Philosophy – Page 20 – Me on the net

Humour

In an advert for Cheezles (a cheese flavoured snack) two mice are discussing the risks of trying for a Cheezle. One says “It’s worth a crack, Nigel”. Nigel apparently tries for the Cheezle, and there is the crack of a mouse trap, and the other mouse says “Nigel? Nigel?”. Now the original ad was, most people would agree, very funny, even if my exposition lacks something. However it deals with something which could be considered tragic, the death of the unfortunate Nigel.

Humour is strange, almost beyond belief. The tragic is often funny. Death is a constant theme in humour. Disfigurement is also a common factor. Other factors are sexuality, criminality, embarrassment. From a different point of view, it’s about surprise and conflict, and a certain discontinuity. But I think that it is impossible to define humour.

It is probably the only human trait which might be totally absent in ‘lower’ animals. I don’t know of any case where a human trait is totally absent in animals, but it may be merely that I haven’t come across humour in animals. It is my contention that no trait in humans is not demonstrated to a lesser extent in ‘lower’ animals. Maybe there is a chimp snatching another chimp’s plaything and then sniggering when his victim can’t find the toy. Maybe. The Internet has anecdotal evidence that animals can demonstrate humour, but nothing too convincing. Or maybe I didn’t search for long enough to come across any in-depth studies.

Animals show joy, a certain self-awareness, disappointment, anger and many other supposedly human traits. They can learn, remember and generally demonstrate that they share our attributes, maybe to a lesser extent (though I feel that for many animals it is not much lesser than humans).

But animals don’t appear to have the capacity to experience humour (to my knowledge). If this is so, it is significant. It would be the only uniquely human attribute. My dog demonstrates joy, affection, desire, and many other things, but doesn’t demonstrate humour. A dog will never tease you. A dog is direct and forthright. You can’t share a joke with a dog. I’m fairly sure that you can’t share a joke with a chimpanzee or a gorilla, but I’d defer to an expert on that.

If humour is endemic to humans it is at least part of what distinguishes us from other animals. It may be the only thing that distinguishes us from them, as there is nothing else that I can think of that does. All animals have intelligence, at least to a degree, above a certain level of complexity. Some animals show preference for attractive appearance or display (particularly birds) which may be the basis of our aesthetic sense, but no animal, so far as I know shows a sense of humour.

There is a variety of humour that seems somewhat different to the ‘mainstream’ and that is the pun. Puns are plays on words in the majority of cases, but they may be visual. A pun can be based on homonyms, words which sound the same but which have different meanings, and even different spellings. For instance there is a village in Southern England called Brede, so if someone announces that “We are going to Brede” one can understand that a bystander might be somewhat taken aback. Another example is George Carlin‘s statement that “Atheism is a non-prophet institution”.

As I said above, humour often involves some sort of mishap or disaster for someone. In such cases it may act as some sort of tension release mechanism. That’s a fairly obvious, therefore suspect, suggestion, though in practise it seems to work and can be a recommended way to break the tension in difficult situations. Puns don’t give the same sort of release (generally), and mostly involve language so seem to be on a higher intellectual level than mainstream humour. In summary however, I’d say that humour is a facet of human beings, but it still seems mysterious to me. Strangely, infants seem to develop a sense of humour early in life. There’s not many things more infectious than a laughing child.

Counting.

If you want to count sheep, count the legs and divide by four. This piece of faux folk-wisdom has, as is usual in such cases, a grain of truth. The human eye finds it easier to distinguish elongated objects if the axes of the object are separated and perpendicular (or so I believe). It is easier to count the candles mounted on a cake than the same candles arranged in a line. This – | | | | | | | – is easier to count than this – _ _ _ _ _ _ _ , I feel. (I’ve used Google to see if I can find evidence and came across this, which seems to align with what I am saying, though I’ve not accessed the paper).

If I am correct it is easier to, say, count the horns on a herd of cattle and divide by two than count their backs. It occurs to me that an optical-electrical counting device might have issues in this regard too, since a leg might stand out from the background, and produce a short pulse in the sensor, but a whole cow might take a while and its colours would blend into the next cow. Of course, one could always use higher technology to resolve the issue with respect to cow counting, (RFIDs in ear tags would be an obvious solution), but it doesn’t solve the wider issue.

