[Newspoetry] Benedictator: beware the newspoets of the past

[DL Emerick]

In the 1994 text Probability and Conditionals: Belief Revision and Rational Decision, Patrick Suppes offers the lead article, "Some questions about Adams' conditionals" (pp 5-12).  His conclusions allusively bemoan our lack of "a satisfactory theory of rational talking, let alone rational decision making...."  [but nonetheless advocates some sort of explicative chances for information processing to fill these observable lacunae of theory.]

More interesting to me, though, was the discursive result in the formal conclusion.  For he suggests that, for sufficiently small epsilon, there should be little psychological difference between a view of a material implication from A to B, and of A, evaluated probabilitsically, would be but two epsilon below unity, and a view of the Baysian evaluation form for that same scene of A and B, as the square of an epsilon below unity.

The key to reacting to Suppes remark is to notice the relegation of difference to a sufficiently small status.  Once that move is achieved, it may be true that all analytically methods fail to revive the mind, to restore perceptual discrimination between two quite different scenes.  It is a solipsism, establishing the vastness of the unity, compared to all modes of deviation from it.

Evolution, it is said, seeks the crack in the wall of time through which its trendrils may creep, breaking down bare  into dwelling places for green and growing living things.  Life distinctly stands out against general entropy.  If life is going to hell in a heat death (or a cold bath), why is there life, at all, anyway?  Is it something that a universe does, just like I do, twiddling my thumbs, while waiting -- a purposeless artifact in itself, but indicative of a class of pass-times that the universe could have chosen (if it only had the power to choose)?

There is a difference, my dear Suppes, between evaluating a material implication and a conditional implication -- but not one that can be maintained if you erase the difference as your first analytical move.

The same remark applies to the universe.  If you think the universe may have some small loci of life in it, but not be alove itself, it would not occur to you to assign to it the possibility of making a choice.   Life is a localism, kind of like a virus -- but it has no chance of spreading over the entire universe, or does it?  Maybe, if you believe in big bangs (and I do so want to believe in one, or more of them (cyclical universes)), the whole thing already was infected when it "started" from the bang.  Maybe, a virus caused the explosion, like a sneeze or a belch or a fart.

In the beginning, God farted, and the wind of his passing created our world, heavens and earth.   But the doctors of religion would have sanitized this, chosen the mouth as their own chosen instrument, reformed belched into "God spoke".  Beware the newspoets of the past -- they are so entrenched that we can not dislodge them easily!

It is easy to make any difference large enough.  Just repeat it several times, until the flaw shows up.  The smallest discrepancy will become greatly magnified, amplified, exploded by the almost faithful replications.  This is what the forms of Godel-Escher-Bach show, in Hofstadter book -- especially the Escher drawings so easily illustrate this to us.  (The conditional law of fractal thinking: there is no reasonable chance for fidelity in a reproduction (except in a material implication, maybe).)  (There is only an unreasonable chance of a faithful reproduction: one that lets commercialism into the scene, for capitalist exploitation, the lopping off of all differences, in the fictitious selling of the same.)

It's a good thing, this life, that in it sanity is not decided for us, by the vote of a committee, that has been stacked like the College of Cardinals.  We'd have to be lunatics to choose a man who hates humanity to lead us.  It's only a amll and insignificant epsilon, or two, or even a squared deviation -- what's the difference, really?  Even if it is applied, then, on a massive scale, so that unity minus epsilon squared becomes raised to some very large power, and vanishes from consideration!