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Thursday, April 17, 2014

Holy Thursday

Holy Thursday
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The Mass of Holy Thursday commemorates three things.


(1) Institution of the Eucharist (where bread and wine are changed into Jesus' Body and Blood).

(2) Institution of the priesthood (where Jesus gives the ordained priest the power to change bread and wine into Jesus' Body and Blood, so we have the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for all time).

(3) Institution of the new commandment to love (I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another - John 13:34)


Jim McCrea


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Purifying Sufferings in Life

Purifying Sufferings in Life
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From the book The Mystical Evolution by Fr. Arintero:
 
 
"All the mortifications and active purgations which we practice would serve us poorly indeed if God did not perfect and complete them with the passive purgations [sufferings that God sends] to which, in His mercy, He subjects us. These passive purgations reach down into the very depth of our soul and there they discover and correct innumerable faults and imperfections which we ourselves would never notice, much less remedy. God mercifully conceals such things from fervent souls so that they will not be overwhelmed or discouraged. He discloses these imperfections only by degrees and in the measure needful to purify souls and subject them to new trials."
 
"Even in those things which appear to us to be very pure, righteous, and holy, we are guilty of a thousand inadvertent imperfections which we could never discover without some superior light. Much less are we able to correct them, unless some superior power comes to our aid. Since nothing vitiated or stained can be joined to supreme purity, holiness, and justice, without degenerating, smothering, and being repugnant to it, to arrive at perfect union and divine perfection it is necessary that God Himself have a hand in the work of our purification and rehabilitation."
 
"...At the same time the soul sees itself full of countless faults and imperfections which formerly it did not perceive or which may have seemed to it to be very insignificant, simply because it did not have eyes to see them or because they were small only in comparison with what we term grave faults. Yet in themselves these faults are truly enormous in the presence of infinite holiness and they cannot but impede that union which is so much desired. The soul sees itself filled with personal views and self-interest; and all its intentions, however pure, simple, and sincere they may appear, are unconsciously enveloped in the deceits of self-love."
 
"The purgations we need most are those which will penetrate to the very depth of the soul and will reach everything within us that is unclean so that the disorder of sin can be entirely removed. These purgations [sufferings of life] must be as varied and as forceful as our evil inclinations are numerous and strong; they must be the more violent and painful as the seriousness and number of our own faults are greater; and they must be so much the more probing and penetrating as the root of evil is the more profound." 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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More of Blessed Henry Suso on the Cross

More of Blessed Henry Suso on the Cross
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"In their many crosses and trials, My friends live happily in the hope of glory. They enjoy peace of heart and tranquility of spirit and in the midst of their afflictions they are happier than the worldly ones with all their pleasures and false peace ... Hear the reason why I tempt them in such a manner ... I dwell in the soul as in a garden of delights and I do not permit it to take pleasure in anything apart from Me and thus become attached to creatures. And because I wish to possess that soul chaste and pure, I encircle it with thorns and entrench it with adversities so that it cannot find rest in base and created things, but it must place all its welfare in the depth of My Divinity ... The reward which I give to these souls for their least suffering is so great that all the hearts in the world taken together would not exhaust it."
 
 
From Mystical Evolution by Fr. John G. Arintero, O.P. - p. 124.
 
 
 
 

