✈️Happy New Year

🎶Feel Good Friday

🎄

 

Saul Steinberg

📖The Meaning of Arithmetic

In the last years of the nineteenth century, a mathematician found an inconsistency in his new arithmetic of infinity. There was nothing else wrong with that arithmetic, and arithmetic is little but logic, so he seemed to have found a perfectly logical proof of a logical impossibility.

In the first year of the twentieth century, a younger but more influential mathematician and philosopher—Bertrand Russell—was thinking about that logical puzzle when he found another. His solution was a mathematical model of logic. Perhaps he thought that even if our evolution had left us without the ability to be perfectly logical, we could still have a scientific theory of logic. In any case, logicians have done a lot of mathematical modelling since then, and now, academic logic does look very scientific. But if scientists discovered something outlandish by thinking logically, would they blame logic?

Or does that nineteenth-century puzzle amount to a scientific proof of something outlandish?

Chapter 1 introduces that possibility.

Chapter 2 describes that logical puzzle.

Chapter 3 proves something outlandish.

Chapter 4 explains Russell’s logical puzzle.

That is the blurb for my 9,590-word book, The Meaning of Arithmetic (updated 23 April 2024)

🙏The Odyssey Theodicy

Why, if there is a God who created all things out of nothing, did God not just make good people, in a world in which only good things could happen to them? Maybe that is what God did.

Maybe God created a heavenly world in which a variety of good people were much closer to their creator than we are here. Wiser and better informed about creation than we are, might some of those people have wanted to spend some of their limitless time in a less heavenly world? There are various reasons why they might have.

If their creator was above and beyond creation, much as any story’s author is above and beyond that story, then there would, for example, be some sort of limit to the relationships that those people could have had with their creator in their heavenly home. It is hard to imagine such a limit; but I imagine that their creator would, for instance, have known about a lot of horrible possibilities (and associated virtues), possibilities that those people would not have dreamt of in their heavenly home. For some reason or other, those people might have thought that their relationships with God would improve if they spent a relatively small amount of time in a world in which their creator was even less evident.

Or maybe they thought that their relationships with each other would improve if they spent some time in a world like ours. From their heavenly perspective, it might have seemed like going camping. It might not have seemed like that once they were there, of course. But presumably a God could guarantee that they would all end up at least as well off as they had started. Maybe they reincarnate, for example, with some of their later incarnations being therapeutic. The fact that we cannot recall past lives does not tell against that possibility because we cannot even recall being born.

🎵Wishful thinking at dawn

🌺Consider the Lilies

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin

Flowers clearly are lazy, as Matthew 6:28 tells us.

Because they spend all day in bed (the flower bed).

🐶Nibi

❄️Spring jingles

✨How I wonder what you are