Maybe the reason that the counting device and the eye/brain find it easier to distinguish objects orientated (roughly) perpendicular to their (roughly) linear arrangement is similar. If they are (roughly) aligned in the same direction as their linear arrangement they may, possibly, overlap, and this can confuse sensor and/or eye. Was that one, two, or three objects that passed the sensor? It’s easy if they are perpendicular, but harder if they are aligned.

English: Geometrical-optical illusions: horizo... — English: Geometrical-optical illusions: horizontal/vertical anisotropy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m pretty much reduced to saying the same thing in different words, but I hope that what I am trying to get at is clear. It may or may not be relevant that humans and higher primates tend to stand more or less vertically, so one individual is more easily distinguished from others than an individual cow is from the herd.

About Loulou

A self-imposed deadline is, I think, the worst sort. I set my phone to alert me once a week to blog something. And it just went off. I have no definite plan so this is going to be off the top of my head. Call it “philosophy” or call it “miscellaneous”. I don’t care!

Today my daughter texted me a picture of a smallish fungus. (Aside – the spell checker doesn’t recognise “texted”. The spell checker needs to be updated!) Apparently my grand-daughter, who knows of my interest in fungi, thought that Grandad might like this “interesting fungus”. Who knows, because of me she might grow up to be a famous mycologist, the one who saves the human race from the mutant spores. Hmm!

Which made me wonder about the effect we have on our descendants. Obviously there are two ways we can do that -the genetic and the environmental. Our genes may predispose our offspring to certain tendencies and our personal influences plus the environments (in the widest sense) in which we live effect the way that we and our children behave.

This image shows the coding region in a segmen... — Genes

Of course I don’t know where Loulou will head in life, but I do recognise some traits in her which I see in myself, but I can’t tell whether or not these are inherited traits or learned ones. Computers are no mystery to her, and she knows that it is possible to take a photo (on a phone) and send it to Grandad. She knows how to unlock the iPad and has no fear of the Android tablet. She and I have a liking for a particular on-line game.

Loulou’s Dad works with computers. She has two older brothers who are computer literate. Her mother grew up with Commodore 64s and computer games loaded from tape. Loulou’s mother’s Dad (me!) worked in computers from before Loulou’s mum was born, but I don’t think I bought the job home, though we did get a Vic 20 and later a Commodore 64.

Commodore VIC-20 Computer with later revision ... — Vic 20

But Loulou is not a geek. When we went on a walk Loulou decided that tights, t-shirt, a tutu, and gumboots were the appropriate wear. (I think that, stylistically, it worked). She’s a fan of Dora the Explorer but is not a fanatic. Maybe she will grow into that. However, her Mum and Auntie weren’t particularly doll orientated.

Hmm, this article seems to be all about Loulou. It’s too early to tell, but I won’t be disappointed if she goes down the geeky route. I’d be interested in how she gets on in that world. I won’t be disappointed if she *doesn’t* either. Either way she’s the most wonderful granddaughter.

Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring

Revolving earth at winter solstice on the nort... — Northern winter solstice

On 21st June we in the Southern Hemisphere get our shortest day of the year. This corresponds to the longest day in the Northern Hemisphere of course, and my wall calendar, which originates from the Northern half of the planet says that 21st June is the start of summer. I believe that the official start of winter, here in New Zealand, is 1st June.

That started me thinking. One would expect that 21st June, the southern winter solstice, would be the middle on winter, since the earth is tilted furthest away from the sun in southern latitudes at that date, and that the seasons would change mid way between the solstices and the equinoxes in both hemispheres for similar reasons. The equinoxes are the days when the night and days are the same length in both the northern and southern hemispheres. (Pedants will notice that I’m not being precisely correct in my explanations of equinoxes and solstices, but that doesn’t matter for my purposes.)

English: Two equinoxes are shown as the inters... — Equinoxes

It is obvious to anyone who has reached a sufficient age that the warmest and coldest parts of the year don’t correspond to the solstices and that the change from higher than average temperatures to lower than average temperatures and vice versa don’t happen at the equinoxes, though these latter events are probably not that noticeable. There is obviously some seasonal lag.

So I browsed to Wikipedia, which is a useful place to start, even if some people question its accuracy and veracity. I’ve not found it too bad, myself. Sure enough, there is an article on seasonal lag, and I’ve no reason to doubt the information there. To summarise, the authors of the article attribute the lag to the oceans which, because of the latent heat of their water absorb heat energy and release energy as the seasons change. I’m not sure that I completely understand the reasons for this, but there are undoubtedly deeper analyses on the Internet. The Wikipedia article contains one reference.

