple or easy to grasp, so it might be a rare piek that has sufficient strength and skill to sort out the interpretation(s) that are worthwhile from the ones that aren't, but there are patterns nonetheless, so it is a matter of the piek.

I said, however, that there were three kinds of constraints on pieks, and have only discussed the first 'universal' kind that affects the ultimate potential of each healthy piek. What of the others? They are both of a personal nature, and have some overlap. The first is wholeness. Or, rather, lack of wholeness. Head injuries, for example, happen, and sometimes they can knock out some of the equipment on which your piek relies. If someone is physically incapable of doing the kind of mental processing that is necessary for the apple example, they have an unwhole piek. It might be temporarily unwhole, due to a minor stroke, or it might be permanently unwhole (perhaps a major stroke). Physical injuries aren't the only source of unwholeness in pieks, however.

Suppose some redhead has been raised to believe that comparing apples and half-apples is a fundamentally fruitless endeavor for redheads. Impossible. Meaningless. Can't be done. Not worth trying. No way you'd get anywhere even if you tried. Leave it to the brunettes, they can do that kind of thing. If such a twisted upbringing took hold, and the redhead completely and utterly subscribed to the premise that they're incapable of the comparison (and anything said to the contrary is ignorant, meaningless, or otherwise dismissable), then they'd have an unwhole piek... probably a permanently unwhole one, unless they first got over the "contrary positions are dismissable" position, then got over the "I can't possibly learn to do such a thing" position sufficiently to be able to learn. Basically, if it would be possible to get over those blocks to the point of being able to develop the skill (whether that development ever happened), it would be a matter of temporary unwholeness, while if the blocks were insuperable, it'd be permanent unwholeness.

That brings us to the second kind of constraint on pieks: piekories. Pie-core-ease. These have nothing to do with the ease involved in concocting the core of a pie, just in case you were wondering. It's not just that the redhead had an unwhole piek, but that it was unwhole because of a bad piekory. Not just a bad one, either, but a self-sustaining bad one, which is particularly bad. Essentially, a piekory is a bundle of opinions about what's important (and sometimes what's true) that can get lodged in a piek. The redhead had one or more piekories which bundled up things like "It is not important to be able to do this thing." "It is important to believe I cannot do this thing." "It is important to keep this piekory lodged in my piek." If it helps, you can imagine little justifications riding along with the things in the bundle: "...because doing impossible things is bad/wasteful/wrong", "...because that's the truth, and believing the truth is good/right", since that's what the third bit of the bundle effectively does: diverts the piek's resources toward propping up the piekory however it can.

Not all piekories are bad, but if one leads to an unwhole piek, it's bad, especially if it's self-sustaining one, since that's the kind that's likely to lead to a permanently unwhole piek. You might have a good piekory that says "It is important to consider the consequences of your actions" and a bad one that says "It is important to believe you cannot understand the consequences of your actions", but if the first one manages to establish its claim as more important, there's a decent chance that the second one (and the unwholeness it causes) will be ejected (and mended).

I put "and sometimes what's true" in parentheses above because, at a certain level, piekories never deliver the claim that something is true, just the importance of believing that something is true. Still, it's a lot easier to talk about a piekory that claims something is true than ones which have "it is important to believe something is true" in their bundle, so I'll make use of it as a shorthand. Even so, it might not be worth having such a shorthand if it weren't for the relationship between piekories which claim things are true and bad piekories.

Think about it for a minute: Imagine something that's a matter of the piek and, whatever it is, denote it by the phrase "kittens are fluffy." So, when I say "kittens are fluffy", you might be thinking "killing is bad" or "the sun is a mass of incandescent gas" or "understanding and excercising love is important" or "don't pour hot water into cold glass bowls". Now, a healthy piek can figure out that kittens are fluffy, because it's a matter of the piek and any healthy piek can deal with such things. If you have a piekory which claims that kittens are fluffy, perhaps there's no harm done in shortcutting, though maybe there is, but if you pick up a piekory which claims that kittens are not fluffy, you have an unwhole piek on your hands. Normally it could figure out kittens are fluffy, but now it's saddled with a bad piekory which inhibits its proper potential and so it's no longer whole.

Clearly, piekories which make claims carry an automatic risk of being bad... but does it only depend on if the claim is true or not? It's time to use your piek. What can happen if you have a piekory that claims kittens are fluffy, as opposed to, say, a piekory that only says "it is important to act as if kittens are fluffy until the piek figures out the truth about kittens"? On the surface, either one leads to acting as if kittens are fluffy, but the first one has additional pitfalls, especially if it's a self-sustaining piekory.

Just like you could imagine extra clauses tacked on to the redhead's bad piekory, self-sustaining piekories will add extra clauses to 'good' claims as well, if they come into question. The piekory doesn't care if its claims are true, it cares that they are adhered to. So, perhaps when the position of kitten fluff is challenged, someone fills in the defense "kittens are fluffy... because puppies are not fluffy!" Just like with the bad case, the justification doesn't have to be relevant or true or even verifiable... piekories don't have such constraints. Sometimes, a justification gets knocked down, but that just leads to replacement: "Kittens are fluffy... because puppies are ugly!". That's no improvement. Other times, the piekory-necessitated truth of the claim bleeds over onto the justification, and that's even worse, because the 'not-immediately-bad' piekory "kittens are fluffy" suddenly mutates into the bad piekory that bundles together "kittens are fluffy" and "puppies are ugly".

In short, piekories that make claims about truth are either bad, at risk of going bad, or, at best, unnecessary. That last would be the case where someone's piek has already worked out both that kittens are fluffy, as well as why it is that they're fluffy, before the piekory comes along.

But, wait... could it be argued that the risk of a truth-claim piekory going bad is worth taking when it's a really important matter of the piek that someone might take a long time to get to, if they ever get there? I can imagine such an argument, but I can't see it getting very far when there's a piekory that doesn't make a truth claim yet accomplishes the same good results: "it is important to act as if kittens are fluffy until the piek figures out the truth about kittens." The resulting actions are the same, but now the accompanying responsibility is to figure out what the truth actually is, and not to conjure up potentially unwholesome justifications for what the piekory says has to be the truth.

Piekories that make claims about what's true may not all be bad in the sense of inducing an unwhole piek, but unless they're wasteful (as in redundant or pointless) they at least carry the heavy risk of going bad.

