Dear Past Self,

I hope this letter finds you well. I know you have work to do, but I expect you'll be able to take the time out to read this - after all, I always have been easily distracted.

Now, I know that sometimes the world looks pretty grim: the everpresent threat of war, of famine, of disease, the knowledge always aching in the back of your mind that there are so many people who are so desperate, so helpless, and that you are helpless to change it. And that feeling never goes away, let me tell you. Life will always be a struggle: some of your fondest hopes will give way to crushing disappointment, and your dreams will succumb, as so many do, to cold, hard reality chipping away at them - slowly, but surely. Science will never cure death, and God will never speak to you and tell you your purpose, and no matter how many times you open your closet door, Narnia will never be on the other side.

But, it's always worth remembering: sometimes you get it right, even if just by accident. The right words in the right place, and opportunity strikes. The skill you spent so long acquiring suddenly becomes needed, or the publisher you spent so long courting decides to bite, or the girl you also spent so long courting... also decides to bite. If you get me.

And hey, things don't have to be easy to be fun. The hardest things you've ever done will inevitably be the best, and once every sixteen days, the ringrise on Titan is still the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. So go nuts. The world is always worth the effort.

Now get back to work, you slacker.

- Etarran

PS. July 14, 2027: Don't get out of bed. I mean it.

Back Into the Machine

One of the common tenets of monotheism is the love of God for his people. Setting aside questions of existence for the moment, I nevertheless have to wonder about this. After all, the assumption is never really explained. What makes us so sure God loves us? In fact, what makes us so sure God can love at all?

It is, of course, futile to try to understand the mind of God. His perceptions would be so far beyond and different from the merely human that even the words "beyond" and "different" imply too much of a connection and similarity to really have any meaning. Nevertheless, There are two things that we know for certain about God, two things which are contained in the definition of such a deity: omniscience and omnipotence.

Now, those are easy words to say, but hard to understand. What does that mean, exactly, if we try to break it down into pieces a human can understand? What is it like to know everything?

God can never know doubt. He must always and forever be convinced, with absolute certainty, of his rightness. In fact, rightness isn't even a concept that applies to God - existence supercedes morality.
God can never feel sorrow. He has no regrets, and not in the same way that people say they have no regrets, which is a sign of either arrogance or duplicity. God actually has no regrets, has never, in the entire history of his existence, done something wrong.
God can never question existence. If God believes he exists, he does. If God believes you exist, you do.
God can never suffer loss. Nothing can ever be out of his reach, nothing can ever be withheld from his grasp.
God can never be betrayed. Stories of Lucifer aside, omniscience precludes betrayal. Omnipotence makes enmity irrelevant. To be the enemy of God is more absurd and worthless than being the enemy of the colour blue. (More impossible than hating pie?)
God can never have respect for another.

Can you love someone who you cannot lose? Can you love someone who you know with certainty to exist? I don't think so. I don't think you can have love without the fear of loss, without the tiniest of doubts that it can be real. Love is one of many attempts by we, the lost, to hold back the darkness - and for God, there is no darkness. For God, there is no fear. God can never lose anyone, and so no one is worthy of his love.

I would say it seems lonely, such an existence, but of course that, too, is ridiculous. God can never be lonely, because perfection is self-contained. God has no needs or desires - in fact, is incapable of desiring anything.

But, if God has no desires, no need for anything outside of himself, must he not be deterministic? Operating according to a set of rules, layed down by himself, for all eternity? There is no room for randomness or chance or free will in a system of perfection. There is no room for humanity to intrude into Godhood. God has no need of love, because love is built on a foundation of poverty. Love is the wish for something you do not have, the desire to keep and hold that which you do, the need to raise up something else above yourself and make it greater than you could ever hope to be. None of this is possible for God.

Is God, then, nothing more than a great world-machine, a series of concentric crystal spheres, spinning in place from the beginning to the end of time - and after? Deus Machina, with nothing to disrupt the perfect, inevitable operation of its flawless mechanism?

Not nothing more, I think. Nothing less.