Apparently the seasonal lag is different in each half of the year. I believe that means that the four seasons are not all equal in length. Hmm, summer does seem shorter than the other seasons, but that may be only subjective. However, our shortest day is only four weeks away, so we will at least be seeing more daylight each day from then on. We will be on the upwards slide to Spring and Summer, even though Winter will not have bottomed out, and we can look forward to barbecues and a summertime Christmas!

Pohutakawa flowers. They bloom at Christmas, in early summer.

Poems and poetry

I usually have some idea of where I am going when I start a post, but this time I’m starting with no real idea of what I’m going to say. It’s just that the idea of “Poetry” entered my brain from somewhere and some synapse went “ping” or some switch closed somewhere in my brain. Two metaphors for something stirring my interest.

(Ah yes! I remember now. I read somewhere that April is National Poetry Month in the USA.)

National Poetry Month Display @ Forest Hills

I’m not going to touch on what exactly poetry is. It doesn’t lend itself to easy definition, and in fact, any definition can only partially explain what it is, so I’ll not try to define it, although I may touch on some of the aspects of what makes it poetry. If you try for a definition, you will find that you have to keep adding exclusions and extensions to your definition, and eventually you will find that you will need to add exclusions and extensions to your exclusions and extensions.

One of the things that poetry is, usually, is rhythmical. In the poems we learnt at school the rhythm was, usually, strong. Most people of my era will remember at least the first few words of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death,
Rode the six hundred.

The poem also contains other well-remembered lines such as –

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die

Charge of the Light Brigade. An example of the... — Charge of the Light Brigade.

Poetry teachers tend to emphasise that the rhythm of this poem echoes the rhythm of the galloping horses, and so it does, of course. But maybe what is more pertinent is that the rhythm of the poem possibly aids strongly in the retention in the brain of the memory of the poem. Maybe a memory needs to be refreshed periodically in order for the memory to be retained and a strongly rhythmical memory is more easily refreshed.

I have no idea if it still applies, but in the early days of computers for data to be retained in the memory of the computer it had to be regularly read and re-written or refreshed. There may or may not be any real parallel between the way that computer memory and memory in the brain works, but the idea is, for me, evocative of a connection.

We certainly remember the rhythm of a poem more strongly than we remember the words – someone may start to quote a poem, run out of remembered words and conclude with “dum-de-dum-de-dah” or something.

Symphony Hall abstract – rhythm in shape

If the rhythms of poetry help the poem and the ideas presented by the poem be remembered, they also act to grab the attention of the person who hears or reads the poem. Poetry shades into music and in pop music almost every song or track has a “hook”, the hook being what grabs the listener’s attention. An outstanding example is the tinkly little phrase in the song “Somebody that I used to know” by Gotye. Or the Largo from the second movement of Dvořák’s Symphony number 9 in E Minor, (From the New World) if you want something more highbrow!

These are musical hooks, but rhythmical hooks abound, such as the one in the Charge of the Light Brigade.I’ll also mention the rhythmical hook in the little poem that helps English speakers remember the number of days in each month:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November.
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone,
And that has twenty-eight days clear,
And twenty-nine in each leap year.

This maybe works more because the rhythm and the rhyming is somewhat defective than for any other reason! Anthropomorphically, the brain goes “Ewww! That’s wrong!” and is hooked. Maybe.

I mentioned that poetry shades into song. As an aside perhaps Rap falls into a gap between poetry and song. Ordinary speech shades into formal speeches, which shade into prose such as is found in great novels, which shade into poems, which shade into songs, which shade into music, at least in the way that I’ve been discussing.

The common thread is rhythm to attract attention and rhythm to aid memory. Maybe if we understood more about the effects that rhythm and rhyme have on the brain, or how the brain uses rhythm and rhyme, or even how rhythm and rhyme are fundamental to the workings of the brain (if they are), then we would understand the brain much better.

Word is Born — Poetry is usually words, but there are exceptions to that, of course

Religion and ceremonies

I’m not a religious person, but two or three times a year my wife drags me to church. I love the rituals and the ceremonials.

At Easter the local Roman Catholic church on Good Friday enacts the ritual of the “Stations of the Cross”. Whatever one might think of religion, the ceremonials add a dignity to the institution of the church and I like this one.

The celebrants face in order one of the “stations” which is a depiction of one of the stages in the progress of Christ to the cross and thence to his entombment. At each station a fairly free-form prayer or verse is sung.