Outside the realm of truth-claim piekories, though, there's more than just bad and nearly-bad. "It is important to be careful of self-sustaining piekories" would be a downright good bit to have in a piekory, as long as it wasn't bundled with self-sustaining bad company. "It is important to avoid truth-claim piekories" is another example. A bundle with "It is important not to steal as long as the piek isn't ready to figure out when it's right to steal", "It is important to develop the piek to the point where it can figure out when it's right to steal", "It is important to lodge this piekory into the pieks of children", and "It is important to retain this piekory until the piek is sufficiently developed" may not be perfectly formed, but it gives an example of a direction in which good piekories can go. There are safeguards against accidentally causing an unwhole piek, prompts to develop the piek to the point where the piekory becomes obsolete, the ability to gracefully leave once it is obsolete, yet still enough self-sustainability, both intra and extrapersonal, to hold on while it's a good thing. True, if someone develops their piek to a point where they realize there'd be a better stealing-rule-of-thumb piekory for people to begin with, they'd have to deal with children already fixed on this piekory while helping other adults develop their own pieks to a similarly competent point before they could successfully get the new piekory rolling, but even if that would be difficult, at least it's still possible.

By contrast, "It is important not to steal" bundled with "It is important to keep this piekory" and "It is important to give this piekory to children" would just be bad. What, though, characterizes a piekory that is 'good', beyond just an example? There's a couple things. First, just as a bad piekory limits a piek's potential, a good one should encourage realizing that potential. Some caution is necessary, though, to make sure part of the potential isn't realized at the cost of the whole potential (imagine a body builder with a bulging right shoulder and everything else atrophied from neglect), as that would effectively be delivering an unwhole piek: i.e. bad. Second, once the piek does develop to the point where the piekory isn't necessary, it shouldn't look back and say "Wow, that was all wrong." It's unfair to expect a pikeory to be able to completely stand in for a piek ("Wow, that was all perfect!" is asking too much) but to be good, a piekory should at least provide a reasonable approximation of what a whole piek could come up with if it had outgrown the piekory.

For those familiar with the preposterously complicated dynamics that can develop with no more than the introduction of the self-referential word 'this', skipping a paragraph or two at this point is fine unless you want to hear more of the same. If, on the other hand, 'this' doesn't strike you as a word fraught with tanglesome potential and confounding danger, read on. And I'll try to keep the language a bit more reasonable, really.

We've already seen that piekories can be self-preserving (keep this piekory), self-reproducing (give this to children), and are subject to mutation (puppies!). With so many properties of 'living things', a good next question is: "How do they get along together?" A necessary first point is that not all piekories lodge in a piek equally. Imagine, for example, someone with a weak, unskilled piek... someone likely to rely on the urgings of the piekories (at least for now) to decide matters of the piek. They probably have a piekory that says "It is important to not hurt human animals", and let's imagine they also have one that says "It's important to not hurt nonhuman animals." What happens when this person has to choose between hurting a human and a seal? That depends on which piekory is more firmly lodged in their piek. Someone in the National Rifle Association could pick one way without much hesitation, someone from Greenpeace picks the other way without hesitation, and a starving vegan might be anywhere in between. The two piekories are lodged in such people's pieks in very different degrees. That's an important point.

One may ask: "Can different things bundled in one piekory be lodged to differing degrees?" Yes and no. No, in the sense that a piekory is a package, and the whole thing gets lightly lodged, or the whole thing gets heavily lodged, but unless it breaks up into seperate piekories, the things in the package don't get more or less embedded than each other. Yes, in the sense that conflicts can arise even within a piekory (imagine a piekory that bundles both of the above non-hurt-animals positions, in the same situation). Such conflicts can lead to a piekory breaking its bundle up into seperately lodged piekories, or to a mutation that is self-ranking: "don't hurt humans", "don't hurt nonhumans", "it is more important to not hurt humans than to not hurt nonhumans". In both cases, there's an effect similar to different-degree lodging, but in one case it's multiple piekories, and in the other it's degree of lodging and then internal tiebreaking.

One may then ask "I thought piekories said 'it is important'... saying 'it is more important' isn't quite the same, what gives?" Nothing unfamiliar, actually, just a truth-claim in disguise. "It is important to believe that this is more important than that" just doesn't roll off the keyboard. Kudos for catching it, though, and feel free to speculate on if a piekory whose parts come into conflict eonugh to require becoming a truth-claim piekory is intrinsically flawed or just a necessary evil.

One may further ask "Well, is it intrinsically flawed, or is it just a necessary evil?", but I'd like to get back to piekories interacting with each other, not just themselves, so think about it and then post a comment.

As far as how piekories get along with each other, the first impression is that it's a jungle out there. The teeth of "It is important to unlodge piekories that threaten this one" try to penetrate the hide of "It is important to keep this one", the quicksand of "It is important not to let keep-me piekories lodge deeply unless they play well with me" traps unwary newcomers, occasional fires of iconoclastic "unlodge all piekories!" or "down with deeply-lodged piekories!" can sweep away huge swaths at once, grudge matches of "truth-claim: everything claimed by that other piekory is a lie, especially its truth-claim that everything in this one is a lie" can pop up again and again. Venom and antivenom may come together when one claims that something is important and another claims it is not important. A piekory may split into seperate, but perhaps mutually supporting, piekories. Some piekories may find they work well together and merge into one piekory with more consistent lodging power. A new piekory could try to cling to an established one until they merged. Whether by backward-justifying illogic, the choice between changing and ceasing to persist, or even a payload including "It is important to modify this piekory periodically", mutations can spring up.

It would be overambitious and tempting wrongness to say that just because piekories can be pretty well described with ideas that properly apply to humans, that they're alive and think and have desires and intent. Perhaps all it takes to be willful (sometimes maliciously, sometimes benevolently) spirits afflicting someone's piek is to be a set of abstract claims about what's important, since that's all it takes to get behavior that bears some resemblance to such spirits- but perhaps more is needed to really merit extending the idea of intelligence, and piekories don't have anything more.

So, quick summary before moving on to the third part of the title. All whole pieks have the same potential to discern verifiable (or pattern-based, or non-revelatory) truth. Pieks have different 'strength' or 'skill' in performing such discernments, and these can be improved or degraded. While all whole pieks have the same potential, their present abilities are limited by that 'strength' or 'skill'. Pieks with less than their full potential are unwhole, a condition which can result from physical causes (brain damage, chemical abuse) or from having "bad" piekories lodged in the piek. Piekories are changeable bundles of assertions concerning what is or isn't important, and each piekory can be lodged in the piek to a different degree, which affects how effectively its assertion is followed. Not quite the opposite of bad ones, "Good" piekories are those which both lead toward increasing strength/skill of the piek and also, while a piek is not able to use its full potential, provide impulses which approximate the discernments of a piek which can use its full potential.

To tie in to earlier terms, sahts are big piekories (big in the sense of bundling up a whole lot of stuff) and the sati is a part of the piek. Specifically, that part which deals with the truths relevant to the groups one is a part of.

So, finally, on to your emps. Don't be mislead by the trailing s, it's an emps, singular. As a first approximation, an emps is someone's collection of changeable automatic responses. I'll generally speak of both 'the emps', to refer to any emps posessed by a physically healthy person with a whole piek, or specify some particular person's emps when it may be operating in a less than ideal situation.

When you stub your toe and yelp out your favorite toe-stubbing expletive, that's your emps at work. When you stub your toe and catch your breath to avoid yelping out any such expletives, that's your emps at work. When you stub your toe and have no reaction aside from your mind rapidly gearing up to decide what's an appropriate response, the reaction is your emps at work, but the end result is not determined by your emps. Whether those responses lead to more automatic responses or put in a call for conscious choices and intervention isn't important; they're still responses, and are still supplied by the emps.

More examples: When you're in a foul mood and someone smiles, glowering at them is the work of your emps. Then again, having your mood become less foul, smiling back, asking them what they think is so funny, or being inspired to write your fifty-second poem about contrasting moods, would all also be the work of your emps. When someone throws a punch at you, it's your emps that decides if (and how) you turn the other cheek, fight back, or run away. Your emps may also lead you to snap off a witty retort like "Oh yeah?", but as many people can attest when they think of what they really should have said an hour later, an emps isn't up to the task of coming up with anything really new on the spot.

It might seem like some people don't react at all, but go straight to thinking about what they should do, what's right to do, without passing through a potentially inappropriate reaction. That, however, is still the emps at work, supplying the frequently helpful reaction of "Engage brain, disengage emps!" Similarly, someone known for being 'cold' or 'emotionless' might be given a perfectly lovely gift and stare at it blankly for a bit before happily thanking the donor, because their emps is supplying the not so helpful reaction of "Engage brain, disengage emps!".

While it's possible to use your emps more or less extensively, it can't be avoided altogether. At one extreme, some folks like to 'go with the flow', 'act natural', or be 'spontaneous', letting their brain run on idle and just reacting to as much as possible, while at the other someone may have an emps which supplies one and only one reaction (engage brain, disengage emps), but it still has to keep supplying that reaction. The emps can be very lightly used, but it can't be avoided altogether.

But emps aren't just reactions, they're changeable ones. Look at anyone whose 'social skills' (which involve a lot of reactions) have improved, or anyone who has learned to drive (there's a whole slew of reactions that have to become automatic there) or developed a skill to the point where it becomes 'second nature', or picked up a bad habit, or managed to develop a good habit. Through some process, the constitution of their emps has changed, as evidenced by them developing different reactions.

It is unfortunately comfortable for many people to believe that their emps encompasses many fewer reactions than it actually does. "I can't help it, that's just who I am", "It's a natural reaction I can't do anything about", "It's just human nature, and I'm a human" are common symptoms of underestimating the scope of one's emps. Pick any allegedly unchangeable reaction, and there's probably some firewalking, cold-defying, unflinching yogi out there who has demonstrated it's not unchangeable. While it's true that the emps doesn't encompass all reactions (demise, for example, is not a flexible reaction to decapitation), it is very much not safe to assume that "never having seen anyone change that reaction" is sufficient grounds to conclude that the reaction isn't actually changeable, and thus in the domain of the emps.

Then again, just because some reaction is in the emps does not mean it's at all easy to change, or even that a particular person is equipped to make the change. One immediate reason is that having an unwhole piek can effectively reduce that person's emps. If someone is afflicted with piekories that lead them to firmly believe they are incapable of reacting to Mondays with anything but grumpy glumness, their reaction to Mondays gets evicted from their emps, since it's no longer able to change. Physical causes can also intrude on the domain of the emps, making reactions available to a healthy person inaccessible.

How, though, does one go about changing the reactions in one's emps, however full or restricted it is? Somehow, practice is able to figure into it: doing the same thing over and over, focusing on doing them in the desired manner, establishing and improving a pattern that can later be called up as an ingrained reaction rather than a deliberately constructed intentional act. Practice, though, isn't the fundamental source of change in an emps: though it could be said that bad habits are 'practiced' in a sense, they can get locked in without trying to establish them. Even more fun, it sounds like sports-science types are getting experimental validation for claims that mentally visualizing practice can have similar effects to really practicing, without ever going through the actual motions.

Essentially, the emps changes to reflect the state of the piek and its lodged piekories. Generally this change is not immediate, but follows a lag that can be influenced by such expedients as practice (or even mental 'practice'). If your piek concludes that a certain kind of reaction is worthwhile, or you have piekories that declare that it is important to react a certain way, than your emps will tend toward corresponding reactions. If it is a case of deeply lodged piekories, or a reaction that gets heavily practiced, the change may be far more rapid than if there are conflicting values among the piek and piekories or if the approved reaction gets poorly exercised.

When I say 'far more rapid', I do mean to include that the piek/piekories could potentially change their collaborative view on what constitutes the appropriate reaction to some stimulus many times, before any change is visible in the emps. Even though the emps reflects the state of the piek/piekories, it's not a responsive enough reflection that anyone's current piek/piekories can be judged by the state of their emps. The trained fighter of fifty years might have wholepiekedly embraced an utterly pacifistic stance, even if his emps continues to throw punches from time to time. Until sufficient time and practice have brought his emps in line with his piek and piekories, he'll be a true-and-honest pacifist, even though he's effectively trapped in a fighter's body.

The emps being a reflection of the piek/piekories (no matter how delayed) is also the cause of an unwhole piek yielding a reduced emps. If they relate at all to what actions are right, important, or appropriate, the unwholeness of a piek becomes reflected as a hole in the domain of the emps. In some cases, it might be a kind of 'partial hole', in that some very similar reactions might still be possible, even if not all reactions are possible. For example, someone whose piek is incapable of grasping that there might be an underlying similarity between humans with dark skin and humans with light skin might not be able to have reactions in their emps along the lines of "React the same way to whites as to blacks because they're fundamentally the same", but a partially compensating piekory might still lead them to "React the same way to whites as to blacks because doing otherwise isn't politically correct". Even though they are very much not the same reaction, for many intents and purposes they can be unnoticeably interchanged. Nonetheless, there is a hole in the domain of that emps, and being able to cover over the hole with something that is similar in many respects does not guarantee that the replacement is similar in all important respects.

So, short version, the emps is the collection of a person's changeable reactions, and, with varying amounts of time delay, it reflects the piek, including all its unwholeness and lodged piekories. Just as a whole piek in a healthy person has no more potential than any other whole piek in another healthy person, the potential scope of the emps of a healthy person with a whole piek does not depend on the particular person. Like the piek it reflects, the current scope of the emps does vary from person to person. One can't completely avoid using their emps, but (for good or bad) it is possible to have that appearance when the reactions in the emps amount to "Engage piek, disengage emps." And, finally, the singular of emps is emps, and the plural of emps is also emps.

Swallowing the implications

Fun fact: The 'big bang' theory has some significant non-secular history. Did Lemaître approach the issue as a scientist in search of truth or a priest in search of theistically supporting evidence? I don't know, and while I've got my suspicions, I haven't dug up evidence to confirm or refute them. I just think it's interesting that what may, possibly, have been a look-gods-must-exist attempt today ends up being denounced as godless 'just-theory' speculation.

That came to mind when I was thinking about the notion of 'Intelligent Design' recently. I'll admit that, to date, I haven't been presented with any arguments for ID that weren't laced with invalidating holes, so I've moved from a position of "I'm skeptical, but they claim to be doing things rigorously, so they deserve a fair hearing" to "I quort that people who profess adherence to ID will employ gaps in their reasoning." That is to say, I've become biased based on consistent experiences.

If you can't support a position without using swiss-cheesed arguments, though, how could such a position persist? Shouldn't it be shot down by now? The usual cynical replies aside, it seems there would need to be something propping up a desire to keep pushing the point.

"One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?" asked the Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. If you assume that everything was created by something intelligent, then you'd know that while your current argument has problems, they're problems with the argument, not the conclusion... since you know that the conclusion is true. I won't say much about the dishonesty intrinsic a position in which "even if there's a flawless proof that something is false, it maintains that there must be a proof that the thing is true because... well... you know it's true!" beyond that it's dishonest and that if you're going to posit a universe which is inherantly contradictory, there's really no point trying to talk about it.

So, why was ID bringing the background of Big Bang theory to mind? Well, while most ID arguments I've seen are strictly flawed, I'll admit there are just some that, so far, only have holes in them. Perhaps those holes will get well and properly filled in at some point in the future, and there'll be a flawless proof that, yes indeed, everything has a designer. I'll admit, I would find that tough to swallow, and would go over the argument very carefully, but it could happen, and I'm not the type to reject it just because I know it has to be wrong, even if it isn't.

I think, though, that most theists on the planet would find it a lot tougher to swallow than I would. I expect that if people who really care about rigorous arguments start trying to make the case for ID work, it'll start to fall into the poor graces enjoyed by Evolution, Big Bang, and much of science in general. Not, however, because it would be more evidence that deities aren't necessary, but rather that it'd make mono (or even finite poly)-theism a much less tenable position.

I'm not about to go trying to lay out a rigorous argument for ID, but I'll outline why I think it'd be potentially terrifying for a lot of major religions.

Essentially, self-causality is either possible, or it's not. For an ID argument to be solid, one thing it needs to do is rule out the possibility of self-causality, since otherwise the universe could have no creator but itself, and I think that runs contrary to the point of most ID arguments. So, suppose it can be established that self-causality isn't an option. The universe, then, must certainly have a (designing) cause, which presumably is also established to be intelligent. And, self-causality not being an option you know three things: The 'designer' has a cause, that cause isn't itself, and that cause isn't the universe (this third item rests on the assumption that causation is transitive: If A causes B, and B causes C, then A can also be said to cause C). The designer's designer, similarly, has a designer (which isn't itself). In particular, there can be no ultimate designer (or 'first cause') since self-causality has been ruled out. Without the option for self-causation, the minimum count of designers designing designers is infinite, and there's no topmost one.

I imagine that accepting that gods exist at all (and that there are infinitely many of them) wouldn't be nearly as rough on me as accepting that your ultimate, highest, unsurpassed god is, necessarily, practically at the very bottom of an unending chain... far closer to you than to most designers. You don't even have the option of getting a better designer way higher up the chain, because no matter how far up you go, you're still talking about a designer who's practically at the very bottom and far closer to you than to most of the other designers.

On the one hand: "Woha, well, I guess there are gods." On the other hand: "My god is pitifully trivial and, in the grand scheme of things, infinitely unimportant."

That's gotta be rough.

One objection I can see to my prediction is that it doesn't take into account that modern ID arguments tend to be much more probabilistic in nature, and wouldn't explicitly claim that self-causation is impossible, but rather that it's only sufficiently unlikely that you shouldn't buy it, at least when talking about things so irreducibly complex that certain probabilities fall below certain arbitrary thresholds. I can see this objection because I think it's entirely possible for more complicated things to arise from less complicated ones, so I can imagine 'designers' that are far less complex than their 'designs'. The requirement of 'intelligence', however, sets some lower bounds on the allowed complexity for designers, however, and that bound is still a good deal higher than, say, the complexity of your favorite beetle organ.

Basically, if an ID argument is strong enough to demonstrate that it's probabilistically ridiculous to imagine the observable world without an intelligent designer, the argument's going to be more than strong enough to show it's at least as ridiculous to imagine that such a designer isn't, in turn, designed. While such a probabilistic argument does allow someone to say "Yes, but at -this- level, you really do have self-causation", it would also show that the most justified level to assume self-causation is the one without any designers at all. It wouldn't be necessary to start believing in an infinite stack of designers, but it would be provably worse to believe in one than to believe in none.

And now for a mathematical digression. It would seem that I'm implying that a solid probabilistic ID argument says "Belief in none is silly, believe in one is more silly, belief in two is even more silly, and so forth... but belief in infinitely many is not silly." And, indeed, that is the implication. If that seems awkward to you, I'm not going to just say "Well, that's the kind of thing that happens when you start mucking outside the finite", even though it's true. I'm going to present a similarly ackward, but hopefully much more accessible, infinite-weirdness situation.

Think about the counting numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so forth. I'm going to define a sequence of sets to think about: The initial set, Set-1, is just {1}. One element, which is the number 'one'. The next set, Set-2, you get by adding in the two next larger elements, and taking away the smallest element. The next larger elements are one and two, and the smallest element is also the only one: zero. Thus, Set-2 is {2,3}. Set-3 is made in a similar fashion: Add the two next larger, remove the smallest, you get {3,4,5}. Set-4 works the same way, you get {4,5,6,7}. Set-5? {5,6,7,8,9}. By this point, you may have noticed that Set-N has N elements, which are {N,N+1,N+2,...,2N-1}. If so, well done. If not, it really does work that way.

So, what happens when we go infinite? What's the set you get if you repeat this process infinitely many times? How bit is it?

Given how I led into this, you might guess correctly, but pretend you didn't have any hints or foreshadowing. People tend to see that at each step, the sets get bigger, so after infinitely many steps, you must have an infinitely large set, yeah? Alas, no. You end up with a completely empty set. Nobody home at all!

Seriously. I'm not joking. Just try to name even -one- number that would be in the final set. If there's infinitely many, there should be at least one, right? But 1 isn't in it, we kicked out 1 when we went to Set-2, and we never looked back. 39 isn't in there either... we kicked it out when we went to Set-40, and we never added it back in. Pick any number (call it X), and the sad truth is, X isn't in the set, because it got kicked out in the process of going to Set-(X+1).

A sequence of increasinly large sets, when you 'go out to infinity', leads you to a completely empty set. That's mucking about outside the finite, for you. Not so different from a sequence of increasingly improbable beliefs, when you 'go out to infinity', becoming the only probably belief.

So, honestly, I expect that the whole ID thing is going to go the way of the geocentric universe and the flat world (by which I don't mean 'becoming featured in Terry Pratchett's novels'). Still, if there really is enough truth behind the idea for something solid to be proved, I think it'll end up going the way of evolution and the big bang, in terms of being thoroughly unacceptable to many religious viewpoints.

"External Faith" - From the memoirs of KC

Superman had gone bad, they said. The gold heart of the man of steel had, as it were, tarnished and rusted beyond recognition. Gone were the good old days of elderly people being saved from oncoming busses and young planets being saved from oncoming asteroids, replaced by a Super-whirlwind of malicious violence. Countless bicycles were hopelessly heat-rayed in two. Ocean travel was reduced to ships randomly floating on the currents, embedded in their own super-chill-breath icebergs. Monuments and works of art, no matter how solidly built, ended up invariably toppled or twisted. Dinners around the world suffered from having messy super-speed bites taken out of the middle of every dish before getting to the table.

Not all hope was lost. The Kryptonite sales and manufacturing sectors were booming, and despite the impossibility of their existence, experts in Kryptonian psychology were doing very well for themselves going on Superman-survival lecture tours. And, of course, there was Niles Underbottom.

Niles, to put it bluntly, almost but not quite epitomized the term 'pathetic'. His spine was suitable for little more than making slime molds look like stiff-backed vertebrates, his smile was reminiscent of stale tuna dip, and the liveliest form of entertainment he could wrap his imagination around was blinking ten times per second, as opposed to his usual five times per second. While he did, of course, have redeeming qualities, the best one that anyone who knew him well could name was that he never left the toilet seat up.

Niles was not, by any stretch of the imagination, Superman's only target for malicious acts. He was, however, among the former superhero's favorites. It made the differences between Superman and the humans of Earth so pleasantly and abundantly clear, if nothing else. One of those differences, I suspect he reflected as he was once again stumbling away from the Man of Stee...er... Rust, was that Superman wouldn't have put up with the kind of treatment that...

But Niles' rare bouts of potential reflection were, inevitably, cut short by some nasty Super-act or another. As he went hurtling through the air, he may have started to reflect on that very fact, but probably cut himself short due to a rapidly evolving superstition concerning the correlation of "Niles Thinking" and "Bad Things Happening." Perhaps it was wise, because he narrowly missed a demonstration of the irregidity of his spine when compared to a brick wall, and only crashed through a plate glass window instead.

Apologizing profusely to everyone around, Niles staggered to his feet and, after more than doubling the damage he'd already done to the shop, managed to remain upright.

It must be said, in Niles' defense, that one item in the shop had very legitimately caught his attention. In those bad days, everyone was familiar with a few points of hope. The name 'Lex Luthor', for example, a bright beacon in the Super-night. The usually-green shine of Kryptonite, for another. And, of course, the fusion of the two: The Kryptonite-powered super suit that Lex was developing in his ongoing battle to stem the worst of the Super-problems. Anyone would have staggered a bit had they, like Niles, seen Lex's suit there before them.

Niles had, most likely, had it with being tormented by Superman. He'd also known there wasn't a thing he could do about it because even if he weren't, as he knew all too well, painfully pathetic, he was still only human. Even if he got up the nerve to, ever so politely ask Superman not to be quite so mean, he couldn't put any weight behind the request... at least, none that'd be noticed.

Niles hadn't had Lex's Super Suit, though, and as he pulled the outfit on, I bet he permitted himself the luxury of a little reflection. Just enough to think about how Lex had made the suit to practically operate on its own. Something reminiscent of stale tuna dip spread slowly across his face. All he had to do was whatever the suit made him do, and that couldn't be any harder than doing whatever Superman had made him do. Like flying across the street, with the greatest of ease, into a window.

