{"id":9897,"date":"2014-07-14T16:58:56","date_gmt":"2014-07-14T20:58:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=9897"},"modified":"2014-07-14T16:58:56","modified_gmt":"2014-07-14T20:58:56","slug":"of-morality-and-mandelbrot-pope-francis-bookclub","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2014\/07\/of-morality-and-mandelbrot-pope-francis-bookclub.html","title":{"rendered":"Of Morality and Mandelbrot [Pope Francis Bookclub]"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In 2014, I\u2019m reading and blogging through Pope Francis\/Cardinal Bergoglio\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus<\/a>. \u00a0Every Monday, I\u2019ll be writing about the next meditation in the book, so you\u2019re welcome to\u00a0peruse them all<\/a>\u00a0and\/or read along.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This week, in my Pope Francis reading, I found his description of\u2026 for lack of a better word, the\u00a0discretion<\/em> of higher truths a little confusing:<\/p>\n

Truth has great value, but it lacks immediate clout, whereas power coerces. \u00a0Paradoxically, the more noble the truth is, the less power it has. \u00a0Even simple truths have some power, because they confirm certain needs and tendencies\u2013think, for example, of the truths that relate to our immediate vital needs. \u00a0But the more elevated the truth, the less coercive force it possesses; the spirit must grow in freedom simply in order to grasp it. \u00a0The nobler a truth, the easier it is for cruder realities to discount it or even ridicule it; it must rely even more on nobility of spirit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I found this argument a little odd, especially when Pope Francis extends it to say that holy truth, as the most exalted, has the least power to coerce. \u00a0The way I\u2019ve always thought of these non-coercive truths is that abstract truths have less power over us simply because we don\u2019t bump into them very much. \u00a0It took a long time to discover that Newton wasn\u2019t the whole story, because the cases where his theory failed, and relativity turned out to be needed, were fairly rare in everyday experience. \u00a0And we still haven\u2019t quite nailed down the truth or falsity of the Riemann Hypothesis<\/a> because its consequences don\u2019t intrude into our lives the way the consequences of, let\u2019s say, the \u201cIs Breathing really necessary?\u201d Hypothesis.<\/p>\n

However, moral truths also seem to have only a weak power to compel, even though\u00a0those<\/em> questions are, without doubt, relevant moment to moment. \u00a0I might say that the reason that we don\u2019t feel as compelled as we do by simple, bodily truths is that the truth has a kind of complex structure. \u00a0Let me explain using a math analogy.<\/p>\n

The Mandelbrot set<\/a> is pretty simple, if you just want to describe it algorithmically: wikipedia summarizes it as \u201cthe\u00a0set\u00a0of complex numbers \u2018c\u2019 for which the sequence ( c , c\u00b2 + c , (c\u00b2+c)\u00b2 + c , ((c\u00b2+c)\u00b2+c)\u00b2 + c , (((c\u00b2+c)\u00b2+c)\u00b2+c)\u00b2 + c , \u2026) does not approach infinity.\u201d \u00a0If I were to say it with a bit less notation, I\u2019d say that you take a complex number (one with\u00a0i<\/em> \u2014 the root of -1 in it) and square it, and then add itself. \u00a0Then you square the sum and add the original number again, and you just keep doing it. \u00a0You\u2019re checking to see if the sums you keep producing are going to stay below some arbitrary number, or it they keep increasing forever, without limit. \u00a0The Mandelbrot set is what you get when you start checking every point on the complex plane and coloring it black if it satisfies these conditions.<\/p>\n

Describing the rule is easy. \u00a0Drawing the shape is harder. \u00a0And predicting whether an arbitrary point will be black or white also takes a bit of computation (though there are some pretty reliable heuristics). \u00a0In a similar way, we know some general rules about ethics \u2014 don\u2019t harm someone without cause, do easy kindnesses without cause, etc \u2014 but might struggle to figure out how to implement them vis a vis a particular person or situation. \u00a0We know the relationship we\u2019re supposed to cultivate (one of\u00a0agape<\/em>) but we have to do a few experiments to see if our present course of action trends in that direction.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not the whole story of why we struggle to do the right thing, but it seems plausible to me as one of the factors that causes us to not obey ethics the way we do physics. \u00a0The truth is present, and\u00a0more<\/em> accessible than, say, physics in a Bose-Einstein condensate<\/a>, but it\u2019s very complex at the fine-grained level, so we usually work with approximations and generalized rules, instead of the fullness of the truth. \u00a0It\u2019s not necessarily very far from us; we just have to get farther away, retreating and retrenching in abstraction, to get a better sense of the picture.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2014, I\u2019m reading and blogging through Pope Francis\/Cardinal Bergoglio\u2019s\u00a0Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus. \u00a0Every Monday, I\u2019ll be writing about the next meditation in the book, so you\u2019re welcome to\u00a0peruse them all\u00a0and\/or read along. This week, in my Pope Francis reading, I found his description of\u2026 for lack of a better word, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":9899,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[138,227],"class_list":["post-9897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-epistemologyphilosophy","tag-math-and-morality","tag-pope-francis-bookclub"],"yoast_head":"\nOf Morality and Mandelbrot [Pope Francis Bookclub]<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In 2014, I\u2019m reading and blogging through Pope Francis\/Cardinal Bergoglio\u2019s\u00a0Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus. \u00a0Every Monday, I\u2019ll\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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