Intellectually very American.... "If God is all powerful can he (sic) create an immovable object and an irresistible force?" The Zen response is probably: "Mu!" The American response is: "Duh!" I'm not one for getting tangled in webs of intellectual noise when a simple explanation covers the territory.

Goedel and logical argument Goedel's theorem is that any sufficiently powerful formal language is incomplete. Applied to logic you can guarantee that any argument will have a counter-example. So you can't have a logically consistent theory without counterexamples. No ultimate theory of rights, for example. Applied to bureaucracy, you get the idea that no matter how many regulations you have, there will always be cases not covered by existing regulations, and requiring new ones. Applied to SGML.... (Oops! Was that heresy?) So what're' ya gonna do about it? Design. It's why judges interpret laws, and why we still have rights. You maybe fudge a bit at the edges, but nobody said we had to cover every possible case. Back to argument: any argument someone makes will have a counter-example. I would like an approach in which people design ways to deal with the limitations of the initial argument.

Requisite Variety in information systems Ross Ashby talked about his "Law of Requisite Variety" in his work on what he called "cybernetics". (More soon.)

Feminism and relationship I haven't articulated this in a long time, so bear with me, please. Feminists rightly pointed out that the personal is political. If a woman is victimized, it has a lot to do with political decisions. Presumably this has given us some progress in a lot of areas. Cops are more sensitive to rape victims. The UN is on record that women should have the right to say "no", even to their husbands. On the other hand, the political is not personal. Bringing political triggers for anger into a relationship does not make for an improved relationship. I lived through a period where feminists demanded that men and women do exactly the same things and have the same values. Fortunately there is now more permission for men and women to have differences and negotiate the terms of the relationship. It's OK if both people prefer for the man to take out the garbage and the woman to clean the bathroom when she thinks it needs it (rather than demanding he clean the bathroom when she thinks it needs it). Of course the bathroom thing is better handled by separate abodes, or at least separate bathrooms.

Love Love is an energy. It's the same energy whether it is felt for a spouse, a parent, a child, a stranger, or a tree. It's empirically measurable. (What's that called: Chorellian photography?) Desires and needs are different from love. People usually say "I love you" when they mean "I want you" or "I have needs that you could fulfill". To be clear on one's needs is not necessarily pretty. A lot of us wanted not to have any needs. I believe, though, that there is value in it. Personally, I think love is pretty easy. Finding someone who would make a great "life partner" can be much more difficult. A hundred years ago, people mostly wanted the same things. Now there are so many things available to be wanted, it is very confusing. We've splintered our interests. On a hopeful note, two people don't need the same interests. They just need compatible interests.

Great Spirit, God, the Universe I define God as the interactions between everything. I imagine this is what Native Americans mean by "Great Spirit". The definition requires no "belief" like "do you believe in God?" It has interesting consequences. We are all part of God. In that sense we are all one. In my experience, visualizing an outcome can create it. Try visualizing parking places. JC.... Jesus could feed the multitudes with a little bread and some fish. It's a lot easier to call out for pizza, nowadays. ("All these works and greater shall you do...") I never eat Domino's. Interesting that just about every topic finds it's way from the physical world onto the Internet, where it is available in electronic form in every moment from every place.

Mental model for processing information. Good ol' Chuck Green taught a class called Empirical Political Theory (at Macalester College, that small but lively Liberal Arts school in St. Paul, Minnesota). We showed up. He talked. We wondered what he had said. But something happened.... One exercise in the class was to make explicit my "mental model" of the world. The issue, as I recall, was how to deal with an overwhelming barrage of often conflicting information. How do I decide, for example, what to pay attention to, what to ignore, and when to change my beliefs. The process I defined then (1980?) is pretty much what goes on in my head today. I examine my values and beliefs for consistency with each other, and for the assumptions upon which they rely. When I scan the world for information, I seek out information that supports or contradicts the assumptions of beliefs I am developing. I analyze that information very carefully. For beliefs I am very strong on, I still scan for contradictory information. Usually this information is rejected as inaccurate, and sometimes it leads to a refinement of the belief. Other information I scan according to whim. For example, fifteen years ago people would insist that the Trident II missile was not a first-strike weapon. (Duh.) They would say it sits in submarines that are survivable, so Trident II was a stabilizing weapons system. It is true that Trident II missiles would survive a first strike. But it is also true that they were accurate enough and carried enough warheads, and could get close enough to Soviet missile silos that Trident II is exactly the kind of weapon system you build if you wanted to launch a first strike. (And then you would want a good enough Star Wars missile defense system to destroy a lot of the missiles that survived the first strike.) The assertion that Trident II is not a first-strike weapon is easily dismissed given a careful definition of what constitutes a first-strike weapon. When George Bush hid behind Colin "We don't do mountains" Powell to wash his hands of the practically genocidal attacks by Serbs in Bosnia, I was busy looking for information to confirm or deny that the Serbs represented a serious military threat. Looking past their victories over unorganized and practically unarmed Croats and Bosnians, all the evidence (besides bluster) was that the Serbs were really a pathetically bad military organization, and that a modern army would defeat in a matter of days. Several years later, a couple of American generals had retrained the Croats. It took the Croats about twelve hours to run off the Serbs. An odd quirk of the human mind allows inconsistent beliefs and values. Teen-age German Neo-Nazis look down on the United States for having a death penalty. This kind of inconsistency gives us the sentence: "Go figure." Most people acquire their core beliefs and values from experiences without much analysis. So a conservative is a liberal who was mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who was arrested.

The Irony of Democracy I wasn't going to mention this, but thinking about inconsistent values inspired me.... Part of the irony of democracy is that the masses do not generally have democratic values. Take a straw poll in the U.S. and people will gladly write off freedom of political expression to keep people from burning a piece of cloth called our flag and endowed with the symbolism of democracy. Feminists will kill freedom of speech to get rid of pornography. Other groups will restrict the liberties of homosexuals. To generalize: most any individual or group that can improve it's situation will happily do so by restricting the rights, liberties, or conveniences of some other group. The great twist is that it is the elites who actually have a certain dedication to the values of democracy. So George Bush was the man defending democracy. Not a pretty thought. Elites, presumably, only value democracy when it doesn't get in their way. Fortunately we have groups like the ACLU and Amnesty International that hold to values. The Irony of Democracy is a book. Don't remember the authors. It's entirely possible that my little story here isn't exactly according to the book. That doesn't bother me: this is what I believe.

© 1995 by John Robert Boynton

Last update: October 22, 1995.