Blessed Henry Suso on the Cross

Blessed Henry Suso on the Cross
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"I know O Lord, that Thy crosses are the instruments of Thy wisdom and the pledges of our eternity, but they should not be too heavy for our strength ... I believe that there is no one in the world so sorely tried as myself. How am I to endure them?" To which the Lord replied: "A sick man, in the midst of his suffering, always thinks that here is no other suffering comparable to his and every poor man thinks that there is no misery equal to his. If I were to send thee other crosses, your complaint would be the same. Be courageous, then; be firm and generous. Resign thyself completely to My will. Accept with resignation all the crosses which I deem it well to send thee and refuse none of them. Thou knowest very well that I desire thy good and I know what is best for thee. Experience has shown thee that all the crosses which I sent thee, whatever they have been, elevate thee and unite thee more closely and strongly with My Divinity than any other things which you might have chosen to do voluntarily ... If suffering did not molest thee, would it be true suffering? ... Why should it be strange that they cross is heavy, if you do not love it? Love it, and thou canst carry it easily ... If I were to inundate thee with spiritual consolations and embrace thee with love, thou wouldst not profit as much as through suffering the aridities and trails which I send thee ... Live, then, in peace, certain that thou wilt not perish under the Cross. It is easier for ten souls, who enjoy the delights of grace, to fall into sin, than for one soul that endures only affliction. The enemy has no power over those who lovingly weep under the Cross. Even if you were the most esteemed doctor in the world and the most learned theologian in My Church; even if you could speak of God with the tongue of an angel; you would still be less holy and less lovable in my eyes than a soul that lives under the burden of my crosses. I give My graces to good and bad, but I reserve My crosses for My chosen ones ... Affliction weans a man away from the world and draws him to heaven. The more his worldly friends abandon him, the more does he grow in My grace which elevates him and makes him divine. From the Cross comes humility, purity of conscience, fervor of spirit, peace, tranquility of soul, discretion, recollection, charity, and all the blessings which flow from charity."
 
 
From Mystical Evolution by Fr. John G. Arintero, O.P. - p. 125.
 
 
 
 

Monday, April 14, 2014

On False Complexity

On False Complexity
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** false complexity is what many modernists and secular humanists are subject to, who deny that we can know objective truth, objective reality, objective standards, and absolute morality ***


Dietrich von Hildebrand says:


 "Or again, a man may develop a predilection for complicating as many things as possible because he mistakes complexity for "profundity." This species of complexity ... is more or less an apanage of the intellectual. Its lover prefers obscurity to clarity; he is liable to credit oracular stammering with profundity, and to dismiss whatever is unequivocally and tersely enounced as trivial. He thus tends to make everything appear more complicated than it really is, and consequently falls short of an adequate knowledge of reality. For such people are blind to the trait of simplicity associated with the metaphysical wealth and height of being; they overlook the metaphysical law that the higher a thing is the simpler it is, in a sense - in the sense of inner unity, as expressed by the dictum, "simplicity is the seal of verity." They are insensitive to the value of true simplicity.

This kind of complexity, too, is connected with the false type of "consciousness." particularly its second form: what we have called the over-development of the cognitive attitude, and the cult of cognition as a self-contained process. The category of the intellectually interesting takes precedence over the category of truth. The protean vastness of untruth, the maze of arbitrary and extravagant but witty errors and sophistries are considered with great interest - if only because they divert the intellect from platitude and simplicity. The mere fact of their complexity (and often enough, of their abstruseness) confers on these errors - in the eyes of such people - a claim to be taken seriously, indeed, even a glamour outshining the simple dignity of plain truth.

Obviously the realm of concepts in which these minds roam about is a highly complicated and disharmonious world, for the possibilities of error are innumerable, whereas truth is one.
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This perverted spirituality hides an inherent impotence to penetrate the world of being, directly and essentially. The mind that wallows in complexity is unable to grasp the *logos* of what is in a straightforward way, to establish a vital contact therewith. It rambles around objects, without ever communicating with them intimately; its ideas are not inspired by the *logos* of the reality in question, and are therefore devoid of intrinsic necessity. A sterile "missing the mark" is the invariable fate of such minds: they are forever a prey to the infinitude of possibilities instead of coming close to the *one* reality. All intoxication with complexity betrays the hunger of those who feed on stones in place of bread."




 From book "Transformation in Christ" - Chapter five: True Simplicity


Also see The Profundity of Catholicism

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Friday, April 11, 2014

Problem vs. Mystery - Jim McCrea

Problem vs. Mystery - Jim McCrea
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By Jim J. McCrea


The work, Abandonment to Divine Providence, by Jean-Pierre de Caussade S.J. is one of the most profound ever. You can read it again and again, and yet get something new out of it each time. There is a tremendous clarity and light that comes from it. Every time I read it, it strikes me as deeper than the last time.

It has a very simple theme: God's providence working for our good in all situations. But it examines this theme from a multitude of angles, citing application after application of this, so that this one simple concept of God's will in all situations in our life, penetrates more and more deeply into the understanding.

There are basically two classifications of knowledge, as the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain points out in his book "A Preface to Metaphysics." One is called "Problem" and the other "Mystery."

