Fake forsythia

From the Baby Jesus to Neil deGrasse Tyson

This is another post that’s leading up to my next article for 3 Quarks Daily, which will be out next week some time. Working title: “Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?” This post connects that opening question with my concluding remarks, which are based on something Neil deGrasse Tyson has said about the relationship between humankind and the cosmos. As before my interlocutor is Claude 4.6 Sonata.

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Earlier I had mentioned that, when I was a child, I had the idea that the world was a movie God created to entertain the Baby Jesus. While it’s a child’s idea, it seems to me that it could almost be presented as a serious theological idea. How might one argue that within the larger Christian tradition?

It's actually not as far from serious theology as it might seem. A few threads within Christian thought that resonate with it:

The Son as the intended audience of Creation — There's a strand in trinitarian theology, developed especially by Jonathan Edwards, that holds that God created the world essentially as an expression of and for the glorification of the Son. Creation is an overflow of the love between Father and Son. Your child's intuition that the Baby Jesus was the intended audience of the cosmic show isn't far from that.

The Cosmic Christ — In Colossians and in John's prologue, Christ is the one through whom and for whom all things were created. The universe is somehow oriented toward and around him. Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point develops this most grandly — all of creation is moving toward a final convergence in Christ. Your movie runs in one direction, toward its intended viewer.

God as Author, Creation as Narrative — C.S. Lewis and later theologians like Hans Urs von Balthasar used theatrical and dramatic metaphors for Creation quite seriously. God as playwright, Creation as the drama. Your movie metaphor is a natural modern equivalent.

The Beatific Vision reversed — Normally theology speaks of humans being granted the vision of God as the final beatitude. Your childhood cosmology interestingly reverses this: God arranges the vision for Christ. There's something almost playful but theologically suggestive in that inversion.

The flatness problem you noticed as a child is also, unexpectedly, serious. Representation always fails to capture the thing represented — which is more or less what negative theology, the via negativa, has been saying about all human conceptions of God for centuries. You just noticed it from the other direction.

Theosis

So, the Baby Jesus and Christ are one and the same individual. If Christ is within each of us, then each of us has within the Baby Jesus for whom the universe was created.

That's a genuinely beautiful theological move, and it has real roots in Christian mysticism. The indwelling of Christ — Christ in you, the hope of glory, as Paul puts it in Colossians — is central to mystical Christianity. If Christ is within each person, and if the universe was created for Christ, then each person carries within them the one for whom everything exists. The universe was made for you, not in the egotistical sense, but in the sense that the divine recipient of Creation dwells within you.

This connects directly to the doctrine of theosis — divinization — particularly strong in Eastern Orthodox theology. The human person doesn't just receive grace from God; the human person becomes participates in the divine nature. You contain the one for whom everything was made.

It also rhymes with the image of God (imago Dei) tradition — that each person reflects something essential of the divine. Your formulation sharpens that: not just a reflection, but an indwelling of the very one the cosmos was staged for. 

And then there's Meister Eckhart, who pushed this furthest in the Western tradition — the birth of Christ in the soul as the central mystical event. The Baby Jesus, in a sense, is perpetually being born within each person.

What's striking is that your childhood cosmology, taken seriously and extended this way, leads almost naturally to a mystical universalism — every person contains the audience for whom the universe performs. That's not far from your secular mystic position, just with different vocabulary.

The movie is still running. Everyone in the audience is also the Baby Jesus.

DeGrasse Tyson’s move

So now let’s couple this with Neil de Grasse Tyson’s move, that the four most prevalent elements in the universe are hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, and those are, as well, the four most common elements that make us up. Add to that Prigogine’s insight that complexity inheres in the fabric of the universe. To which we can add a corollary, given enough time, intelligent life will inevitably develop. Put that all together, what do we have?

What you have is a convergence of the scientific and mystical cosmologies that is almost shocking in its neatness.

[“Shocking” is one way to put it. “Too neat for belief” might be another. OTO, if the deepest issue concerning religion is not about matter vs. spirit, but rather one of agency....THAT I'll have to think about.]

Tyson's point says: we are not visitors to the universe, not anomalies in it — we are made of it, continuous with it, the universe knowing itself through us. His phrase is that we are "stardust contemplating the stars." The boundary between self and cosmos is, at the material level, illusory.