Later that day, while gleefully terrorizing some senior citizens, a look of Super-suprise spread across Superman's face when he saw Niles headed his way. It might have been because Niles was sauntering, which would strike most people as only a little less strange than a disco-dancing tarantula. It might have been because Niles wasn't stumbling /away/, which was the only direction he ever moved, as far as Superman was concerned. It might have been something else.

Undaunted by Superman's unusual expression, Niles continued to saunter up. He greeted Superman casually, explained in no uncertain terms that he was not going to put up with being bullied anymore, then jabbed a finger into the legendary red-and-yellow S to make it clear to whom he was speaking.

Naturally, Superman toppled over like a board.

The former Man of Steel was, to put it mildly, unaccustomed to such treatment, and quickly got to his feet with the look of someone who's about to transition from mild Super-bullying to more serious Super-malice. A number of the reporters who recklessly trailed Superman and his 'antics' commented rather gleefully on this point. While, that day, their thirst for seeing an obviously superior opponent thoroughly trounce an inferior patsy was not satisfied, they did capture some impressive footage of Superman taking a lot more than he dished out, not to mention some never-before-seen Super facial expressions.

The details of the fight really aren't important to anyone who doesn't collect comic books, but the results were clear. Superman was given the two classic choice of 'shape up' or 'ship out', and Niles didn't relent until it was clear that "None of the above" wasn't one of the options.

Truth be told, Superman did manage to choose something not on Niles' list, because while he's not a Super-genius, he's still a pretty darn clever Kryptonian, and he stuck around without doing the shaping up he'd claimed was his plan. It had, of course, become clear that with Lex's suit, Niles was more than a match for Superman, but everyone also knew that nobody, unaided, could really even contemplate taking on the former superhero. So, with some plotting and some scheming, Superman saw to it that somehow (nobody ever figured out how, what with the human-impregnable and kryptonite-laced security system), one night, a very convincing fake suit was substituted for the one Niles had worn.

It was sad. Niles didn't even realize the swap had been made until some tipped-off reporters stormed the now well-known door of the man who could keep Superman at bay. With scientists in tow, they revealed that the tip was right: Niles was now the proud owner of a rather convincingly painted foam rubber and ceramic suit.

These days, things are back to normal. That brief span when Niles kept the peace still linger on fondly in people's memory, but the world has become accustomed to investing in Kryptonite doorknobs and lead-lined underwear, and that's the best they can do against the ongoing level of Super-meyhem. Without the likes of the suit, there's really nothing more they can do.

Of course, the nastiest piece of Super-mischief is the thing I never told anyone. They all still wonder how I swapped out the suits, so they'll never realize that all I had to do was call the media and tell the truth of the matter. Of course, if somehow they do figure out that's all I did, I really will have to ship out, because man oh man, if they realize that Niles Underbottom, of all people, didn't need anything special to whup me...

To quort or not to quort?

Time for a new verb: quort.

You know that random person walking down the street? The one that you don't have an idea whether they like the same foods as you do? You shouldn't quort their judgement about what foods you'd like. Your mother, on the other hand... well, you probably should quort her judgement about what you'll like (or, at least, what you'll like if your preferences haven't changed since you were ten), even if you may not quort that she'll actually give you things you like. If the stuff you like isn't healthy, and she's big into healthy food, you should quort that she'll give you things you don't like. If you like healthy stuff and so does she (and you have the same idea of what healthy actually is), you'd quort that she'll give you things that you like. If she cooks by the method of "pick a recipe at random", then unless you like everything, you shouldn't quort that she'll make something you like, nor should you quort that she'll make something you don't like.

But enough about food. At least until lunchtime rolls around. I quort that when I push the power button on a computer (that's plugged in) something will happen. I quort that if a computer is running a Microsoft operating system, I will have to reboot it sooner rather than later. I quort that Apple products will generally be on the expensive side. I quort that when I drop a bowling ball on my foot, it will hurt, but I do not quort that anything dropped on my foot will hurt. Indeed, I quort that when I drop a pillow on my foot, it will not hurt.

Now, to get personal again. If someone consistently lies to me, I do not quort that they will tell me the truth, and I do quort that what they tell me won't be true. If someone randomly lies to me, I neither quort that they'll tell me the truth or that they'll lie to me. If someone consistently avoids lies, I'd quort that they'll tell me the truth, and I'd quort that they wouldn't lie to me. As such, if I were to say that I quorted someone, it would be wise to ask "how so?", both because you might have thought I said I had courted them, and because you wouldn't know if I quorted that they would remember my birthday or if I quorted that they would steal anything that wasn't bolted down.

Time for a first attempt at a definition.

To quort that X will Y: To believe that one understands X well enough to, with reasonable accuracy, predict that X will do Y.

Or, more generally (and less usefully)

To quort: To believe that one understands some situation enough to predict how it will evolve with reasonable accuracy, with respect to some particular aspect.

Expressing that one quorts, without (contextually or explicitly) specifying the situation and the aspect, isn't very informative. "I don't quort Joe" would, in most cases, be false, because just about everyone does understand other people enough to accurately predict that they'll breathe air, and I think it's safe to say most people believe they have this basic understanding. So, in most cases, "I quort [insert identifier here]" is automatically true: if nothing else, you believe you understand something enough to predict that it can be identified the way you did. A spade, as it were, will tend to be a spade. Beyond that basic level, there's the whole breathing thing: almost everyone quorts almost everyone else, because there's some particular aspect (breathing) which is quite predictable.

To quort a particular aspect of a person's or object's behavior, however, is appropriate to the verb. If someone asks you if you and your significant other want to come over for dinner that night, barring unknown schedule conflicts, chances are good that you quort that your SO would want to (or not want to, as appropriate).

So, as with communication in general, I hope that you now quort that what I'm talking about is the same thing you're thinking of as quort.

A pair of bulls

Two bulls once met across a fence.

The first bull said to the second "Where are you from?", to which the second replied "Outside your fence. How about you?"

The first bull answered "Oh, I also came from outside the fence, but I found life to be better here. Indeed, I tried living within many different fences, but they all left me hungry. The farmers would give me shredded paper, or tofu, or elbow macaroni, or ground up cows with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, but none of these sated my hunger. Our Farmer, though, he feeds us grain and water and salt. You could join us, if you like."

The second bull looked over the fence at the herd, and nodded. "I can see that you are well fed and healthy. I can see a certain appeal to joining. I must know, though: why didn't you just go out of the other farmers fences and eat the food nature provided you with, though? I've found it to be quite nourishing."