I find the ritual moving, but I don’t know why! As I said, I’m not religious, but the re-enactment of this religion’s pivotal event is engaging. I suspect that I would experience similar feeling if I experienced a similar re-enactment of another religion’s similar event.

As a non-believer I’m bemused as to why I feel moved by the ritual. I should recognise it as such and discount it, but rituals such as this, and the marriage ritual do move me. Even if the ritual is supposedly secular as in many marriages.

Ceremony and ritual are so necessary to human social interactions that we invent them if there aren’t any there already – a good example is the POTUS, the President of the United States. So many rituals surround him, and they were invented just for him.

The stations of the cross supposedly started with St Francis of Assisi, and this is interesting, since “Francis” is the name chosen by the current and recently elected Pope. It will be interesting to see how far this apparently humble man can extend his concern for the poor throughout his church. Interestingly, he has included women and non-christians in his “washing of the feet” ritual for Maundy Thursday.

Morals and Ethics

Almost every philosophy book, or at least the ones that deal with the whole of philosophy, has a section on morals and ethics. I’ve always been suspicious of such chapters as the topic seems to me to be a little vague, even for philosophy.

I saw a news report about a group of people who, at some risk to themselves, formed a human chain to rescue a boy in trouble in the sea. I asked the question “Would you have risked your life, like these people did to save the boy’s life or would you merely stand and watch?” Some of rescuers, notably the policemen who initially formed the chain, had to be helped out of the sea themselves.

I realised that I’d asked an unanswerable question. It very much depends on the circumstances. If you sincerely thought that your “help” would merely hinder the rescue, or if you sufferred from a medical condition such as a heart problem, then you would merely watch the rescue, no doubt willing the rescuers on. If you were fit and healthy and no other issues prevented you, you would no doubt take part, almost instinctively.

It strikes me from the above that morals and ethics don’t have any absolutes. There is no situation where it is completely obvious what the right course is. Should you kill one person to save a million? There is a school of thought called “Utilitarianism”, {link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism} suggests that the best way to decide would be to consider the options and choose the that “maximizes utility, specifically defined as maximizing happiness and reducing suffering” (See the above link).

The trouble with this approach is that no two people would agree on the calculations involved. What if the person who is to be killed is your son or daughter? What is the situation were slightly less clear? Should a killer be put to death to protect his potential future victims?

Some people introduce deities to provide an absolute basis for ethics and morals, but this merely shifts the question to deity – how does the deity provide moral and ethical direction? The question is no longer “What should I do?” but “What would God want me to do?” The believer has to make subjective moral judgements about the way that God would want morals to work. The believer is in fact no further on.

This seems to reduce morals and ethics to subjective opinions, a view known as “Relativism”. The religious view is that God (or whatever the deity is being called) sets the absolutes, so there can be no moral relativism. The difficulty with this view is that we are no further along in determining the absolutes if they are absolutes. It seems that different deities have different absolutes, and the same deity’s “absolutes” may change over time – the morals and ethics of earlier times is different to the morals and ethics of earlier times. For example slavery was OK at one time but is not OK today. In any a special class of people has evolved whose whole life is based on the need for the deities views to be defined and interpreted.

I’d suggest that most people treat moral and ethical matters more or less pragmatically, depending on their culture and upbringing. Those who are not on the breadline tend to consider that accepting an unemployment benefit or other benefit is somehow not morally correct while those without jobs are happy to claim them. If someone on a benefit were to suddenly become rich, and a rich person become desititute then they would get an idea of each other’s viewpoint. I’d suggest that the erstwhile rich person would accept the dole with reluctance, and their moral qualms would subside and the reverse would happen to the suddenly enriched beneficiary, who might come to feel that those on benefits are getting too much of his money. Hopefully the enriched beneficiary would have a more enlightened view than the erstwhile rich person had, though, having actually been a beneficiary at one time.

While researching on the Internet on this topic, I came across this set of articles about morality and the brain {Link: http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/morality-located-in-brain1.htm} They are worth a look. One of the points is that the emotional side of the brain makes a decision, maybe about the killing of a child to save many, and the rational side tries to figure out why the emotional side made the decision. Maybe the discussion is pointless. Maybe most moral decisions made in the heat of the moment are made emotionally and all discussions on what the correct course should be are post-decision rationalizations. If that is so, then there is no real point in discussing what is right and moral as rational decisions do not come into it. But then again, maybe such decisions inform and incline the emotional side of the brain when it makes a decision. Maybe that’s what makes discsussion of moral and ethics topics in philosophy seem so fuzzy and unsatisfactory to me.

reason, conclusion - emotion, action — reason, conclusion – emotion, action (Photo credit: Will Lion)

Plato extended

English: The School of Athens (detail). Fresco... — Plato

Plato conceived the idea that each and every real physical object is an inferior representation of an idealised “Form”. Forms were supposed to be “more real” in some sense than the ordinary real world objects that the Form idealises. Wikipedia says this, in its article on the theory of Forms:

These Forms are the essences of various objects: they are that without which a thing would not be the kind of thing it is. For example, there are countless tables in the world but the Form of tableness is at the core; it is the essence of all of them.