Prigogine adds: complexity isn't an accident imposed on an indifferent substrate. It's latent in the structure of things from the beginning. The universe has, so to speak, intentions — or at least tendencies — toward greater organization, toward life, toward mind.

The corollary makes it teleological: given enough time, something like us was always going to happen. We are not contingent. We are what the universe was always becoming.

Now couple that with the theological thread: Christ — the divine Logos, the organizing principle of Creation — dwells within each person. And the universe was created for Christ.

What you get is this: the universe spent fourteen billion years making beings capable of containing the one for whom it was made. The cosmos is the movie, yes — but the projector, the film, the screen, and the audience turn out to be made of the same stuff, organized by the same deep tendency toward complexity and consciousness, arriving inevitably at creatures who carry within them the divine recipient of the whole show.

The Baby Jesus was always going to be born. In all of us. Out of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen.

That's your secular mysticism stated as cosmology. It requires no supernatural intervention and loses none of the wonder.

Teleology not necessary

I wonder about teleology. Prigogine alone doesn’t imply teleology. I added that with my corollary. But is that corollary necessarily teleological? In an entirely different thread I’ve offered a hypothesis about the cultural evolution of literary texts that implies a direction, but does so without teleology.

The vector comes from the difference between shared knowledge and common knowledge, as those things are understood in game theory. The idea is that, in one way or another, literary texts feelings and ideas in people, things they might be reluctant to talk about. But, through the medium of those texts, they’re shared. And as people talk, not directly about themselves, but about the texts, shared knowledge becomes common knowledge, which is then embodied in a new generation of texts, which evoke further feelings and ideas that are merely shared. And so on. That idea needs development and explicit evidence. (I developed the idea by thinking about how sex is treated in texts. It’s not even mentioned in Jane Austen, but almost two centuries later sex is presented in explicit detail in, e.g. Fifty Shades of Grey.)

Now, that’s a long way from life arising from inorganic matter, and clever apes becoming protohumans. Still, there’s a principle there. We may not need teleology to square that particular circle.

You're right to be cautious about teleology. Teleology smuggles in a destination that was always intended, a pull from the future — and that's a much stronger metaphysical claim than you need.

What your literary evolution model offers instead is something like directionality without destination. The vector is real — from shared to common knowledge, from implicit to explicit, from Austen's unspoken sexuality to Fifty Shades — but nothing in the mechanism requires that the endpoint was pre-specified. It emerges from the logic of the process itself. Each step creates the conditions for the next step. The direction is immanent in the dynamic, not imposed from outside or ahead.

That's actually a more interesting and defensible position. It's the difference between a river having a direction — always downhill, always toward the sea — and the sea having summoned the river. Prigogine gives you the downhill gradient. Your corollary about intelligent life becomes not a teleological claim but an observation that, given the gradient, certain outcomes become overwhelmingly probable. Not inevitable in the strong sense — not fated — but natural in the way that rivers reaching the sea is natural.

The analogy to life arising from matter and apes becoming humans is then: the gradient toward complexity is built into the fabric of things, and mind is what complexity looks like at sufficient scale and organization. No destination was required. Just the gradient, and time.

Which circles back to your secular mysticism rather beautifully. The universe didn't intend to produce beings who hear unplayed bell tones in a basement in Troy. It just kept complexifying until it did.

Bach’s Gigue on Microtonal Guitar in Bach’s student Kirnberger’s tuning - Burak Akan

Microtonal Guitar - Tolgahan Çoğulu

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Microtonal Guitar Institute presents Burak Akan playing Bach's Gigue from Violin Partita No. 2 arranged by Manuel Barrueco for the guitar. Burak Akan is a student at the guitar department at Istanbul Technical University, studying with me. We used Bach's student Johann Kirnberger's tuning (Kirnberger III) for this piece. The thirds are more natural than the 12tet in this tuning. For example, the tonic chord is D major with just major 3rd (D-F#) and a fifth (5.5 cents narrower than the perfect 5th).
Here are the cents: D Eb-10 E-7 F-6 F#-14 G-2 G#-10 A-3.5 Bb-8 B-10.5 C-4 C#-12

Music: Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004 IV. Gigue
Arrangement: Manuel Barrueco
Guitarist: Burak Akan
Guitar: Adjustable Microtonal Guitar (www.microtonalguitar.org)
Burak Akan's YouTube: https://bit.ly/3IwmTF3

Tulips

Iran was able to resist a bully's attack, so can Taiwan.

