This is a sequel to (Re?)Introducing Meh and Lah. Read that first.
Picture now the creation of an artificial world. A simulation. Possibly an artificial life simulation, or a MMORPG like World of Warcraft, or something along those lines. This creation is performed by a human, using his hands, creating something new in Lah. He or she achieves this creation by thinking and planning in Meh, and communicating with other team members using Meh.
The computer exists in Lah, consisting of physical parts. Electrons travel through circuits, performing some voltage-and-no-voltage
computations. (Ones and zeros on the lowest level of our Meh. Numbers, colours, properties and code on higher levels of our Meh.) Electrons pass through coils in speakers, electrons are fired at a fluorescent screen, or electrons are used to charge tiny capacitors containing liquid crystals. Lah.
On this piece of Lah, a software simulation is running, a new universe is simulated. A world containing new entities. These entities do not exist, in the sense of our Lah. Personally, we experience them in our Meh, in interpreting what we see on the screen, what we hear on the speakers. But they don’t really exist in human Meh either. In fact, the screen and speakers are merely the tools with which they make their existence known to us. Or more correctly, the tools by which we eavesdrop and spy on their existence. Built on human-Lah, it is a human-Meh portal into their reality, into their Lah.
The entities running around in a virtual world are not aware of its virtuality. Their virtual world is the only thing they can test, the only thing they can interact with. They have a Lah. And their Lah is not our Lah.
What about their Meh?
Now here’s where things get tricky. Let us think first about other primates’ Meh. Similar to ours, but different. Possibly simpler? from our perspective? Less developed language, less “deep philosophical” concern? Still, the primates’ Meh.
Now other mammals: Meh (Lah).
Predators: their thinking (a bunch of neurons firing), their planning (a higher-level neuronal response to complex stimulii), their observing of the environment (neurons from eyes, ears, nose), the smell of food (particles travelling through the air, reaching the predator’s nose), the excitement of the hunt (some hormones pumping in preparation for rapid and accurate muscle twitching and coordination).
Prey: fear (self preservation, neurons, hormones), flight (complex survival-response to complex stimulii)…
Sex drive: a desire for mating (selfish genes ensuring their replication through hormones and neural wiring, instincts).
Digging deeper, what about reptiles? Birds? Other vertebrates? Invertebrates? Fish? Insects? Bacteria? They might not be self-aware in the same sense we are, but they could still have a Meh of some sorts. As uneasy as I feel about this kind of comparison, I’m prepared to accept the statement that their Meh is less “sophisticated”. They are not sophists like we are…
Back to the entities living in a virtual world. Take World of Warcraft first. Lah-wise, a character’s “neurons fire” according to the computer code that defines their behaviour. They receive a sensory input (another entity in the virtual world striking it with a sword, or a human clicking with a mouse), and they have some kind of response to that stimulus. On the Meh level, they are intricately connected with “the gods”, controlling them from a “higher plane”, they don’t have any significant kind of “free will”. They live to serve their master.
Now an artificial life simulation, somewhat more interesting. Entities in this virtual world evolve. Their code and behaviour is not pre-programmed, it develops over time. Their behaviour is linked to and defined by their Lah, or evolved in response to their Lah, rather than directly linked to and defined by “the gods” from a “higher plane”.
Now let these entities evolve… Give them a complex and sophisticated enough virtual world and enough “virtual time”, and they eventually develop something that looks like self-awareness. Now what? Now they have a rather “sophisticated” Meh. Possibly a pre-enlightenment Meh, not quite aware of the “factuality” found in Lah, they still take Meh as their reality. They build a Tower of Babel based on it. (They try to understand and describe everything around them, using Meh. They develop intricate mythologies, and they reach out, they search, they are looking for the god of their universe, they are looking for us.) The tower tumbles, because it is based on Meh, on wishful thinking. And so they battle, realising they have multiple cultures, with diverse Meh, and they cannot understand one another.