Problem knowledge is simply the accumulation of material facts, or the solving of material puzzles, such as working out a theorem in mathematics or verifying a hypothesis in science. Mystery knowledge concerns faith and contemplation.

Once a problem has been solved, it is like a knot that has been untied. There is nothing more to do. It is a dead problem. With mystery, the mind penetrates more and more deeply into the same thing never exhausting it and finding new sources of joy (the object of this is *suprageometric* being).


The human person is like that. No matter how well you know him or her, there is always more to know.

In a Godly marriage, one will always find joy in the spouse (notwithstanding inevitable crises) because no matter how long the marriage lasts, there is always more to discover about the other.

In the priesthood, the priest doing the will of God discovers more and more pertaining to his ministry.

The Bible is mystery par-excellence. Every time we read it, we can find something new and more profound.

Mystery in the above senses, is what Jacques Maritain called "intelligible mystery" - that is, it is partly knowable and partly dark to our understanding.


The contents of Abandonment to Divine Providence, which discusses the idea of abandonment to the will of God at every moment in our lives, is mystery knowledge in a supreme sense.

It is a light that shines more and more, rather than a series of facts to be accumulated. And it is a necessary light for us growing in the Faith.

We can have a tendency to think that the events that come into our life are things happening at random. This can be a source of anxiety, because one can logically reason from the idea of randomness to the idea that something might occur in our life that is more than we can take.

This book points out that this is not the case. God's providence infinitely saturates everything. Everything we experience, down to the finest detail of existence, is a message from God to us and some influence from God to form us to eternal life.



On line book Abandonment to Divine Providence

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Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Problem vs. Mystery - Jacques Maritain

Problem vs. Mystery - Jacques Maritain
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Here Jacques Maritain explains the difference between reason and intellect in that reason is moving from one "problem" to another. Intellect is the penetration into being, which he calls "mystery." Problem and mystery are the two dimensions of cognition. Problem knowledge is moving from thing to thing, as in science. Mystery knowledge is staying in the same place with an ever deepening understanding of the same thing, as in contemplation - Jim J. McCrea



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Maritain says:

The proper object of understanding is being. And being is a mystery, either because it is too pregnant with intelligibility, too pure for our intellect which is the case with spiritual things, or because its nature presents a more or less impenetrable barrier to understanding, a barrier due to the element of non-being in it. which is the case with becoming, potency and above all matter.

The mystery we conclude is a fullness of being with which the intellect enters into a vital union and into which it plunges without exhausting it ... The Supreme "mystery" is the supernatural mystery which is the object of faith and theology. It is concerned with the Godhead Itself, the interior life of God, to which our intellect cannot rise by its unaided natural powers. But philosophy and science also are concerned with mystery, another mystery, the mystery of nature and the mystery of being. A philosophy unaware of mystery would not be a philosophy.

Where then shall we discover the pure type of what I call the "problem"? In a crossword puzzle, or an anagram. At this extreme there is no ontological content [no being content]. There is an intellectual difficulty with no being behind it. There is a logical difficulty, a tangle of concepts, twisted by a mind which another mind seeks to unravel. When the tangle has been unraveled, the difficulty solved, there is nothing further, nothing more to be known. For the only thing to be discovered was how to disentangle the threads.

... In fact every cognitive act, every form of knowledge presents these two aspects. The mystery and the problem are combined. The mystery is present because there is always some degree of being, and its depth and thickness must be penetrated. The problem also because our nature is such that we can penetrate being only by our conceptual formulae, and the latter by their nature compose a problem to be solve.

The problem aspect naturally predominates where knowledge is least ontological, for example, when it is primarily concerned with mental constructions built up around a sensible datum - as in empirical knowledge, and in the sciences of phenomena ... purely ideal as in mathematics; or yet again when its object is mental constructions of the practical intellect as in craftsmanship and applied science.

... The mystery aspect, as we should expect, predominates where knowledge is most ontological, where it seeks to discover, either intuitively or by analogy, being in itself and the secrets of being; the secrets of being, of knowledge and of love, of purely spiritual realities, of the First Cause. The mystery aspect is predominate in the philosophy of nature and still more in metaphysics. And most of all in theology.

