Just Passing Through

Opera isn't so bad under Windows Vista.

I found out Dell was offering me a free upgrade to Windows 7, but as an "upgrade" I have to be running Vista first. So after running into just a few more glitches in Linux, as it struggled to use my hardware properly, I gave up and put Vista back on. This is all 64-bit, by the way.

In Linux land, just about everything comes in 64-bit if you want it that way. Not so much in Windows land, but I can understand the concept of running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit system. It's not quite so easy to slip in viruses and malware, particularly if it means changing the system files. So far, there haven't been any 64-bit viruses.

So naturally I had to add all my favorite free software. Most things which worked in XP work in Vista. The list includes things like Firefox, Emerald Editor, Cream/Gvim, Lynx text browser, and PuTTY so I can log into my Unix shell account. The Vista interface looks better than anything the X server can do, but I'll get sick of this baby blue. I'm not sure why Microsoft never came up with other basic colors to run with Aero visual effects.

But I see Windows 7 is faster and not quite so limited. I'll let you know when it gets here.

Those over thirty today can remember not having the Internet. That is, what we know as the Internet was not in the mainstream consciousness much before that. Most of us thirty and over can recall the freshness of the experience of pulling up content not already on our computers, and sending messages to people across the world without postage and envelopes -- and a whole lot quicker.

I'm not suggesting the network of networks is going anywhere. It's going to change so drastically we won't recognize it, and very soon.

There are a few million hobbyists, and a few million more die-hard oldsters who will continue buying and using personal computers, regardless of the brands and types. We'll continue running various operating systems, mostly Windows, then Mac, then other stuff. Maybe Linux and friends will gain market share, but that won't really change the overall picture so much. Then, of course, you'll have a very large number of business workstations around for a very long time. The corporate world tends to change glacially slow when it comes to such things.

So something like a PC unit will still be around after you and I are forgotten. But the way we use them, particularly in how we interact with the Internet, will be gone even sooner. Already there are thousands of devices using the Net which aren't anything like a PC. That will explode in the coming years, slowed only by the broad current economic misfortune. For consumers, most of it will be via something like cellphones, though that beast, too, will soon morph into something we can't imagine right now. But the vast majority of what passes over the Net to consumer devices will become controlled by increasingly fewer hands, so to speak. More and more content will be restricted to the looming giant gatekeepers, and independent content will disappear.

That is, it will disappear as far as consumer devices are concerned. Those devices will become increasingly "commoditized" -- made so utterly essential, so cheap, so very similar with precious little variation. It's the nature of how hardware, software, services and access is blended in the market. We now refer to that as an ecosystem. I'm doubt anyone can be sure how much of this drift in the ecosystem is a matter of reading the consumer's wishes, and how much of it is manipulating consumer perceptions (and thus, their wishes), but the field is shifting. Where the money goes is where the entire field of endeavor will go.

Those who use it for different reasons were there when it all started, and will still be around when the rest have moved on to other things. I'm one of them. It's hard to tell which way we will go in the next few years, but the underlying "geeknet" will not die easily. Either we will get to keep our old network flowing over the mainstream Internet, and keep the old protocols while everyone else moves to new ones, or we'll have to shift to another infrastructure completely. Right now, there's a lot of exploration in both directions. Since it's really easy to keep the geeknet stuff mostly below the radar, using far fewer resources to share information we find useful, there's a good chance we'll still be hidden on the mainstream network system. Maybe it will be some of both; who knows?

But the geek community will increasingly drift off into other worlds, because the center of attention and imagination will move, drawing most of them along with it. Only a decreasing number of folks will try to keep the older technology alive and improving. Should the Third World start grabbing a big share of access at slow speeds and such, they'll keep it alive for a time. But eventually they'll demand their share of what everyone else has, and they probably won't spawn too many older style computer geeks. In other words, they'll pass through the same territory much more quickly. The original academic free exchange will shrink to obscurity.

Perhaps the geeks will find other ways to connect. The whole thing is really just a by-product of oddballs, misfits, even geniuses, artists of that other kind who just can't confine themselves to the mainstream of life. There has to be a better way, not just how we do it, but how we even think about it. They are the heart and soul of what brought the Net to life, and they will continue on with our without it. The Net was a tool, and for a time the ultimate tool, but still, never more than just a tool. For now, as long as there's a way to keep using some part of the current Internet as it exists, they'll avoid having to reinvent the wheel of rolling traffic back and forth among themselves. If they ever find another way to do that, something better for the purpose, the Net will truly die. It might continue to exist as a means of daily commerce, etc., but it will be dead all the same.