There are several issues with this approach. For instance, when one looks at a table, one can count its legs. Many tables have four legs, while some may have more than four and some may have less than four. Some may rest on a pedestal and so have no legs at all.

So what is the essence of a table? It seems that there are many attributes of tables that are variable, like the number of legs, which is pretty shoddy for an ideal of an object. One could define a table by the uses to which it is put, but again the uses to which a table can be put are variable. We have writing tables, operating tables and pool tables. It seems that there is no attribute can be found which has a single value which makes a table a table.

For Plato the Form of a physical object is the richer of the the two. In the Analogy of the Cave, the real world objects were mere shadows of the Forms. However, it appears that the real world objects have to be richer than the ideals of the objects. This derives from the necessity of distinguishing one real object from another. This table here is different from that table there (in spacial location if in nothing else), and specific location is an attribute that the ideal cannot have.

like being in the Plato’s cave — A shadow in Plato’s cave

Computer scientists have a solution to these issues, based around the concept of an “object”. An object is a container which may contain other objects, properties, or actions (called “methods” in the jargon) and which belongs to a class of objects. A table object for example may contain zero or several leg objects, it may contain the property of being wooden, and may contain the actions or methods of “lay”, “dine off”, “clear”, and so on.

Included objects can be considered parts of the object like the legs of the table. The properties are descriptive of the object, such as “wooden” or the property of “has four legs”. The actions or methods are things that you can do to the table, such as “dine off” it or “lay it for dinner”.

All objects belong to a class of objects and are called “instances” of the class. Each class is unique. There is only one class called “table” for example, and all table objects (instances of the class) derive or in other words are instantiated from it. A class is also a container and may bring properties and methods to the derived instance, so the table class may contain an action or method of “lay for dinner” and a property of “has four legs”.

So far so good. The Form equates to the class and the real world object to the instance object, so the computer science model aligns with Plato’s model. However the computer science model has a few more wrinkles which Plato’s model doesn’t.

Firstly, when the object is instantiated in the computer science model, the new object doesn’t have to incorporate the properties and actions or methods of the class that it is modelled on. For example, if the new table is used for writing letters, then it doesn’t need the action or method of “lay for dinner” so it can omit it. On the other hand it may benefit from a “clear space” action or method! It would probably carry over a “has four legs” property if the class supplies it. The instantiation process is very flexible! Class properties and actions or methods can be included in the instance or new properties and actions or methods can be created, if required.

Secondly, each and every object can implement one or more classes. This is a fancy way of saying that it can pick and choose properties and actions or methods from one or more classes. In other words a table object may be made of wood, hence, to use the jargon, it inherits from the class of “wooden objects” the action or method “polish”. We can polish a wooden object, and we can eat off a table object, so we can do both off a wooden table.

English: answer to the question: Draw an inher... — Inheritance diagram

The point of all this is to address some of the deficiencies of Plato’s theory of Forms. Plato’s idea was that any table object derived from an archetypal table Form, which was not a real world object but still existed in some sense. The idealised Form was considered “purer” and was the essence of a table, comprising only those attributes shared by all tables. The difficulty here is finding any attributes that every table has, and which no “non-table” has. Using the extended Platonian scheme, if you extract all the properties and actions or methods that are not common to all tables, it seem that you might be left is an empty Form.

That may seem to be a disadvantage of this approach, but it is a strength. What sort of object do you get if you have an object which contains two box objects and a plank object? If you add the action or method of “eat off” you have a “dining table object” possibly with a property of “make-shift”.

So, under this extended Platonian scheme, what actually makes a table object a table object and not some other type of object? That’s actually a lot harder question than the question of what is a table object. Evidently it is a more subjective question as people will disagree what constitutes a table.

table with chairs (Photo credit: srqpix)

Understanding

On and off over the years I’ve been thinking about the concept of understanding, most particularly in the field of mathematics. When one encounters a new branch of mathematics, one is (conceptually) presented with the definitions, axioms and theorems in the field. Of course, one doesn’t necessarily understand them at first. However, after delving into the field, studying the axioms and definitions, and following through the proofs one soon gets the general feel for the field.