Where the problem aspect prevails one solution follows another: where one ends, the other begins. There is a rectilinear progress of successive mental views or ideal perspectives, of different ways of conceptualizing the object. And if one solution is incomplete, as is always the case, it is replaced by its successor. It is as when the landscape changes and scene succeeds to scene as the traveler proceeds on his way. Similarly the mind is on the move. Progress of this kind is progress by substitution.

On the other hand where the mystery aspect prevails the intellect has to penetrate more and more deeply into the *same* object. The mind is stationary turning around a fixed point. Or rather it pierces further and further into the same depth. This is progress in the same place, progress by deepening... Thus we can read and reread the same book, the Bible for example, and every time discover something new and more profound.

Here knowledge is not exactly constituted by the addition of parts, still less by the substitution of one part for another. It is the whole itself that grows or rather is more deeply penetrated... as the indivisible whole and in all its parts at once.

At this point we must distinguish three kinds of intellectual thirst and three corresponding means of quenching them.

In the first case, where the problem aspect predominates I thirst to know the answer to my problem. And when I have obtained the answer I am satisfied: that particular thirst is quenched. But I thirst for something else. And so interminably.

This is the water of science, useful and bitter.

In the second case where the mystery aspect predominates I thirst to know reality, being under one or other of its modes, the ontological mystery. When I know it I drink my fill. But I thirst and continue to thirst for the same thing, the same reality which at once satisfies and increases my desire. Thus I never cease quenching my thirst from the same spring of water which is ever fresh and yet I always thirst for it.

This is the water of created wisdom.

In the third case - the vision of God's Word face to face - my thirst is once again different. I thirst to see God and when I see Him my thirst will be completely quenched. I shall thirst no longer.



This is the water of uncreated wisdom of which it is written " Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a fountain of water springing up unto everlasting life." (John iv. 13-14) The climax of spiritual disorder is to confuse the third of these thirsts with the first, by treating the things of eternal life, the vision of God, as an object of the first thirst that namely which belongs to the first case of which I was just speaking, the category of knowledge in which the problem predominates. For .this is to treat beatitude, not as a mystery, our mystery par excellence, but as a problem or series of problems, like the solution of a puzzle. As a result of this confusion Leibnitz can declare that beatitude is a moving from one pleasure to another, and Lessing that he prefers endless research to the possession of truth which would be monotonous, and Kant considers the boredom which it would seem God must experience in the everlasting contemplation of Himself.


But it is also a radical disorder to confuse the second thirst with the first by treating philosophy, metaphysics, wisdom a category of knowledge in which reverence for the mystery of being is the highest factor as an object of the first thirst, pre-eminently a problem to answer, a puzzle to solve. Those who make this mistake attempt to make progress in wisdom by proceeding from puzzle to puzzle, replacing one problem by another, one Weltanschauung by its successor, as though in virtue of an irrefragable law. Progress by substitution is required by the sciences of phenomena, is their law, and the more perfectly they realise their type the more progress they make. But progress of this kind is not the law of wisdom. Its progress is progress by an adhesion of the mind to its object and a union with it increasingly profound, progress as it were by a growing intimacy. And it therefore requires as its indispensable prerequisite a stable body of doctrine and a continuous intellectual tradition.



From A Preface to Metaphysics by Jacques Maritain



Maritain was one of the premier Catholic philosophers of the Twentieth century.



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Saturday, April 5, 2014

The Metaphysics of Artificial Intelligence

The Metaphysics of Artificial Intelligence
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By Jim J. McCrea


First published in the Iron Warrior (June 1987), which is the engineering paper of the University of Waterloo
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Republished with minor modifications
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Many concerns, philosophical in nature, are now being raised about artificial intelligence (AI). They say that it is replacing the human mind. The fears expressed are, at best, that when AI becomes sufficiently advanced a large pool of unemployed people will be created, and at worst, that the computer will take over. However, it is my belief that these fears are completely groundless.

Firstly, it is a sheer impossibility for the computer to ever equal, let alone surpass the ability of the human intellect. Artificial intelligence, no matter what level of sophistication it attains, will always be artificial. Although it can mimic many operations of the human mind, it is still only a finite approximation of an infinite process. It cannot equal the human mind (statically) in its complexity, or (dynamically) in its operation.

