House of Eratosthenes

There was this tragic-comedy movie awhile back about a baby born into a pretend-world, filled with actors, and he grows up into a man never realizing his entire life is a television drama. Hollywood does love their existential bullshit, and every now and then they put out something that makes you think. This one has a climactic scene in which the star, Truman, having put all the clues together, takes it upon himself to sail out on the open sea. Sure enough, he meets up with the wall of the dome that contains his pretend-world. And he starts pounding on it in a mixture of fear, realization, confusion, and God knows what else I suppose.

It is a masterful scene. It speaks to all of us who have watched and enjoyed fiction, and asked just a few too many questions about it. And it also entertains questions that have consumed the attention of philosophers across the centuries. How do we know any of this is real? Suppose we’re all Truman. Or suppose there is no “we’re all” and it’s just you. Who’s to say, when you were one year old you didn’t fall asleep in your playpen and start dreaming…and you’re still dreaming?

Well, the answer is pretty simple. Man and God can make universes, but only God can make an infinite one. Certain questions about the fictitious, man-made ones that only exist inside domes, pound on the boundary from the inside by sailing too far. I’ve written before about these; with so much fakery around, it seems every time we ask a question about anything at all, it turns out to be one of these “you’re not supposed to be asking that” questions. It seems now that our play-domes are getting tinier, it’s becoming easier to sail out into the boundary and start pounding on it, regardless of whether that’s what we intended to do. One of my favorites has long been “How come Darth Vader can’t sense his own daughter when she’s standing right in front of him?” Such a question can be answered without breaching the dome, by merely extending it, although such an exercise quickly turns comical and silly. See, Leia was so masterful with her use of The Force, surpassing even her brother Luke, that she was blocking Vader — without even consciously realizing she was doing it. And from across the Galaxy, on Dagobah, Yoda was helping her or something.

The fascinating thing about this, to me anyway, is that such questions can only fracture brittle domes. There has to be some agreement that the answers are sensible, and that the dome is hard, crisp, brittle, infused with the appropriate sense of humility, ready to shatter and admit “Okay, you got me” rather than allow itself to be contorted out of shape into absurd positions. And that’s up to the person asking. If you’re really ready to distinguish between fiction and truth, you have to be ready to say: Cut the crap. The correct answer is that Lucas is making this all up as he’s going along, or he was at the time anyway. Vader could have sensed his own daughter, from quite a distance away actually, but at that point she wasn’t his daughter yet so there are plot holes. This space opera is full of such questions, because it’s full of geeky nerds who insist on stretching the dome-wall into a gooey mess with “You see, uh, it’s like this” explanations for every one of these plot holes. You can get much simpler if you want to. How come Cordé felt she had failed her queen by getting blown up, when she actually did a terrific job — the whole job — taking the hit? The sensible, concise and devastating answer is “bad writing.”

But again, geeks can build annexations onto the dome, and stretch it’s wall out of shape. Many have. How do you do a Kessel Run in twelve parsecs when a parsec is a unit of distance? How come Han Solo doesn’t shoot first, only on this planet not on that planet?

It’s not limited to Star Wars. How come the finest journalist in Metropolis can’t figure out her colleague is really Superman, just because he’s wearing glasses? How do rocks from his home world hurt him?

You’re asking questions the maker of this pretend-universe didn’t ask himself. You’ve exceeded the radius of the dome. You’ve overthought it.

And that brings us to our friends, the liberals. They are surreal and they have managed to create factional infighting in their opposition, just by being themselves. Why do we even call liberals liberals, when they don’t love liberty — far from it — and when Donald Trump introduces change, they resist the change by any & all means necessary? Have they been supplanted by a usurping agent? Or were they seduced into something? Were they seduced out of something? Did it happen all at once, or in stages?

The simplest answer, the one that extends humility and demands it as well, will usually be the one to fracture the dome and reveal the truth…provided the person asking really wants that to happen. The trouble with our friends, the liberals, is that they’re human, and we humans all have flaws. Ideas within a philosophical movement remain fixed, but we are not fixed as we seek to propound or to oppose those ideas. Loving liberty…there’s a dicey proposition for you if ever there was one. The truth is that liberty has a lot of fair-weather friends. Your own liberty, when there are no strings attached to it, is an easy thing to love. The test is if you can keep loving it if there are responsibilities connected. Can you love someone else’s liberty. Like many things that have never been tested until late in the game, liberals fail this one when it’s finally administered. They don’t apply it against themselves. And the rest of us haven’t been applying it to them.

