Briefly stated, fantasy is reality minus details, plus details.
F = (R - d1) + d2

Delving more deeply, there exists a reality. Some may say there are many, or that there is one but viewed from many angles, all of which I don’t care to debate. Whatever it is, it’s full of details.

These details often get in the way of our full apprehension of it. Scott McCloud makes reference to this in his theory of “masking“, in which a less-rendered protagonist is more accessible to a reader than a fully-rendered one.

Once the reality has been distilled from its trappings, additional details can be re-introduced safely. In the inarguably well-rendered Buffyverse, there are specifics to the point of trivia. Still, the writers of the show have stated that the Monster-of-the-Week is merely a metaphor for abstracted human issues. Dealing with stress becomes demonic slave-drivers. Reality is still intact, but wholly transformed into fantasy.

This is no thought exercise. These issues come up on a regular basis for many of us. Granted, I may have first become aware of them in my high school days, where my own hobbies were under constant scrutiny by the hacky-sacking upper crust, despite their established positive effects… More recently, watching an episode of Firefly with my girlfriend led to questions like, “Why are they speaking in Chinese?” and “Why does that guy have a sword?” which pulled my relationship with fantasy (specifically sci-fi in this case) to the center of my human relationship. I was forced to confront why (or better yet, how) I better relate to Malcolm Reynolds than an office-mate.

The details in “Children of Men” are not what made it a great film, but they are what made it fantasy. I’ve seen plenty of movies about men with kids, but none have so well abstracted the concept of fatherhood. No doubt an excellent script and flawless acting helped create the world, but the world was what made the film reach me and establish a connection between my abstracted model of myself-as-father all the way back to the reality of my being one someday.

Fantasy is the laboratory in which many of us discover reality. It may take a certain kind of mind, but to those people it is invaluable.

A number of (possibly all) of my friends and family have more attachment to a spiritual practice than myself, so—although I’ve watched from afar as others have attempted to tackle this issue—I’ve kept out of the debate until now. Of course, I don’t really see what there is to debate. Didn’t Immanuel Kant say the same thing back in “Kritik der reinen Vernunft“?

For those who haven’t followed the antics of Dawkins (non sequitur: he also invented the word “meme” back in 1976), his book proposes that the term “delusion”, defined as a belief that is maintained despite contradiction by rational argument, most certainly applies to religion. He’s been interviewed by everyone from the BBC to Stephen Colbert. Both the Left and Right reviews of his book and follow-up documentary “Root of All Evil?” tend to criticize his ferocity rather than his arguments. Probably because they rightly perceive the futility in doing so. Dawkins, an extremely articulate Oxford University biologist, is the Top Dog on his issues (though I’d love to see him debate Ken Wilber). His criticism of the lack of academic rigor around religion is dead on. I’m still tempted to say, “so what?”

Religion explains religion using religion. How do we know God exists? Because the Bible says so. Why should we believe the Bible? Because it’s the Word of God. How do we know it’s the Word of God? Because the Bible says so. Around and around we go. Any rational person who doesn’t notice this should be sent back to Sunday School (another non sequitur: an overzealous Sunday School teacher once forced me to choose either Jesus and my Hindu friend Arjun… Arjun won… see you this Christmas, Arjun!). Noting circular logic need not make you an Atheist, however.

Science explains science using science. How do we know electromagnetism exists? Because scientific research says so. Why should we believe scientific research? Because it follows the Scientific Method. Why should we believe the Scientific Method? Because its results are confirmed by scientific research. Around and around we go again. As a system unto itself, science is completely coherent. As a world view, it makes basic assumptions, like “the world is understandable by the human mind”, that I’m uncomfortable saying are a priori.

The real problems come about when one system tries to govern the other. “The God Delusion” is clearly an attempt to apply science to religion and, no surprise, religions fails miserably. However, religion has been doing the same to science for years—whether it’s religious US politicians censoring research on sex education or Galileo being forced to recant for suggesting the Earth was not the center of the universe.

Can science and religion get along? There are lots of examples that attempt to merge the two. Christian Science characterizes disease as a separation from God and treatable through faith. Many find their objection to conventional medicine irresponsible, conveniently ignorant about both the Placebo Effect and that 1.5 million people are hospitalized every year due to adverse reactions to prescription medication. Another example (I’m deliberately picking on religions that include “science” in their name) is Scientology, an “Applied Religion” which offers its members specific techniques (like the ARC Triangle and Tone Scale) to lead more graceful lives. Though both of these belief systems have received more than their fair share of criticism, two dear friends of mine are a Christian Scientist and a Scientologist—and they’re both wonderful people.

That’s what it really comes down to for me. People. Many before me have asked Dawkins what, really, is so bad about religion. He shares a list of atrocities committed in its name or justified by it, ranging from genocide to homophobia. Critics of Atheism quickly retort that Stalin was an Atheist, isn’t that just as bad? Of course, those who seek to control populations always make use of belief systems to do so. Though George W. Bush claims to get his orders from God, I don’t think unprovoked assault is quite what Jesus had in mind. Let’s not forget how Darwinism led to Nazi eugenics. In short, both religion and science can be tools for evil in the hands of a tyrant.