It cannot equal the human mind in its complexity for the following reason: we can see that to construct anything, whether it be by man or machine, a coordinating principle is required. In the case of a man, that coordinating principle is his intellect. The intellect of man directs the assembly of basic components which confer on a final product a specific nature or essence (whether it be hardware or software). If his intellect is the efficient cause of this essence, the essence must be entirely contained within his intellect prior to the assembly of the product. One cannot give what one does not possess. Moreover, the essence of the most sophisticated device he might design may only be a small part of the complex web of ideas and relations which is the totality of his mind (arbitrarily small, in fact). Therefore we can conclude that the human mind is not only more complex than any system that can be constructed, but infinitely more complex (complex only within respect to the ideas and relations contained within the intellect; as a substance the intellect is a unity).

We can see that AI cannot equal the human mind in its operation in light of the principle of causality. First with respect to the final cause, and then with respect to efficient cause (in the terminology of philosophy, final cause refers to the goal for the event taking place, and efficient cause is that which makes the event happen).

With respect to final cause, suppose one is given a concrete value to calculate; say it is the electrical impedance of a certain component. The goal of having this knowledge may be the increased cost effectiveness of a certain product, such as a stereo receiver. This would be a first order final cause, because it is in immediate relation to the knowledge gained by the calculation. The second order final cause would be, perhaps, increased sales of this product, because it is the goal of the first order final cause. Similarly, a third order final cause could be increased profits for the company producing the product and so on. There may be many more orders in the chain, but we cannot proceed to infinity. Since the purpose of the computer is to serve humans, this series must ultimately terminate at a manifold which is a set of human needs and wants (All human activity whether assisted by machine or not has happiness as its ultimate goal, says Aristotle). The final cause of all computation must be this manifold of human needs or wants; therefore, no matter how advanced AI becomes it must always be subordinated to human control.

With respect to efficient cause, let us again suppose we are given the impedance of an electrical component to compute. That which immediately allows this value to be known is an algebraic expression from which it is computed. Because it is immediate it can be called a first order efficient cause. A second order efficient cause may be an operation in calculus that gives us that algebraic expression. We may continue in this series, going to ever increasing levels of abstraction; but again, we cannot go to infinity in the number of terms of the series. It must terminate; but where? What would be the ultimate efficient cause of all computation?

This would be a manifold, again, which I call the axioms of pure reason (in traditional philosophy these are the first principles of thought and being). These are acquired necessarily and invariably by the human mind. Their acquisition is a natural function of the human intellect. One of these, which is ultimate because it inheres in all the others, is the law of non-contradiction. It states that something cannot both be and not be under the same relation at the same time. Another very fundamental axiom is the law of identity, which state that a thing is what it is - A is A. A third is the syllogism, which states that if all of a group x has the property e, and a is a member of x, then a has the property e.

These axioms of pure reason are not something which the intellect manufactures, but are acquired because the mind mirrors the logical aspects of reality. These axioms cannot be computed, but are those on which all computation ultimately depends. They cannot be computed because the act of acquiring them is a function of understanding. Understanding is the act of one perceiving an idea, and in the same act of cognition knowing that one perceives this idea. Understanding is an exclusively human activity (in the material world). While in a machine one part can reflect upon another, only the human mind has the ability to totally reflect upon itself. Thus for the reason that the ultimate efficient cause of all computation must be the axioms of pure reason. AI must again be subordinated to human control.

The example given above is the calculation of a specific numerical parameter, but the above mentioned concepts are also valid for AI which deals with non-numeric computation involving expert systems and natural language synthesis/analysis. As AI advances it will be able to perform increasingly subtle and complex operations. The effect will not be to dehumanize, as many people fear, but to free the mind from drudgery so that it can perform actions which are more and more human.


** End note (written in 2014) - At present large software projects may involve the work of thousands of computer programmers. All the work of these programmers is not cobbled together haphazardly, but with it there is a profound coordination. The work is arranged in a hierarchy.  At the bottom level are the programmers writing all the sub-routines to take care of details. Then on the next level are programmers who use these subroutines to write sub-routines for more general functions. At the top is the programmer who integrates those subroutines to write the program to perform the AI function needed. The programmer at the top needs to know the *essence* of the program (the essence is that which makes it what it is). Now this essence is only a part of the sum total of relations and notions in his mind, so that any AI program that he writes must be significantly inferior to his mind. That is why AI can never be superior to the human mind.
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