You Can Check Out Any Time You Like

One of my favorite short stories is "The Ultimate Melody" by Arthur C. Clarke, which can be found in Tales of the White Hart, if you go looking for it - which I highly recommend.

The premise is simple: There are some songs which stick in your mind, so insidiously and completely that you find yourself humming them for weeks, or even months. I myself have been known to sing Greensleeves or Girl in the shower, over and over again, because something about the songs sticks in my head in such a way that I can't get them out.

What is frightening about this, though, is that the song will, for a time, drive from your head all thoughts other than the song - it will make concentration impossible, it will leave you unable to carry on conversations or do work without being distracted. We've all experienced this, of course - when a song gets stuck so thoroughly in your head that it's all you can think of.

So why does this happen? Well, the premise espoused in the story is that the music we find compelling is just a reflection of the Ultimate Melody, a song which resonates perfectly with the human brain. Weird, maybe, but an interesting idea - and one that starts to seem more possible when you think about how songs break out, catch people's minds seemingly simultaneously and completely, and then die away again.

So what would happen if we could synthesize such a thing? All it would take is a computer running through lists of possible sounds, selecting for the combinations and melodies which humanity finds most catchy - and, given some time, the ultimate melody is within your grasp.

But of course, as ever, when reaching for the very top, mankind's hubris turns on us, and the scientist who creates the melody becomes an empty shell, his mind totally taken over by the strands and chords of the song to end all songs. After all, even a simple toon or ditty can erase thought from one's mind - the ultimate melody must have power vastly beyond such a thing.

But my question is - what would that be like? To hear the ultimate melody, and never to turn back; to give your mind over to the music of the heavens? It wouldn't be like death, exactly. More like transcendance.

And the answer? Yep. It would be worth it. I would do that.

Sexy Times

Though I hate to tread on the toes of the good doctor Hood, it is a movie that led me to this post.

You see, I saw Milk the other day - the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician in America - and it was excellent. Though it was undoubtedly an overly rose-coloured portrayal of the gay rights movement, it accomplishes what it sets out to do admirably. The story is compelling, and compellingly told, the acting is of extremely high quality (and believe me, I never say that about movies), and all in all, I would highly recommend it.

For one thing, it made me think.

I don't often talk or, for that matter, think, about sexual orientation or sexual freedom. Sure, I'll spend a lot of time on the nature of love, and the importance of sex personally and in society, but honestly, who it is you're having sex with and how many of them there are simply isn't terribly important to me, at least on a philosophical or political level. I have many militant-for-gay-and-polyamorous-rights friends, not to mention several friends who are themselves not of a purely vanilla sexual orientation, and, though it seems a little strange to say this, I've pretty much left the thinking and talking about such things to them.

This is also an awkward discussion to have for me, as one's perspective in the matter is so attendant on one's own sexual desires. Being male, straight, monogamous by strong preference, and without, insofar as I am aware, any interesting fetishes or sexual quirks - though my understanding is that you don't discover that you have these until you've tried them, so I suppose the possibility must always exist - I've always felt, in a way, that my perspective wasn't terribly useful to such a debate.

Then I realized that that was ridiculous. What was I thinking? There is no such thing as a useless perspective.

So I suppose that my opinion on the whole issue of sexual freedom and limitations on sexual desire is simply one of profound puzzlement. If someone enjoys different books than I do I might try to understand why their tastes differ from my own, I might even make fun of them, but I wouldn't try to prevent them from reading it. What possible reason would I have for doing that? Where, to put it bluntly, is the advantage to me?

Now, sex is a little trickier than novels, to be sure. It can be exploitative, violent, dangerous, and cruel. And those kinds of sex should obviously be prevented through law or social norms - but what you're preventing is not the sex, but the exploitation, the violence, the danger, and the cruelty. We have a vested interest in seeing people not hurt one another - it's against any kind of morality, and, on a more self-interested level, it's bad for society. Where is the interest in seeing people not fuck each other? As long as it doesn't infringe on others' ability to function in society, why the hell do we care?