We see liberals who hate and fear liberty…because they always did.

You see, these are high-grade interrogations into a low-grade subject. They exceed the dimensions of the dome. And that is what we should have expected to see happen, because this particular “Truman Show” dome is quite tiny. Liberalism isn’t a philosophy at all. It’s a plea for attention, a virtue signaling waste. It has been from the very beginning. Look how wonderful I am. Look how ready I am to boldly embrace change. Look how much I love liberty.

But if the liberty under discussion isn’t one of just a very few things that have to do with deviations from conventional morals, many of them having to do with sex…abortions, gay marriage, taxpayer-funded sex reassignment surgeries…there’s no love for the liberty there, none at all, and they’re not ready to let us keep it.

[…] Determine Whether a Friend or Relative Is a Liberal or a Leftist” Morgan’s Six Dollars Pounding the Dome So Much Fake Stuff Should I Even Bother Watching I’m a Man What’s Most Convincing […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 03/09/2021 @ 06:09
Man and God can make universes, but only God can make an infinite one.

Minor nerd quibble: Men can make infinite universes too (for definitions of “make” involving following a set of procedural rules out to any desired distance.) (Make/discover/explore are all a little blurry and possibly coincident in mathematics.)

The Mandelbrot set is one example. Any minecraft world is another (though the computer runs out of integers at some ridiculous distance into the world, you could posit recompiling it on a multiple-precision-integer math library and removing the limit. The abstract concept isn’t limited by the implementation details.)

These infinite worlds don’t really have what we would consider infinite content though: The programs we use to generate them are finite, so even if there is structure at every scale, it is eventually “boring” in some way.
- nesalpers | 03/09/2021 @ 06:30
PS: (Just figured out how to register on your blog, but have been reading for a few months…)

(Going down various not-quite-on-topic rabbitholes)

I doubt you mean this statement in this way: “Man and God can make universes, but only God can make an infinite one.”, but I’ve encountered people who do: It seems there is this strange impulse with some people to “put mankind in its place” relative to God.

Rather than using the idea of God to build men up and encourage their creative faculties, they are used to tear them down and discourage imitation as futile. Any finite number “falls short” of infinity in the same proportion, just as zero has the same proportion with any finite number: ordinarily a value-neutral fact about differences in kind instead of degree.

As long as you’re not using your creation to limit or imprison someone like Truman, or to corrode/degrade/otherwise-attack people, it’s hard to see how it can be evil. Is humility really the thing in shortest supply?
- nesalpers | 03/09/2021 @ 06:54
Delighted to have you.

Not sure I understand the sticking point here. One of us is missing something, and it might be me. But I did mean the statement in that way. It comes down to a simple truism: That which is finite, by definition, can never prevail over something that is infinite.

When we talk of these systems, like Minecraft for example, we’re talking about a development effort, and a development effort is essentially a triumph of order over chaos. The universe in which this conquest takes place, of course, sides with chaos. There’s a law about that. So if the system works, there has to be a wall built around it. Chaos prevails by default, so all living things that endure, have to have a skin. A municipality in which you manage to get everything working the way you want, has to have a jurisdiction, and anything over that line has to be enforced by way of non-enforcement: It’s over the line. Not in our bailiwick.

If I understand your point correctly, you’re prognosticating the kind of development project that can self-replicate, into something resembling infinite space, like a virus. All fine and good, but the overall point here is about things making sense, “plot holes” being adequately resolved. Having an effect is easy. The virus-author might succeed in spawning something that reaches the far corners of everywhere. COVID, arguably, is something like that. Maybe the virus-author will be held liable for the damage he does, or maybe not. But he didn’t achieve this conquest of order over chaos, and as such, he didn’t truly develop. He…infected.
- mkfreeberg | 03/09/2021 @ 08:59
[…] And that brings us to our friends, the liberals. They are surreal and they have managed to create factional infighting in their opposition, just by being themselves. Why do we even call liberals liberals, when they don’t love liberty — far from it — and when Donald Trump introduces change, they resist the change by any & all means necessary? Have they been supplanted by a usurping agent? Or were they seduced into something? Were they seduced out of something? Did it happen all at once, or in stages? — House of Eratosthenes […]
- Strange Daze | 03/10/2021 @ 01:17

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Pounding the DomeMonday, March 8th, 2021

Pounding the Dome
Monday, March 8th, 2021