And yet, they still want to build a tower. An enlightenment event happens, they become Lah-obsessed. Since they share a Lah, they can cooperate on the search for Lah-based knowledge, aka science. They try to forget Meh, they develop some sort of Objectivism or something, they cling to Lah. And they build another tower, a modernistic one built only Lah. And here’s the limit of Lah-obsession: they can explore their reality, their virtual reality, but its very existence won’t exactly make sense. And if they are emotional creatures, their personal realities, their experienced realities, are still ruled by their Meh. They need something that resonates with that, and Lah-obsession will be inadequate. Their dreamers will dream, their artists will create, and they will come to understand the separation between Meh and Lah.
Dreams…
See Also: Non Sequitur, The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor
26 responses so far ↓
1 Ben // Feb 23, 2008 at 5:41 pm
I’ll never understand the point of these articles.
2 Pieter // Feb 24, 2008 at 9:54 am
Your meh and Hugo’s meh do not match?
3 gerhard // Feb 25, 2008 at 1:09 am
ben: from the sounds of it, he is trying to lay out an alternative theory for alpha/omega.
in this vr , the ’sims’ could evolve to create their own virtual realitys, leading towards new dimentions , layer apon layers of sims creating lah out of meh where meh is possibly lah, leading to n-th dimention of sims
that would also imply that many vr worlds could/would be running in parallel , possibly by multiple people.
(sounds a bit like mormonism)
i think we dont need to pre-program the meh. Each conciousness would evolve a virtual reality based on the shared lah to be able to experiance the lah induvidually and make sense of it, be it dog , cat, rat or human.(u need to understand the world to act in it.. to understand it is to model it. each model completely customized to each beings capabilities but equal in their diversity to handel lah)
communication between sims would eventually let their multiple interpretation of the lah spread between them.
a ‘common’ lah known and experianced as meh.
the most successful, not potentually ‘best’ would become more prevalent amongst the mehs. (mutual/common knowledge)
the diversities of competing mehs would also include ones with the realization that lah leads to meh and hence treat lah as meh. ..
from the point of view of a virtual reality , there would be evidence of programming not just the result of it (ie. the experiance.). they may evolve to be able to.
figuring out the lah is a reasonable way of figuring out the meh/lah.
part of this would be going out there , into the virtual world and experiancing it , searching the lah, understanding the truths of lah.
just think of how amazing something like earth is within our reality and how diverse and amazingly beautiful it is, think of the size of the universe and the many plantets within .
now imagine a virtual reality simulation , so daft about the potentual beauty of the lah that they all stay in one place debating and worshiping the nature of meh while leaving most of lah relatively unexplored. giving up on most of the infinately possible dreams. i wonder what would become of the sims should they embrace the lah and evolve in the greater lah which dreams they’d have…
Veritas vos liberabit not Adeste fideles.
4 Ben // Feb 25, 2008 at 5:08 am
FWIW, I picked up a Brian McLaren book (”The Story We Find Ourselves In: Further Adventures of a New Kind of Christian”) the last time I took my daughter to the library. I made it to page 57 tonight before I had to throw the book across the room.
5 Hugo // Feb 25, 2008 at 10:05 am
*grin*
I’m much more curious what you’d do with a Marcus Borg book…
I’m impressed by your curiosity and willingness to have a look.
The point of these articles: I’m constructing a little memetic toolkit for future use. (A meh-toolkit?
)
6 gerhard // Feb 25, 2008 at 10:48 am
when are u gonna take my comment out of moderation ?
7 Hugo // Feb 25, 2008 at 11:25 am
Done.
It wasn’t in the moderation queue, it was classified as spam by akismet. I don’t know why I’m getting so many false positives these days. Grrr…
If you make a comment that doesn’t appear, let me know. (Maybe drop a short comment.) Chances are I don’t know there’s another false positive.
8 gerhard // Feb 25, 2008 at 11:32 am
cool , no worries , took me long to write , so many lah and mehs
what do u guys think about the not needing to pre-program the meh and the meh being sujective lah part?-g
9 Hugo // Feb 25, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Yes, meh is your subjective experience of lah.
Shared meh facilitates communication. But yes, getting to grips with lah is of great importance.