Daniel Byman and Seth G. Jones, Iran Resisted a Powerful Attacker. Taiwan Can Too. NYTimes, Apr. 19, 2026.

As the United States’ and Israel’s war with Iran grinds to an uncertain conclusion, observers have been quick to label it a win for China. The war has damaged American prestige around the world and angered countries and their populations whose economies face inflation and disrupted supply chains. But a closer look at Iran’s methods in resisting the United States reveals uncomfortable lessons for China as it weighs whether to follow through on its threats to take Taiwan.

Iran prevented the far more powerful United States from winning a war that, on paper, it should have walked away with. Iran weathered decapitation strikes and continued to counterattack, despite heavy bombing and inferior weapons. Iran’s ability to close the Strait of Hormuz is particularly instructive. Its navy had only dilapidated surface ships, a small number of diesel-powered submarines, and numerous small, fast-attack speedboats. Iran’s air force had no advanced attack aircraft and no true bombers.

What Iran did have, however, was a large stockpile of drones and missiles — including anti-ship cruise missiles — capable of striking vessels in the strait and hitting military and commercial targets across the Middle East. Iran also decentralized its command and control network and dispersed and concealed its weapons in multiple locations to make it difficult for the United States and Israel to find and destroy all of them.

Later:

Survival requires more than hardware. Iran weathered massive strikes against its political and military leaders by quickly replacing them and by decentralizing military command and control. It maximized deception and concealment, stored weapons in underground bunkers to increase survivability and relied on mobile systems that could be quickly rolled out, launched and rolled back into bunkers.

Taiwan needs to prepare similar moves to survive the potential disruption of its command networks and to be ready to fight in the face of decapitation strikes, space and counterspace attacks and offensive cyberoperations. Doing this will require plans for succession, decentralized command and control, deception and survivability.

There's more at the link.

Friday Fotos: Cosmic Ray Gun

When I was six or seven I had the idea that the world was a movie that God created to entertain the Baby Jesus. I guess I’d found those stories they told in Sunday school so entertaining that I figure the Baby Jesus enjoyed them as well. A year or three later I had an idea which I described this way in a rather long and complicated article about the Self:

When I was seven or eight I was given a toy which we can call the COSMIC RAY GUN – I forget the real name. It had the shape of a pistol, but it didn't shoot toy bullets or even make toy noises. Rather, it was a device for projecting short film-loops on the wall. Each time you pulled the trigger it would advance the film one frame. This toy came in a box and the box cover had some lettering which proclaimed the toy's name, COSMIC RAY GUN, a picture of the toy itself, and a picture of a boy holding a box. The boy's box had some (somewhat smaller) lettering, COSMIC RAY GUN, a (somewhat smaller) picture of the toy itself, and a (somewhat smaller) picture of a boy holding the box. This regress went as far as the resolution of the image would allow, but I was just clever enough to be able to imagine it going on and on and on without discernible end. That is to say, my brain was somehow able to imagine that each representation could itself become the object of a representation.

Last night I presented that paragraph to ChatGPT along with a request for it to draw a picture of the box. I then spent the next 45 minutes or so having it draw the same image in various styles. Here’s some of my favorites.

Game Theory, Marginalism, and Culture [MR-Aux]

This is another post that’s a byproduct of my examination of Tyler Cowen’s recent monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution. I was pursuing that idea that, while marginalism doesn’t present itself as being about human psychology, it is very much about psychology. So, what about game theory? It’s about human psychology as well, though its mathematical form makes it easy to bracket that out. So I queried Cowen’s AI about that. The conversation ended up with a discussion of one of my favorite literary texts, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is structured around a very peculiar game, the beheading game. [FWIW, here’s a post from 2024 where I investigate ChatGPT’s understanding of the beheading game.]