The first bull looked at the second. "I can see that you are healthy as well, and you are lucky indeed. All truly nourishing food comes from Our Farmer, and so you must have been milling around near a place he left food out. He's not unkind, you see, and so doesn't only feed those of us in his fence. It must be scary, though, having no reliable source of food."

"No reliable source of food?" asked the second bull, confused, "I get my food from the same source your Farmer does, from the ground itself. Without the middleman, my source is at least as reliable as yours."

"While, yes, there is some food to be had from the ground," rejoined the first bull, "the food of Our Farmer is better. You see, he's where grains come from, and corn, and apples. You can't get those from the ground. I'll be the first to admit you are doing very well on your ground-food diet, but there are two big problems. One is that the ground can't supply the most important things, so you'll never be completely nourished, and the other is that you can't rely on the ground to only give you good food, so you'll end up eating bad things."

"That's what I have a sense of smell and of taste for," said the second bull, "and a memory. I can figure out which things from the ground are good and which are bad. Grains, for instance. I found some, growing in the ground, far from here, and I can tell they're good food. Your Farmer doesn't have the monopoly on grains. You certainly look like you're fed on grains, but your Farmer's got to get them somewhere, and it's the ground."

"Of course, your senses are good to have, but they're not enough," pointed out the first bull. "Even if grains did grow in the ground... which they don't... your senses weren't enough to tell that they're good. That's why it's important to be in Our Farmer's field. He knows what's good for us, even when our senses don't. He tells us what is good to eat and what is bad, and he gives us the good things to eat. Simple as that. All we have to do is digest them... which isn't always easy..."

"Well yes, naturally it's not easy." interjected the second bull, "If it didn't take any effort to digest the food, it would all slide out the other end with no benefit gained..."

"But we aren't reduced to relying on our senses. Granted, you can use your senses to tell that we've got something good going on here, that's how I decided to join the herd. I could tell that there was something special about Our Farmer's food..."

"But there's nothing special about your Farmer's food!" objected the second bull. "There's something special about your food, but not because it comes from your Farmer. If your Farmer were replaced by a mechanical bull, grains and corn and apples would still be good food, it would still come from the ground, and it would still be the right food for the likes of you and me. The food, yes, that's special, but getting all worked up about it being tied to your Farmer is not only unnecessary, but could lead you to make mistakes. You'd be better off learning, yourself, how to tell good food from bad and how to find the good food where it grows in the ground."

"But, you see, we already can tell good food from bad: the food Our Farmer gives us is good, and anything else is at risk of being bad. And we already can find the good food where it comes from: it comes from Our Farmer."

"You can't see that your Farmer is a fallible middleman between the source of proper food and yourself, you don't believe that complete nutrition can be derived from the actual source of all nutrition, and you want me to join you?" queried the second bull.

"I can't see why you wouldn't want to. I see that you can tell that our food is good. We have a nice big herd, too. You don't seem to be in a herd. Aren't you lonely? If you had calves, would you want them to be lonely and underfed?"

"Until you realize that there are more important, more fundamental things than your Farmer and are able to discern them with your own eyes, I cannot be a member of your herd. If I had calves, it would be wrong to raise them among closed eyes, even if they were well fed and never lonely, for it would be far too easy for them to never learn to open their own eyes, thinking they have food and friends and that truth is only of secondary importance."

"But," protested the first bull, "Having Our Farmer's food and being in the fence really is what matters..."

"Just so," lamented the second bull, "just so."

The Saht

What is a Saht?

Every living thing has at least two Sahts, and each one may have a varying strength. The combination of all of a person's Sahts, taking their strength into consideration, is their Sati.

A being has a Saht for each group of which it is a member. All beings have at least two Sahts because they are members of the community of life, and the community of themselves. A creature in a pack, tribe, nation, community, team, or any other group also has a Saht associated with each such group.

The strength of a Saht is determined by the group it is associated with, the person in whom it resides, and the power of the group over the when the Saht is given. A Saht given to an adult by a club may be very weak unless the adult values the club highly. A Saht given to a child by a community may be so strong as to seem unarguable. A Saht given to a being by power of being a link in the community of life is, in almost all regards, indistinguishable from instinct.

The nature of a Saht is to seek the continuance of the group it is associated with. Every action taken, every choice made, is passed to a person's Sati for review, and their Sati judges it: Disruptive, Irrelevant, or Fostering.

Any group which cannot establish a strong Saht for itself in its members is doomed. Though an action may be Disruptive to the group, a person's Sati may judge it Irrelevant or Fostering because, to the Sahts of other groups in the person, it is so, and those Sahts are stronger.

Any group which cannot establish an accurate Saht for itself in its members is also doomed. Though an action may be Disruptive to the group, their relevant Saht may falsely judge it Irrelevant or Fostering, for lack of foresight. An accurate Saht is one which can reliably decide if an action truly is Disruptive, Fostering, or Irrelevant to its group.

The community of life has long endured, and must, thereby, have the capacity to instill a strong and accurate Saht in most of its members. As the community of life communicates not in words but with inborn instincts, most living things have, in their Sati, a strong voice that speaks in favor of the community of life.

Similarly, any species that has endured, must also give its members a strong Saht. Strong enough, even, to be heard over the voice of the community of life's Saht if it is not in agreement, for the message of one Saht does nothing to benefit another where they are not in agreement.

Should a species give its members Sahts which are too strong and too much at odds with the community of life, however, then the Sahts of the community of life must call for the destruction of that species, or the community of life itself will become Disrupted and fall apart. As no species of life can survive if there is no life at all, the accuracy of a species' Sahts depends on not being too much at odds with those of the community of life.

Likewise, for any group whose existence is predicated on the existence of another group, the first group's Sahts must, to be accurate, reflect sufficiently the Sahts of the other group. This aspect of accuracy may also be called compatibility. This is relevant both to a smaller group which is part of a larger group, and thus dies if the larger group dies, as well as to a larger group composed of smaller groups, which falls apart if its members do not hold together.

Thus, each Saht of an enduring group reflects and strengthens the Sahts of each group upon which it depends, and thus a person's Sati may often seem to speak with an unambiguous, incontrovertible voice: A judgement made on behalf of the community of life, on behalf of the species, on behalf of the nation, on behalf of the community, and on behalf of the individual, that is a judgement whose voice would seem impossible to deny as obvious.

