The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens
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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The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens
The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens
The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens
[…] 2008 at 6:53 AM raph_kosterhttps://www.raphkoster.com/2008/07/20/the-sunday-poem-modus-ponens/https://www.raphkoster.com/?p=1841This week’s poem is a meditation on good and evil and faith and logic via Principia […]
Maybe it’s the geek in me, but I find something especially beautiful about science poems. This one is lovely.
(Also, I have no idea why my livejournal friend page is hitting your trackback. There are 9 other readers on that feed. I removed it from technorati to see if that would help, but apologize for the comment spam.)
This is one of my favorite recent science poem finds:
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Poem Written By an Evolutionist Who Believes in the SoulThey say there are more people living now
on this earth than have ever lived before
which means, in terms of reincarnation,
that some of the people we pass on streets
_
must have been snails or badgers once,
since there are only so many human spirits
to go around—or maybe they were clouds
of atoms drifting through the wet vapor.
_
Perhaps the disgruntled toll booth operator
is the compilation of nine coconut trees and
the cranium of a pterodactyl, plus two lilies
and a salt shaker burnt up in a kitchen fire.
_
And I myself carry the essence of penguins
amid the faint consciousness of a tennis ball,
sharing space with those who were giraffes
and hippos, swatting flies with their fat tails.
_
If so, surely this means too that population
is not just the product of low infant mortality
plus a great deal of unprotected sex, but rather
the graduation of lesser species on their way
_
towards an age when life will float the cosmos
as joyful flutters of immeasurable raw energy,
without memory, light as light but twice as fast,
presiding over the cold stone of dead planets.
_
Michael Meyerhofer
Now I wonder what dinner was like in Uday and Qusay’s home.
I actually like this poem Raph and find it refreshing that this thought is being expressed. Or is this a case where I see what I want to see expressed in your poem because I need its expression?
I’ll leave you with this, we see, speak, and hear, through a symbolic lens of illusion… or is it delusion?
I’ve always wondered whether “we’ve found the gene for X” might not be just as accurately stated as “we’ve found a gene that doesn’t suppress X”.
Imagine you have a glass of water with a vertical line of three holes in it, and you have absorbent sleeves of varying diameters. If a sleeve is within a certain diameter range, it will cover all three holes, and there are no leaks. If it is too large, it will slide too far up the glass, and one or more holes at the bottom will be uncovered; the glass will leak. If it is too small, it will not slide far enough up the glass, and one or more holes at the top will be left uncovered; again, the glass will leak.
If we pretend the glass is human behavior, the leak is undesirable behavior, and the sleeves are genetic markers, a scientist might excitedly run up with a sleeve of an inappropriate diameter to prevent all the leaks… and exclaim that he’s found a sleeve that causes leaks.
But there is no sleeve that causes leaks. What causes leaks is that the glass has holes in. I’ve never been satisfied that genetic researchers have even attempted to consider alternate hypotheses; the notion that “genes cause things” has been around since the fifties, long before we had any real evidence, and it’s just never really been challenged.