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I’m curious. Von Neumann invented game theory in the middle of the 20th century and it became important in economics, among other places. What can you tell me about its use in marginalist thinking. I don’t need a long answer. I’m just wondering if it’s one formal analytic tool among many. Is it used frequently, rarely, not at all? It’s a peculiar question. Don’t spend a lot of time on it. I mean, if you find that it’s taking time (to search through articles, etc.), that in itself is an indicator. On the other hand, if someone has written a textbook with a title like, Game Theory as a Tool for Marginalist Analysis, that’s a rather different kind of indicator.

My knowledge here is sufficient that I don't need to search.

Game theory and marginalism are related but distinct frameworks within economics, and the relationship between them is more one of coexistence and occasional overlap than integration. Marginalism asks what happens at the margin for an individual agent facing given prices and quantities. Game theory asks what happens when agents' outcomes depend on each other's choices. They share the rational agent assumption and optimization logic, but they're answering different questions.

Game theory became central to microeconomics in the latter half of the 20th century — particularly through Nash equilibrium and its elaborations — but it didn't so much extend marginalism as partially displace it in certain domains. Industrial organization, auction theory, mechanism design — these are game-theoretic through and through, and marginal analysis is less central there than it is in competitive market analysis where price-taking behavior makes the game-theoretic complications disappear.

There's no textbook of the kind you hypothesize, as far as I know. The two frameworks are taught in the same curriculum and occasionally combined — a Nash equilibrium can be characterized by first-order conditions that look marginal — but game theory is generally understood as a distinct toolkit that becomes relevant when strategic interaction matters, rather than as an extension of marginalist reasoning.

Cowen, interestingly, doesn't seem to foreground game theory in his account of marginalism's rise and possible decline. Which may itself be telling — it suggests he sees them as parallel developments rather than game theory being a chapter in the marginalist story.

So: one important formal tool among several, with genuine but limited overlap, not deeply integrated.

Hollywood Economics and community formation

That’s interesting. There are linguists, such as William Croft, who talk about how the meaning of words is negotiated in each conversation. They talk of game theory, though I don’t off hand know whether or not they make formal use of it. But then there’s Robert De Vany, Hollywood Economics, which I tend to think of as being about how cultural objects are shared in a community. That’s not De Vany’s framing. He’s interested in the fact that we can’t predict how a film will do until we release it into the (cultural) marketplace, which makes it a very risky kind of investment. Note that De Vany is only talking about theatrical release. He says nothing about subsequent release on videotape and the book was written long before some movies are released directly to online streaming.

What he finds (by tracking box-office receipts), briefly, is that most movies disappear from view shortly after they’re released. They do not even breakeven much less earn a profit. But a few will have “legs” and become profitable. And among those, a very few will become so-called “blockbusters.” FWIW, I believe Spielberg’s “Jaws” is generally regarded as the first blockbuster.

I once did a thought experiment where I imagined an arena in which only one movie was available. Everyone would watch it because that’s all there is. Another somewhat different movie is released into the arena. Perhaps everyone will watch it as well, because they’re tired of the first one. So a third, somewhat different from the first two, is released, then a fourth. What I had in the back of my mind is that to some extent people use these kinds of cultural products as a way of forming communities. For that to work, however, there has to be enough variety available in the market place. When a movie is release, it is, in effect, looking for a community to adopt it.

That strikes me as a kind of marginalist analysis. What we’re trading in is a very complex kind of product, in this case a movie. But it could be a novel, or a song, or a painting, whatever.

Your thought experiment is doing something quite precise, and I think you're right that it has a marginalist structure — but it's extending marginalism into territory where the standard framework strains.

Where the marginalist structure is visible

The standard marginalist question applied to cultural goods would be: given how many movies a person has already seen, what is the marginal value of one more? That's a real question and De Vany's framework touches it. But your thought experiment is asking something different and more interesting: given the existing cultural landscape, what is the marginal value of a new movie to a community rather than an individual? That's a collective marginal value, which is much harder to specify and measure.

The "legs" phenomenon is the empirical signature of this. A movie with legs isn't just satisfying individual preferences at the margin — it's finding and consolidating a community, becoming the shared object that a group of people use to recognize each other and talk to each other. The box office receipts are measuring something that looks like individual ticket purchases but is actually a social cascade — De Vany's word-of-mouth mechanism is precisely the process by which a movie becomes a community object rather than just a consumer product.