Praying to God is not a rational act.

In the English language, we say something is "reasonable" because we could expect most reasoning minds to find the thing acceptable. We refer to reasonable people as "rational," with the implication they are well acquainted with reality as we all experience it. If we wanted to say someone was an extremist at demanding strict logical reasoning, we might call them "hyper-rational." For those of us who understand human reasoning, but sense there is a whole world above it, we might call it "super-rational."

It's not possible to prove God exists, or that there is any such thing as super-rational, also known as supernatural. The terminology itself acknowledges any proof would be a little thin. When Jesus walked upon the earth, He would assert at times He was the Son of God, though He did often use other terminology. It was an assertion, for which He really had no rational proof. Rather, He demonstrated a reasonable implication of such authority by miracles. Those miracles were typically said to be "signs" -- an indicator. As the Pharisees approached hyper-rationality, they found reason to reject Jesus as the Messiah, despite such undeniable signs as raising Lazarus.

Today, as part of the gospel of Jesus Christ, we assert He was the Son of God, that He was sinless, that He could thus die for our sins, and that He rose from the dead because He had authority over the Fall. We also assert all mankind is fallen, sinful by nature, and needs that redemption. While we could conceivably cast this as reasonable, it requires accepting certain givens which are inherently unreasonable. But they aren't irrational, they are super-rational.

The popular term for my religion is Christian Mysticism. The Christian part is obvious. The Mysticism part includes the notion the things which really matter don't yield to human intellect. It can't really be put into words by way of clinical explanation, only indicated by using symbols. It is altogether outside the constraints of human reason, but only because it is above it -- super-rational. That I consciously assert all this justifies the label "Christian Mystic." By now, you should realize following Jesus is inherently mystical, but we have this long tradition in the West of clinging to Aristotelian epistemology as the foundation for all things. Most mainstream Christians balk at the label "Mystic." Yet, in popular use, that is what we are. I'm just admitting it openly.

Naturally, that word "mysticism" covers an awful lot of territory. It would be very easy to get lost in the wilderness. Only God Himself can make sure you tell the difference between smoke and mirrors versus the Pillar of Fire and Smoke. I have no part in most of what is established today as Christian Mysticism. I don't care much for John of the Cross and his ilk because I refuse to recognize the authority of the Pope. Frankly, the term "mysticism" is much abused, in that the underlying epistemology is typically quite rationalist. Their personal experience with God is constrained by excluding a lot of the original biblical experience, and including a lot which the Hebrew writers would reject. Still, there is some common ground, so I don't have to be prickly. The only other question is whether we can work together.

So far, the silence is resounding.

Okay, it's not so dramatic as the title suggests, but it is for me.

With all due respect to our hosts, I'm not going to use Opera browser any more. It remains one of the best efforts out there, but it keeps breaking my heart. I've written about that often enough here, so it's probably not really news. The point is, the Opera developers keep making the same mistakes over, and over, and over. Bug reports don't help. Every release I have tried, starting back with Opera 5.0, has always done one particular thing so consistently which no other browser does: It locks into race mode and won't die without extraordinary measures to kill it.

I realize it is something in the basic structure of Linux which permits certain kinds of flaws to take over all system resources. Now, I suppose Opera is not yet multi-threaded, because on my dual processor machine, it only grabbed one CPU core. I was still able to walk through the process of killing it since the second core was unaffected. That's a good thing, but the folks at Opera still don't quite get it. These days, virtually nothing in a stable distribution of Linux does the race condition... except Opera. And Opera does it all the time.

It's possible the Opera folks will see this, but I seriously doubt it will register. I've tried hard to work with them, going through all the channels and notifying them this thing keeps coming up. After all these years, why don't they reconsider how they hook it into the X server? How about we stop having lock-ups from JScript, for Pete's sake? What does it take?

Sorry, but I don't have time to fight with it any more. Even if I have to compile it myself from source, my computers will be mostly Mozilla-based (aside from text browsers) in the future. I can't afford Opera any more. It may be free to download, but in terms of the hassles, it's too expensive to use.

In my research, I run across debates and disputes. The difference between a debate and a dispute should be obvious: A debate tends to focus on the actual issue. A really good debate serves to define underlying issues, which helps us understand why some things are never really settled. It points back to the very fundamental assumptions, some of which cannot themselves be debated reasonably.