If it does, that's another matter, naturally. I can understand why a church would not want to be forced by legislation to recognize gay marriage. After all, that's an internal matter of religion. I wouldn't ask them to recognize Buddha as their overlord, either. But in the vast, vast majority of cases, people's sexual orientation has nothing to do with anyone else.

Most people would say that gay rights are an issue because the gays have made it one - brought it into the public sphere. Some people would say this with anger, some with admiration, some with pride. But they're wrong. The people who made it an issue are the people who are trying to prevent others from doing what they want.

There are so many things worth caring about, worth fighting for, worth bleeding and hating and dying over. This really isn't one of them. I don't want to have to care about what someone likes in sex, or whether they like sex at all. Really, it's just not worth it. People just want to live their lives. Why should they have to fight for that?

It's Always Comforting

... to know that, no matter how many scandals and failed policy decisions and hopeless wars he has involved us in, our head of state remains the best in the world at dodging shoes. I can't say I'm sorry to see the end of your term approaching, President Bush, but damn, sir, you are a ninja.

A Long Awaited Journey

I have been meaning to do something like this for some time now, but only now have I gotten around to it. I am starting another blog.

The mandate of this blog is essentially "Etarran reflects on the universe in whatever way he sees fit," and that's all very well, to be sure. However, politics-philosophy-gaming-dinosaurs-metaphysics-physics-mathematics-literature-psychology-sociology-and-anything-else-that-strikes-my-fancy was beginning to be a bit too much to handle, and is, I feel, leeching focus from any of the individual issues that I discuss. Furthermore, the project I have in mind for the new space is somewhat more ambitious than can really fit in a blog dedicated to other things, and demands its own space.

So you can (mostly) scratch out the "gaming" section of the above list.

The Games Of Castles is intended to be a space for me to discuss games: gaming culture, gaming as a hobby, individual games that strike my interest. But, more than all this, it is intended to be a place where I can catalogue games: campaign logs, setting information, story and character and plot and background, all woven together into what is hopefully a cohesive and interesting whole. Roleplaying games, after all, are in many ways like writing a story - and what good is a story if you don't share it with anyone?

Mangling Defenseless Objects

Psychology is the study of human thought on an individual level. Sociology: thought on a cultural level. Philosophy: thought on a cosmic level.

The so-called "social sciences" begin and end with the study of human thought, in each situation and of each consideration to which it can be applied.

Sometimes, though, I think we have it wrong, we philosophers, we pretentious liberal-arts majors studying the Fundamental Truths of the Universe According to Dead Racists. Sometimes, I think the best way to examine human thought is with a math problem.

Here's an interesting one, which some of you may have encountered before. It's called the Mutilated Chessboard problem, which makes it both educational and hilarious.

Imagine a chessboard with two squares, each in an opposite corner, removed. Now, take 31 dominoes, each of which covers exactly two squares. Place them on the chessboard such that the dominoes cover all 62 squares, or explain why this is impossible.

Take a moment to try to come up with the answer before I tell it to you. It's an interesting little problem, and actually much harder than it looks.

....until you figure out the trick.

What is the fundamental property of a chessboard? 64 squares, alternating black and white, so that no two adjacent squares are of the same colour. Thus, the two squares removed when the chessboard was mutilated (ideally in some kind of horror-movie sequence involving a psychopathic grand master) must have been the same colour. However, any given domino must cover two differently-coloured squares, which means that the problem is impossible.

But that's not how most people would go about solving that problem, is it? I would guess that the vast majority of people, on being handed a chessboard, a knife, and 31 dominoes, would start by putting dominoes on the board and trying to see if some sort of pattern emerged. Humans are programmed to be experiential, rather than logical - in most cases, we prefer to touch, rather than think, to do, rather than see.

Maybe that's why people so freqently make obviously bad decisions. Sure, if you thought about it the right way, you'd know that the Xtreme stunt/questionable relationship decision/substance abuse isn't really the cleverest of ideas - not the optimal solution to the problem - but sometimes, you just have to spend an hour playing with dominoes before you figure it out.