Given long stretches of time in which different groups, through the effects of their Sahts on their members, can compete both against each other and against their own structure, the natural order is for those Sahts which are strong, accurate, and compatible to survive and be passed on, while those which are weak or inaccurate (especially due to incompatibility) are either abandoned by their group, or die with their group.

The great enemy of strong, accurate Sahts is rapid change of groups or their environments. Each Saht is a product of the environment of the group it is associated with, and should the nature of the group or its environment change too rapidly, the Saht may become unequipped to be accurate any longer, and the group will be doomed unless it takes up a new Saht. In an environment of rapid change, however, a hastily adopted Saht may have little time to be tested and proved before becoming itself irretrievably inaccurate and abandoned.

In particular, the Sahts which arise in a rapidly fluctuating collection of groups may never feel the pressure to reflect the Sahts upon which they depend - the effect of the changing playing field is more urgent than the gradual requirements of enduring existence. Subjected to rapid change, Sahts are forced to be nimbly accurate for the short term, under a wide array of possible conditions, rather than enduringly accurate in the long term for a stable set of conditions.

Such Sahts are not truly accurate. They can only hope that the next step taken will be Fostering... or at least Irrelevant... and not Disruptive. Not every upward slope leads to a high mountain peak, however, and only looking a step ahead, such Sahts only achieve accuracy by coincidence. In particular, there is no reason to hope they are even compatible.

It is, it seems, the peculiar misfortune of humanity to be able to not only change its environment and groupings rapidly, but to be able to do so at an ever increasing rate. While this can throw confusion to the Sahts of other species, requiring them to adapt the enduring old ways or risk ceasing to have any way at all, it afflicts humans with a bewildering array of Sahts urging their Sati in conflicting directions.

At a deep level, there are still the Sahts of the species and of the community of life, voicing commands that are often dubbed 'conscience' or 'innate knowledge of good and evil': Do not weaken your group by killing its members, do not endanger yourself by eating flesh whose maladies you could acquire, do not treat others in ways you would not wish to be treated, do not weaken your group by denying aid to those who need it when you have aid to spare. Being the deepest-seated of Sahts, these judgments are almost impossible to completely avoid hearing.

At the same time, however, the human gift for language allows for a rapid spreading of Sahts by word that far outpaces the spread by genes. As rapidly as groups and conditions shift, inaccurate new Sahts can be spread down through generations, modified to be more versatile while less accurate, spread to another generation, modified again, and spread even to members of the current generation, without having to so much as be present from childhood anymore to truly take effect.

While the presence of the deep, accurate Sahts remains strong... as it necessarily will do, given how slowly it is able to change... the new, inaccurate, language-communicated Sahts becomes ever stronger as well. How could it not, given that the only ways to dethrone a Saht are to eliminate its group or replace it with a stronger successor? This encroaching doom, in the form of the increasing inability of human's Satis to make accurate judgments concerning the long-term Fostering of any group, is, as they say, the bad news.

The good news is twofold. First, humans have at their disposal imagination, forethought, logical prediction, and generally the ability to understand the potential results of events without the events needing to occur. In an actual field where natural, long-term competition between Sahts breaks down and yields self-destructive victors, humans have the potential to extend the field of competition into the realm of the possible, where Sahts could again be weighed against each other based on their accuracy. Second, the deep, accurate Sahts have not yet vanished from the Satis of humans and, thanks to the rapidity with which humans can change, they may remain accessible for much longer than we would need to re-establish accurate... and so by necessity compatible... Sahts.

The bad news, however, is also twofold. The encroachment of inaccurate Sahts is the first part. The second is that the good news only speaks of potential, not of inevitability, and to realize that potential may require an almost unimaginable amount of work, energy, and dedication. It is not enough to learn to listen carefully to the deep, accurate Sahts that speak of how the community of life can survive, or how the species of human could once survive. Such listening is, without a doubt, a very difficult, taxing, and most of all important first step, but it is no more than a first step.... for it does not reveal the other Sahts which are necessary for sustaining any part of humanity... only the species as a whole, it only shows how those other Sahts must be compatible.

The task ahead is to equip people with complete Sati, not merely ones which have some accurate and overwhelmingly strong Sahts, but ones in which all the Sahts are balanced in strength and, in their accuracy, are all compatible. The chance of any one person being able to do this alone is low, but it need not be done alone. Some may have an ear well-tuned to their deep Sahts, others may have imaginations that can supply the potential fields of competition. Some may have the range of insight to see what Sahts would endure in the imagined fields, others may be skilled in the art of translating one person's vision into a picture that others can understand. Some may lack any of these tools, but may know what tools are needed and how to bring them together, while others may contribute 'simply' through care and maintenance of the tools of others.

The human capacity for rapid change, and the power of symbolic language to feed that change and the alteration of Sahts which accompanies it, has been an accidental tool we have used to set ourselves up for self-destruction. Like any tool, however, it is as much a blessing as a curse, as it provides the means to not only undo its previous work, but to go further and improve.

To those who dream: Share your dreams, for they may shed light on the future
To those who predict: Listen to the dreams of others, and see where they lead
To those who listen: Turn your ear to your conscience, and share what the deep Sahts understand.
To those who understand: Discover what tools you and others have, bring them together, and put them to use.
If we do not settle for an unwhole Sati... either by succumbing to the new inaccurate Sahts or submitting to the old partial ones... there is not simply the hope of restoration from our current depth, but the possibility of rising as far above as we are now sunk below.

Mission Statement

Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people.
In a similar regard, a blog will not, and cannot, change the world. It can, at least, be waved around threateningly, however.

By way of parables, essays, and the occasional diatribe, I aim to collect and correlate existing wisdom for my own benefit. To come to a better understanding myself, I will seek to form my presentations as if they were the benefit of others, and operate under the pretense that someone out there is listening.

While I have some hefty analytical tools at my disposal, I will seek to use discretion in my choice of weapons and avoid overkill when attacking an issue. While there are times when an industrial sandblaster may be the only reasonable tool for the job, it would be sad to turn away capable amateur diggers when no more is truly needed than a stout spade.