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.