You have to start somewhere. A trademark of this blog is pointing out what I claim is a very fundamental difference between where the typical American in particular, and generally all Western Civilization, starts versus where I am sure the Bible starts -- that they are not at all the same place. But it's not simply about the Bible, but the whole span of what we do. I doubt there is much dispute among Christians that the Bible should frame all we do, that living Christ means no part of our human experience escapes His examination for fitness in His Kingdom. The difference is in how this gets applied, based on the means of evaluation.

We can show, as a reasonable postulate or theory, how the ANE folks adhered to a different path. That is, they may well face pretty much the same basic issues of human life, but they didn't come to their answers by the same means. In our Western intellectual traditions, we refer to that other process by a broad term -- "mysticism." Among other things, it refers to a process which passes through at least one non-rational step. In analytical logic, I have to be able to show every step. That's what we learn in math classes when they teach us about proofs (if our math classes were any good). We have a large body of material discussing how people fail to set out certain intervening steps, because it surely means coming up with a wrong conclusion. You have to account for all the parts which make up the whole. In the ANE, this was understood, but was never the final answer to things.

This rational framework didn't arise overnight. What we now call "Western Civilization" wasn't born fully developed. While good solid philosophers, particularly in Ancient Greece, did delineate this view for all to see, it took a while for the leading minds in Western Europe to formalize the details of adopting this. We can examine the writings of famous scientists in more primitive times making notes which included mystical sentiments, and we view some of their work as not entirely rational. Look up the term "alchemy" sometime. It tells the story of trying to find ways to do things we now consider impossible, chasing myths. Oddly, the turning point for academia as a whole is rejecting all inputs deemed outside the rational process, largely featured in the so-called "scientific method." We call that period of time the Enlightenment, which Christians recognize as the rise of secularism, the rejection of God and faith. We want the fruits of rational logic, even cling tightly to them, so much so we insist on trying to define our faith rationally.

Today, when I happen to stumble into a debate on something, it's clear right away who is adept at this rational logical form. Pointing out the mistakes of those who fail that standard does not settle all the disputes. We recognize way too many people don't embrace the thing totally. That in itself should indicate something, but it's mostly dismissed as proof a disputant/debater is not up to par. The image is that of the lonely few who are truly logical, part of an elite Brotherhood of Reason.

I would suggest first that were we limited to such a pure logical standard, most scientific advancements would not happen. My reading in the history of discoveries indicate the majority are found pursuing something else, or pursuing something which could not be rationally pinned down. It was a driving sense that something was missing, which we often refer to as "intuition." I contend that intuition is a primary manifestation of the necessity of mystical tools in the process.

We can easily prove the majority of those living under the ANE intellectual traditions weren't particularly adept, any more than Westerners under their own traditions. Indeed, there is plenty of room for differing over just what it might mean to be adept with such a tradition. Perhaps that's because the ANE intellectual tradition doesn't consider that question in the first place. A significant element in embracing the ANE framework is not rejecting rational logical process, but realizing it can only go so far. It cannot possibly account for all we experience, individually or together. It asserts we have to include something on a different level, a level which Western Civilization insists does not actually exist, insists it's just another form of irrationality. ANE thinking assumes it is self-evident there is something on an entirely different plane, a form of logic which passes through some area of the human consciousness which cannot be conformed to rational analysis. They still make room for acknowledging as fools those who would rather not think on any level at all, but react from emotions.

There are times when, in pursuit of my best efforts to process the world around me, I'm going to reveal results which most people will reject. In particular, I've already faced a mass of rejection from those who should be the first to understand -- my fellow believers. Answering them is not always easy, because they keep demanding I adhere to that rational process, which precludes the thing they don't accept in the first place. Because I want to hope for the best, I generally assume they simply don't get it yet. If what I have found reflects at all any part of the Ultimate Truth of things, then I'd be a fool to keep it to myself. So I keep seeking ways to open their minds to possibilities they haven't explored. To me, it's mostly a matter of countering propaganda, of ripping down the lying advertising, the false warning posters plastered all over the entrance to the hidden treasure rooms of God.

In other words, against all rational hope, I'm forging ahead.

I'm poking that mystical method into places I haven't seen it used before. I contend there is a logic to it, just not a rational process of logic. When people react to the odd pronouncements this process brings forth, I stand ready to explain how I can't explain to their satisfaction. In my debate arsenal, the weapon with the most wear and tear on it is to mention I didn't get there through a process they recognize, that I don't have to understand everything about the matter, because I understand human reasoning itself. My calling is to question the process by suggesting possibilities you probably won't even see if you confine yourself to the scientific method. So my proposition wasn't meant to start a debate, but to encourage discovery.