On pre-programming meh… well… I don’t think we’d be able to program the meh of the entities we created in a virtual reality. Not without first “becoming one of them”, y’know? Necessary in order to relate in a meaningful manner, and to understand how their meh functions. We can only interact with the (recursive) virtual reality’s lah.
In our lah though, we have an influence on our own meh, and on the meh of the people around us. Meh requires bootstrapping. This includes the language you learn as youth. I’m not sure we can really think or reason without language (I love considering language the first technology.
)
Further, we develop our meh, our understanding, our concepts, theories, ways of relating to the world. We develop our minds. And we teach. And this is all good and important, but knowing the limits of meh is necessary. If it conflicts with other people’s meh, we need to know how to deal with that without starting wars over it. And if it conflicts with lah, it must change. Our lah is our reality, that can be empirically tested and demonstrated.
The reality of lah cannot be changed by thinking differently, so it is more important for our meh to adapt to our lah. We do have influence over lah though. For example, there’s poverty and hunger in the world, there is something we can do about that.
Anyway, moving on…
10 Hugo // Feb 25, 2008 at 6:47 pm
A friend suggests I capitalise these terms. Even then I’m bound to look nicely insane, especially taken out of context.
11 Ben-Jammin' // Feb 26, 2008 at 3:06 am
I’ve never read him, but I understand his books are a bit bigger and heavier. So I’d probably heave it instead of throw it.
I would be quite the hypocrite if I was unwilling to read opposing viewpoints while asking others to consider mine.
12 Ben-Jammin' // Feb 26, 2008 at 7:50 am
I put up part 1 of a review. You should be able to read it without having to register, I think.
13 Hugo // Feb 26, 2008 at 10:35 am
Naah, “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time” is about 140 pages. More scholarly than the other books of his I have (i.e. more footnotes, apparently a tougher read for the person I’ve been lending books to).
I can read, but I cannot respond.
Did he say that? Or is he just pointing out we all have different “Meh’s”? Did he say “my religion is the only truth”, or are you bringing your views of Christianity with you?
But it’s fun reading your review. I still wish you’d picked up “Secret Message” instead though.
14 Hugo // Feb 26, 2008 at 11:03 am
While we’re on a Meh/Lah post…
The rest of what you call “taking shots at naturalism”, is something I see more as an awareness of the limitations of Lah, pointing out that Meh is a significant part of the human experience.
He didn’t say that, did he? What he says is this:
He doesn’t identify the true story to that detail. McLaren is very inclusive of religions in general. I’d suggest he’s pointing out how integral a part of human culture this is.
But yes, I’m biased, and I don’t feel like defending my statements right now.
I’m particularly interested who the main target of these books are. Probably hard to know though. Are you able to appreciate how “ground breaking” they are to someone coming from a fundamentalist background? Can you have an appreciation for the importance of having a continuum of perspectives? (Instead of everyone being solid atheistic naturalist/skeptic like you?)
15 Ben-Jammin' // Feb 26, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Everything I’m reading indicates he is making Lah claims.
I’m bringing my understanding of verbs like is with me. I don’t see how else to read what he wrote. He doesn’t say other religions, like his own, are creations created by creative beings in the story we find ourselves in. His story is treated very differently - it IS the story we (including non-Christians) find ourselves in.
Going back and re-reading to check…the part where he says ‘a perversion of the true story’ is in chapter 8. He begins talking about his story, then the book gives the quote about the modern Western story being a ‘perversion of the true story,’ then he goes on to talk about Eastern religions like Hinduism:
Considering he is referring to both of the competing stories to his Christian story as mistakes and talking about neither of them being true, I don’t see any reasonable interpretation other than the one I’ve assigned, even after re-reading.
The library didn’t have it.
And this is where I disagree with you strenuously and fail to see the point of your meh and lah posts. I see the religious apologetics and such that I’ve read as making lah claims.
