Category: tech

(this is speculative, FWIW)

There are a lot of Bahá’í Writings, applying to a lot of different contexts, and many aren’t translated yet. But I’ve been puzzling over two quotes. The first is:

Know thou that every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute. (Gleanings, LXXXII)

This makes sense to me — how could a universe so vast (and probably not the only one) not have life everywhere? And the concept of social progress with the Bahá’í concept of Progressive Revelation — that we are evolving from family unity, to tribal, to national, and now we need world unity — surely implies interplanetary unity somewhere down the road? And besides, there’s Star Trek 😉

The other quote is:

Having created the world and all that liveth and moveth therein, He, through the direct operation of His unconstrained and sovereign Will, chose to confer upon man the unique distinction and capacity to know Him and to love Him—a capacity that must needs be regarded as the generating impulse and the primary purpose underlying the whole of creation.… Upon the inmost reality of each and every created thing He hath shed the light of one of His names, and made it a recipient of the glory of one of His attributes. Upon the reality of man, however, He hath focused the radiance of all of His names and attributes, and made it a mirror of His own Self. Alone of all created things man hath been singled out for so great a favor, so enduring a bounty. (Gleanings, XXVII)

This too makes sense — this physical world is a nurturing home for humanity, and the definition of “mankind” or “humanity” is often cited as “fully reflecting all of the attributes of God”, not just some of them like the mineral, plant, and animal Kingdoms.

But look at that second quote closer: it says “man has the unique distinction and capacity to know Him”. Surely the Klingons can also know God? And we’re not admitting a pantheon of gods, there is just One God for both Klingons and Earthlings.

So if I bring those 2 quotes together, it seems to me in a Star Trek future, we would have to use the words “human” or “mankind” to also include all the different intelligent species in the universe, and they would have human souls, neither Klingon souls nor Earthling-specific souls.

This might be quite a shift in our thought. There’s probably a reason the distances between stars is so large, related to our capabilities now.

Orson Scott Card explores this in Ender’s Game, where we face the guilt of wiping out an entire race of beings before really knowing them, if I remember it correctly.

Back in the 1960’s cars had mechanical carburetors and ignition, even manual chokes, and for me they were sometimes a source of problems — if they were adjusted just right, the car ran well, but the next day it might not because the weather changed a little, or the airflow got a little obstructed, and the engine sputtered or failed to start. Sometimes it flooded with too much gas, but if you let the car sit for an hour or so to “dry out” it would start then. It wasn’t as predictable or reliable as with today’s sensor-equipped models.

As I age I find my own mind acting like this, some days are productive, some a wash, and some have failures where the best I can do is try again another day. Right now I work in InfoTech, but not in management, and the level of detail required becomes difficult to manage as an older person. Most of my coworkers are at least a generation younger, some almost two generations; although we discuss the work itself, there is no one I can talk to with similar experiences. In my small local Bahá’í community I can watch how people deal with aging and learn from them, but they don’t work in IT.

Lately I’m puzzling over a new experience, and not just in the workplace — sometimes people seem to react overly well to me and I think back the next day and wonder what in the world I did that was so great; other times people will look at me in disgust and I think to myself what did I just do wrong? That’s usually a good time to quit for the day and try again, but sometimes even after reflection I can’t figure out what happened, thus it’s harder to learn from.

One thing that’s obvious is I’m too isolated, and so I talk too much in some situations. That takes time to work on, but I should have more time in a few months.

Using the analogy that our heart is meant to be a mirror, Baha’u’llah says:

Cleanse thy heart with the burnish of the spirit (Hidden Words #8)

I intended this blog to have some focus on religion and on technology, the two areas that I spend most of my time thinking about. So far I haven’t felt able to contribute anything useful about tech, but here’s a topic that for me applies to both — the parallels between a persons’ growth through life, and the process for writing working computer software.

Both are usually iterative, and involve verification that changes comprise progress in the desired direction and do not reintroduce old problems. Of course this analogy only goes so far, but it’s fun to play with.

So when writing a new program in this paradigm, the first step is to construct the tests that it must pass, and then to run those tests and watch it fail (because there is no program yet). This verifies that the tests actually do measure what they’re supposed to. (One recent beginner book that emphasizes this process is Ken Youens-Clark’s Tiny Python Projects (Manning, 2020)). Then you gradually add functionality until those tests pass.Then later on as changes are made, the tests are re-run to make sure nothing has broken.

And as we grow up as people, situations come up to test our abilities and our reactions. As a little kid trying to walk, this is very visible; as an older person encountering trying situations, or opportunities to be kind or helpful, we might look back on those and say to ourselves something along the lines of “I thought I was a really nice person, but I completely handled that situation wrongly”, or “I thought I was over that weakness, but I just fell into the trap again.” With luck, we’ll try to do better the next time, or the next time, or … eventually.

With enough social status, or success in our careers, or money, it’s possible to be more insulated from tests — especially if we’re around people who are just like us, who reinforce our own self-esteem a little too much, and we can coast along feeling self-satisfied. Then life hauls out that Python test-harness and shows us, and maybe those around us, that it’s time to improve some more. Over time (sometimes a very looong time) this increases our abilities, like the little kid who achieves walking, then walking without falling, then running, then helping in the family, then helping in a community …

Something we can do to help this, maybe, is to ask 3 questions at the end of each day:

1. what did I do well today?
2. what could I have done better?
3. what were my blessings?

Bring thyself to account each day ere thou art summoned to a reckoning; for death, unheralded, shall come upon thee and thou shalt be called to give account for thy deeds.

— Bahá’u’lláh, Hidden Words

In the 1990s, sf writer Neal Stephenson wrote some notes on the computing scene (linux-Microsoft culture wars were in the air, & I regret getting so caught up in that back then). I think this related to his novel Cryptonomicon. The links to those notes have disappeared AFAIK, but the part I’ve saved and quote below has been copied by a few others as well.

This imagines God sitting at a unix terminal running the “universe” program with different physics constants to see what kinds of universes are created. The context for this is the discussion as to whether our universe is a product of Intelligent Design in some form, or a random accident — and the recent discovery that even slight variations in these constants would produce a universe in which life was not possible. Quoting just the central paragraph because I think it’s so good:

I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:

universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27....

and when he’s finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what’s going to happen; then down it comes–and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.

I had forgotten about this until I watched today’s Bahá’í Faith — Modern Perspectives talk by Kendal Williams on the Sifter of Dust site — now on Youtube. He was talking about the compatibility of scientific and religious worldviews.

P.S. A more recent article on the friendliness of the structure of the universe for life is on The Atlantic as “Where Science and Miracles Meet” (porous paywall). But I think this field is still Early Days in our understanding.