I might for instance read a ‘popular’ book about mathematics and read about ‘hyperreal numbers‘. By a ‘popular’ book, about maths, science or practically anything else, I mean a book which provides a non-rigorous introduction to a field, intended to give a feeling for it. If a reader of such a book requires an in-depth treatment of the subject, the reader would no doubt have to spend a long period studying the necessary maths to even start to address the topic. Such a ‘popular’ book could not possibly give one an understanding of ‘hyperreal numbers‘ of course. It’s more of a geography lesson, in that it would provide an understanding of where the topic fits in to the topography of mathematics, just as one might read about Greece, but one would not understand from the guide book what Greece is really like. For that one must go there.

Tired of studying! — Understanding mathematics requires study!

So you need to study something in maths to understand it. When do you know that you have understood it? I believe that there are at least three stages or signs that you understand it.

In the first stage, you have studied the axioms or the basis for the field of mathematics that you are trying to understand and you have seen and understood a few of the proofs of theorems in the field and you can reproduce them if asked. You have arrived in Greece, you are getting to grips with the money, you know how to purchase something in a cafe or restaurant, to extend the analogy.

In the second stage, you understand the ‘why’ of the proofs, you start to get a feel for the way that proofs are put together in the field and what can be achieved in the field. The concepts are sinking in. In Greece, you know how to find the best bars and restaurants where the Greeks drink and eat, you know what to order from the menus, and you are picking up a smattering of the language.

In the third and final stage, you are using the mathematics in the field with confidence, either to develop your own ideas in the field or in further study. When you look back at the difficulties you used to have in the field you are astonished that it took so long for the concepts to sink in. They seem obvious now. In the Greece analogy, you speak the language fluently, you have married a Greek person and you have lived in Greece for years. You mock the foreign tourists, and also you realise that there is more to Greece than your particular corner of it.

So, my point is that to understand something you need to immerse yourself in the topic. I don’t mean to say that you won’t have “Eureka Moments“, but even Archimedes had to immerse himself in his topic of study to come up with his Principle!

archimedes (Photo credit: Sputnik Beanburger III)

The Pope thing and predestination.

I can understand the Pope, who is old, sick, and reportedly tired of the job, resigning. I can see that it has come as a surprise to many people. What I can’t understand is the reactions that people have to the announcement. It isn’t unprecedented, as Popes have resigned before.

However, some people believe that the Pope is elected for life and that resigning as Benedict XVI has done is close to sacrilege. I believe that the thinking goes something like this: God has chosen a particular man to be Pope. For that man to relinquish the post is for that man to, by his actions, imply that God is mistaken, and that cannot be.

If there is a God, and I’m firmly in the other camp, then He, being omnipotent and omniscient, not to mention omni-temporal, must know that His chosen candidate will resign the post, and has arranged matters so that this happens. In other words the resignation was ordained. It seems that one cannot get away from predestination! (The above description of God ‘knowing’ and ‘arranging’ is of course anthropomorphic).

pope and me — Someone similar in appearance from the back to the Pope contemplates the works of God or nature.

Put into a religious context, the debate over predestination versus free will comes down to the following:

If God is all-seeing and all powerful then He has control over everything and nothing happens which He hasn’t caused to happen. If there were something that He hadn’t caused to happen, then that would have to (de facto) be caused externally to God. God and whatever outside of God that caused the event would have to exist in much the same sense and such an existence would have to have a frame of existence, a ‘container’ if you like, that contains both God and the other thing. However, I started out by crediting God as being all-seeing and all powerful and that doesn’t seem to leave room for things outside of God as that implies something greater than God. So given the concept of an all powerful God there can be nothing that He hasn’t caused to happen and which he does not know about.

OK, so if God causes everything, then he causes every event to happen. He (ultimately) causes us to make the particular decisions that we make. So the concept of free will evaporates, as God causes us pick the options that we do, even if we think that we make a choice.

God, the Father watches us all everywhere.

Of course God may be a compatibilist – He may believe that if he presents us with a number of options, we have the free will to select an option, even though the selection is in fact predetermined by Him.

Of course, shorn of the religious tones, the above argument still applies, if, for example, you replace the references to God with references to ‘Nature’ or ‘the natural laws’.