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The Sunday Poem: Modus PonensJuly 20th, 2008 |
This week’s poem is a meditation on good and evil and faith and logic via Principia Mathematica, based on the news this week that some genes for violent antisocial behavior have been identified.
It turns out that up to one percent of the population may have these genes. But they do not always express, because nurture and life circumstances are just as important in whether or not the person’s actually going to turn out antisocial, or dare I say it, evil. And yet, we have so often ascribed these behaviors, throughout history, to the Devil, or to other supernatural causes.
I ended up linking this to the notion that religion exists in our mental space in a position analogous to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which in its broadest layman interpretation states that a system cannot prove its own consistency; wasn’t there something religious, in the end, in Russell and Whitehead’s belief in complete systems, in the ability of logic to put everything into order?
OK, so either you come to this blog because it sometimes leaps from game design to poems linking genetics, theology, and mathematics in rhyming hexameter — or you are wondering what the hell (no pun intended) I am on about. Shrug. Here’s the poem either way, annotated for your (in)convenience.
Modus ponens
These days, when evil’s gene is sequenced, and one percent
Of our species damned, one wonders how the fate
Of empires hinged on changes small as earlobe’s bend
Or shape of brow, but was accounted divine punishment.
If this, then that, and therefore so, logicians say.
But erudition falters, premises are false,
And gene expression governs evil RNA,
Which may or may not manifest the Devil’s pulse.
Perhaps religion is the gap that Gödel saw,
The faith in something more than systems can contain;
Like Russell’s faith, like Whitehead’s faith, the futile thought
That logic renders all itself to logic plain.
So all faith hides the knowing; knowing hides some faith.
We speak of evil: don’t we mean more than we know?
We mean incomprehensible, Occam’s razor failing us,
And Hilbert’s second problem writ upon our souls.
Have mercy, then, upon the one percent, who know
Not what they know, three chromosomes from Heaven’s glow.
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[...] 2008 at 6:53 AM raph_kosterhttp://www.raphkoster.com/2008/07/20/the-sunday-poem-modus-ponens/http://www.raphkoster.com/?p=1841This week’s poem is a meditation on good and evil and faith and logic via Principia [...]
The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens
The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens
The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens