December 29, 2006

• For St. Thomas Becket’s Day

  Tools
  of Christ Church

  “For every kind of vampire,
  there is a kind of cross.”
  – Thomas Pynchon

  
  
  Click on picture for details.

  Today is the feast
  of St. Thomas Becket.

  In his honor, a meditation
  on tools and causation:

  “Lewis Wolpert, an eminent developmental biologist at University College London, has just published Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast,
  a pleasant, though rambling, look at the biological basis of belief.
  While the book focuses on our ability to form causal beliefs about
  everyday matters (the wind moved the trees, for example), it spends
  considerable time on the origins of religious and moral beliefs.
  Wolpert defends the unusual idea that causal thinking is an adaptation
  required for tool-making. Religious beliefs can thus be seen as an odd
  extension of causal thinking about technology to more mysterious
  matters. Only a species that can reason causally could assert that
  ‘this storm was sent by God because we sinned.’ While Wolpert’s
  attitude toward religion is tolerant, he’s an atheist who seems to find
  religion more puzzling than absorbing.”

  – Review by H. Allen Orr in
  The New York Review of Books,
  Vol. 54, No. 1, January 11, 2007    

  
  “An odd extension”–

  Wolpert’s title is, of course,
  from Lewis Carroll.

  
  Related material:

  “It’s a poor sort of memory
  that only works backwards.”
  – Through the Looking-Glass

  An event at the Kennedy Center
  broadcast on
  
  December 26, 2006
  (St. Steven’s Day):

  “Conductor John Williams, a 2004
  Honoree, says, ‘Steven, sharing our 34-year collaboration has been a
  great privilege for me. It’s been an inspiration to watch you dream
  your dreams, nurture them and make them grow. And, in the process,
  entertain and edify billions of people around the world. Tonight we’d
  like to salute you, musically, with a piece that expresses that spirit
  beautifully … It was written by Leonard Bernstein, a 1980 Kennedy
  Center Honoree who was, incidentally, the first composer to be
  performed in this hall.’ Backed by The United States Army Chorus and
  The Choral Arts Society, soprano Harolyn Blackwell and tenor Gregory
  Turay sing the closing number for Spielberg’s tribute and the gala
  itself. It’s the finale to the opera ‘Candide,’ ‘Make Our Garden Grow,’
  and Williams conducts.”

  – CBS press release

  See also the following,
  from the conclusion to

  
  “Mathematics and Narrative“

  
  (Log24, Aug. 22, 2005):

  

  “At times, bullshit can
  only be countered
     with superior bullshit.”
  — Norman Mailer

  Many Worlds and Possible Worlds in Literature and Art, in Wikipedia:

      “The concept of possible worlds dates back to at least Leibniz who in his Théodicée
  tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming
  that it is optimal among all possible worlds.  Voltaire satirized this
  view in his picaresque novel Candide….
      Borges’ seminal short story El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (“The Garden of Forking Paths“) is an early example of many worlds in fiction.”

  “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.“
  – Voltaire

  “We symbolize
  logical necessity
  with the box ()
  and logical possibility
  with the diamond ().”

  — Keith Allen Korcz 
  
  

  “The possibilia that exist,
  and out of which
  the Universe arose,
  are located in
       a necessary being….”

  — Michael Sudduth,
  Notes on
  God, Chance, and Necessity
  by Keith Ward,
   Regius Professor of Divinity,
    Christ Church College, Oxford
  (the home of Lewis Carroll)

  For further details,
  click on the
  Christ Church diamond.

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