With that, I really have to end with Nietzsche. “God is dead!” is possibly the most misunderstood three words in modern philosophy. To really understand what Friedrich was getting at in “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft“, let me include the rest of the passage.

God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife—who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event—and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!

Nietzsche writes not in the first person here, but puts these words into the mouth of a “madman”. He is laughed out of the village, an Atheist village, all the while shouting, “What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?”. Nietzsche’s message is not intended as anti-religious, but an admonition of those who have dethroned God without realizing their vital new responsibility to bring order to the chaos of existence. “Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness?”

This is a question that people of science and people of faith must answer, and can only answer, together.

The official law broken, buried in this pdf, is right here:

Nevada law requires every person or group of persons organized formally or informally who advocates the passage or defeat of a ballot question at any primary or general election to report their contributions and expenditures in excess of $100.

When the Drug Czar came to town back in 2002, the Marijuana Policy Project cried foul and filed suit. The Czar countered that campaigning against the question was part of his job in “speaking out about the dangers of illegal drugs.” The paradox is that, if Question 7 passes, marijuana would no longer be an illegal drug—so would it not be his job anymore?

I won’t weigh in on Question 7 itself, living in a city where medicinal marijuana is legal makes me aware of both the positivies and negatives, neither as extreme as either side in Nevada would have you believe. That said, illegally opposing legalization of something on the grounds that it’s illegal spins my head around with its level of absurdity. Using the same logic, I could just as easily say that legalizing marijuana would keep 14.6 million Americans from using illegal drugs every month. They’d still be smoking pot, it just wouldn’t be… y’know.

My mother, an elementary school librarian, recently told me about a book in which a kid decides that a ball point pen should be called a “frindle”. Since it’s a kid’s book, his years of campaigning are eventually rewarded and “frindle” is added to the dictionary. Let’s all wish “megagaltastic” the same fate. I bring this up (and have before) because social change is not unlike language.

There were outcries over the ebonics controversy destroying the English language, and later the same over pager slang. Our nation managed to survive both. Even “MILF” hasn’t destroyed any lives, despite it not being “a real word”.

At any rate, be it language, social change, or the legalization of a controlled substance, it takes those people who either knowingly break the rules or innovate into territory where rules have not yet ventured that push us as a culture, people, and planet. No cause, be it votes for women or gay marriage, can win without challenging what is “legal”. Our founding fathers, afterall, were traitors to the crown every one. If we limit ourselves to what is legal, we’re tacitly approving the world as it is. By breaking the law, we evolve.

I’m going to stop now, before I become a Think Different ad.

Philosophers have wrestled with logic for thousands of years, coming up with some amazing advancements:

• Ternary Logic (1400s) recognized that it’s possible that there are other answers than true and false, but only goes as far as adding “unknown”. There is an understanding that, if known, that answer would probably be true or false.
• Bayesian Logic (1700s) challenged the Law of Excluded Middle by navigating the wasteland between true and false with probability. A threshold for truth is set where if something has, say, a 98% chance of being true, we feel comfortable calling it true.
• Fuzzy Logic (1960s) can be understood as a set of states (e.g. early, on time, late ) that are assigned ranges of truth (e.g. earlier than 9:00, 8:45 to 9:15, later than 9:00). In this way, you might ask “Was Stan ‘late’ for work today?” and receive “yes” as your answer, as I arrived at 9:13. If you had asked “Was Stan ‘on time’ for work today?”, you’d receive the same answer.

Still, almost three millenia after Aristotle, most common usage relies on Boolean Logic. A set of mathematical operations named for George Boole, who must have been a very hot and cold sort of fellow, everything is true or false, on or off, 1 or 0. Boole is so immensely popular with computer programmers, they’ve named a whole datatype after him. It contains a single value, either true or false.

I’m no fucking Buddhist, but it seems a priori to me that this strict bivalence is missing some answers. Nagarjuna, a Buddhist philosopher back in 150CE, claimed a dialectic of four states: true, false, both true and false, neither true nor false. Though this certainly feels like a more natural way to describe the world (“Are you still in love with her?” really needs those third and fourth states, no?), it’s never been embraced by mathematics or computer science because it’s near impossible to program a dialetheia.

Or is it? Say we have a datatype, like a Boolean, but containing one of four values (true, false, both, neither). I guess we’ll call it a Nagarjunean. Imagine how this might be used:

if (Nagarjunean is true) then action

Let’s consider what happens for each value. “True” would trigger the action, as would “both”. “False” and “neither” would not. This works with other expressions:

if (Nagarjunean is not false) then action

Again, “True” would trigger the action, but so would “neither”. “Neither” is not false. “Both” would not trigger it, as it is false (both true and false, actually). Is this making sense?

I realize that Nagarjuna himself would take great issue with all of this. His dialectic of the four states was intended as an admonishment of people running around trying to measure everything and claim knowledge of the world. Still, I wonder what power may lie in applying his logic to modern mathematics and computing. Is there application for Buddhist wisdom in today’s world?