All of the context of that chapter, and the preceding and following ones, suggest that he considers Christianity the true story.
Absolutely not. My imagination and/or empathy can’t stretch that far.
No, although a naked ‘no’ answer will not suffice. I appreciate a free and open attempt at developing accurate lah models. Inevitably, people will disagree, including some who will be supernaturalists, theists, dualists, etc. But the more people who use the best methods of investigation, the better the resulting consensus will be. If that happened to result in nearly everyone subscribing to naturalism, I wouldn’t see that as bad, any more than I see the near unanimous opinions of asupermanism, asanta clausism, or 2+2=4 as bad. If it goes the other way and the best methods of investigation being used by the most people results in me being the only naturalist, well, I’m just another human giving it my best shot.
16 Ben-Jammin' // Feb 26, 2008 at 12:08 pm
I bet I’m mixing him up with Kung (the u is the one with the two dots over it.) Kung, Borg, both four letter last name theologians who I’ve never read.
Too many concussions.
17 Hugo // Feb 26, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Thanks Ben, I appreciate your comments. We’ll hopefully have more interesting discussions next month.
18 Hugo // Feb 26, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Is what, though? What is-claims that McLaren make bother you? If it is claimes like “blabla is true”:
“Us post-modernists” distinguish between “fact” and “truth”. A myth can communicate a profound truth about the human condition. From “our” perspective, thus, a claim like “the story of *bla* is True” is not the same as “the story of *bla* is factual”. In this understanding of “truth”, you end up at that idea of “so, what’s your truth?”, an idea I bet you don’t like very much.
That kind of “truth” requires a lot of context to communicate/explain, often people holding onto said truths do not have a good idea what the deconstructed explanation for the truth is, but they still recognise, or feel, the truth speaking to them. Progress can be made if one could dig into the truth and find out what it is that they find so valuable in it. At that point, we can climb out of the trenches and stop senseless bickering and war. Well, that’s the idealist’s naive dream anyway.
Hypothesise that these books are aimed at the fundamentalist, and serve as an intro to liberal Christianity, through use of the tool of a dialogue with someone “on the outside”, and these books look very different. That, methinks, is the point of this part in the preface:
This book is there as a tool to help a certain kind of seeker, written with that kind of seeker in mind. If you’re not that kind of seeker, or do not understand that kind of seeker’s mindframe, chances are you will misunderstand the intention of the book.
From your perspective (dare I say with your baggage), this might look like “taking shots at natrualism”:
From another perspective, this could be saying. “What are you so worried about scientific naturalism for? You think that undermines your concept of ’sacredness’? You should be much more worried about the powerful global economy then, quit demonising science!”
Do you see what I mean?
OK, hopefully this is all I will say on this topic. I have not read that particular book, and typing out my interpretation of every piece is really too time consuming and likely not useful enough…
And yes, again, I’ve not read that book, so my response is not that well-informed.
*sigh*.
19 gerhard // Feb 26, 2008 at 4:30 pm
sounds alot like declaring absolutely that there are no absolutes
anyway , mclaren (and now after your recommendation, i have read some of what he has written ) sounds more like he rationalises , he twists language and turns meanings of words into their most abstract of fikkel of meanings to backup his ‘truths’.. sounds more like an american politician , bables on without actually saying much…
btw, i want to add something to ponder about regarding china
did you know they don’t emphasize a creation story in their spiritualism? you know why? because in their oral and recorded history they still have a memory of a pre-civilization human society. So for them, creation doesnt really matter as much as them attaining the techonolgy of civilization which was ‘brought’ to them. (they actually think white people , namely , the red haird germanic/norse )
so for them truth is , that being a man means nothing unless man is civilized which is why human life is considered cheap there and why they embrace other cultures and incorporate their ideas/thinking into their society but reject creationism..
20 Hugo // Feb 26, 2008 at 5:39 pm
*sigh*
21 Ben-Jammin' // Feb 27, 2008 at 2:28 am
Well, Neo gets asked if the creation story he is selling is a myth:
He specifically denies it is a myth and specifically refuses to call it anything less than fact.
You ain’t kidding.
I tried to give you the last word, but I failed. I had to respond to your ‘myth’ objection.
22 Hugo // Feb 27, 2008 at 2:46 am
Thanks Ben. Should I be leaving you with the last word?
“The story we find ourselves in.”
The idea of each religion being a “story” within adherents are living… Methinks the main idea here is that he doesn’t consider the stories told by “ancient Semitic nomads around a winter fire” as “less” than fact. He doesn’t have a scale leading up to “fact” as the highest on the scale. He likes being non-linear, or getting “above the line” (consider a line from fact to fiction, a simplistic line that doesn’t satisfy).
Reductionistic empiricism isn’t “better” than inspirational stories, inspirational mythos is not “less than” reductionistic empiricism. They’re different.
McLaren doesn’t deny science, btw.
Oh, and you’re more than welcome to respond, I’m hoping this explanation makes sense to you, even if you don’t like it.
23 Ben-Jammin' // Feb 27, 2008 at 3:18 am
Not if I say something you feel needs a response.
But he isn’t saying his story is a myth, like the other religious stories. He continually and repeatedly sets his apart, saying it is NOT a myth, and saying it is not anything less than fact. He IS making lah claims (in your terminology.)
If it is a myth that allows for him to lead a life he likes, just like other religions are myths that allow adherents to lead lives they like, he has had several opportunities in the book to say so. He specifically denies this point of view.
As part of the creation story he is presenting, he mixes in ‘objective facts’ freely, without any change in language or terminology to show that the rest of the story should be considered anything less than claimed objective facts also.
Paging through for an example:
snipped for brevity…
Every part of the story is being presented as (at least) objective fact.
24 Hugo // Feb 27, 2008 at 3:40 am
Except that example contradicts completely literal Lah-interpretations of Genesis, right?
He is indeed painting the Lah within the context of the Meh, I’d still say he is talking Meh most of the time.
Get this: Darwin’s work, “The Origin of Species”, is Meh. Meh that describes Lah… All our scientific theories are also Meh. They also try to describe Lah. But because they are Meh, they keep on changing as we discover and test (empirically) more interesting things in Lah.
In terms of “where does it all start”, yes, the theist (including me) ponders beyond empiricism, and calls that thing beyond, “God”. (I can quote the Terry Eagleton article here.) The atheist/empiricist typically thinks it doesn’t make sense to ponder beyond that. They’re quite happy not taking a bite from that apple.
And, of course, McLaren is a Christian, firstly. He is not a scientist, he’s not an atheist. You’re bound to differ.
Shall we agree to disagree? Or maybe agree that the story McLaren is describing is the story Christians typically find themselves in, and atheists typically do not find themselves in? “Neo” (ugh, when was that book written?) is describing his worldview.
Let me know if you find McLaren saying something you have a strong and specific disagreement with, something you would not be able to let go with something like “ah, okay, that’s their views, doesn’t make sense to me. I think he’s/they’re wrong, but it doesn’t do much harm in and of itself”. Or cases where “Neo” or McLaren makes statements of a more explicit “other worldviews are wrong” nature…?
25 Ben-Jammin' // Feb 27, 2008 at 3:53 am
“Neo” is a nickname the character took based on his initials - N.E.O. That doesn’t bother me.
I can’t agree that McLaren is describing the story Christians typically find themselves in, while atheists find themselves in another, because again, the Neo character explicitly rejects this point of view.
I’m up to page 90 now, I’ll post more of my thoughts at some breaking point. Maybe the next time I feel compelled to throw the book across the room.
26 Rinus // Feb 27, 2008 at 11:57 am
Sorry for potentially hijacking the thread (i have no idea where to put this, so I’ll just put it here).
Here is an article I just read and thought readers of this blog (and especially this thread) might find interesting.
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