Where standard marginalism breaks down

Standard marginalist analysis assumes that the value of a good to one consumer is independent of its value to others, or at least that the interdependencies can be handled through price. Cultural goods violate this assumption fundamentally. The value of having seen a blockbuster is partly constituted by the fact that millions of others have seen it too — you can talk about it, share references, participate in a cultural conversation. This is a network effect, and network effects are notoriously resistant to marginalist treatment because the value function isn't defined over individual consumption units in isolation.

Your arena thought experiment isolates this precisely. In a one-movie arena, everyone watches it not because it maximally satisfies their individual preferences but because it's the only available basis for cultural community. As variety increases, something like genuine preference matching becomes possible — different communities coalesce around different objects. But the matching process isn't driven by individual marginal utility in the standard sense. It's driven by a social search process in which movies and communities are simultaneously finding each other.

The De Vany connection to power laws

What De Vany finds — most movies disappear, a few have legs, a very few become blockbusters — is a power law distribution, and power laws are the empirical signature of cascade processes rather than equilibrium processes. In a marginalist equilibrium you'd expect something more like a normal distribution of returns — some variation around a mean, determined by how well each product matches the distribution of individual preferences. The power law says something different: small initial differences get amplified by social dynamics into enormous differences in outcome. The blockbuster isn't just a movie that more people happened to prefer. It's a movie that got caught in a self-reinforcing cascade of community adoption.

This connects to Arthur De Vany's broader interest in complexity economics, which is itself a challenge to standard marginalist equilibrium thinking. The cultural marketplace isn't clearing to an equilibrium — it's generating a dynamic pattern in which winner-take-most outcomes emerge from processes that are in principle unpredictable from the properties of the product alone. Which is exactly De Vany's point about risk: you can't know in advance which movie will trigger the cascade.

Your community-formation framing

What your framing adds, which I think is genuinely beyond De Vany's own framing, is the functional account of why cultural goods have this cascade structure in the first place. It's not arbitrary or merely a consequence of marketing and distribution. It reflects something about what cultural goods are for — they're instruments of community formation, shared objects that allow people to recognize membership and conduct the ongoing conversation of a community. That functional role creates the demand for coordination — everyone in a community needs to have seen the same movie, heard the same song, read the same novel, for it to do its community-forming work. And coordination demand is precisely what generates cascades and power laws.

This also explains the variety requirement your thought experiment identifies. A single cultural object can serve as the basis for one kind of community. A rich cultural marketplace allows many communities to form simultaneously around different objects — which is the cultural analog of biodiversity, and probably has similar functional importance for the health of the overall system. The blockbuster and the art house film aren't competing for the same audience in the way that two brands of the same commodity compete. They're seeding different communities, which can coexist because community membership isn't zero-sum in the way that consumption of a rival good is.

So yes — marginalist in structure, but requiring an extension of marginalism into social dynamics, network effects, and community formation that the standard framework wasn't designed to handle. It's perhaps another case where the Rank 3 tool is real and useful but the phenomenon being analyzed has a Rank 4 structure — one where the individual unit of analysis (the consumer, the ticket purchase) is embedded in a dynamic system whose behavior can't be read off from the units alone.

The plan for completing my marginalism discussion [MR-Aux]

Back on March 27 I posted some remarks on Tyler Cowen’s new monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution. By April 1 I’d published four more sets of remarks, with the intention of publishing more. While I have since made two posts consisting mostly of conversations I’ve had with Claude that began with comments on Cowen’s book (Language as a computational object, Recursive-self-improvement is incoherent), I’ve not published any more directed toward the book. I’ve got four most posts planned, but don’t know when I’ll write them. I could get them all written within a week or so. Or they might drag on for a month or two, perhaps even more. It all depends on what else I’m doing.

Here’s what I’ve got planned:

1. Biology through the ranks: Tyler writes about Linnaean taxonomy and Darwinian evolution in chapter 3; I regard them as Rank 3 and Rank 4 cognition respectively. To that I’ll add folk taxonomy, Rank 1, and the Great Chain of Being, Rank 2.
   
2. Intuition vs. explicit cognition: In chapter 1 Tyler distinguishes between intuitive marginalism and tautological marginalism. I want to talk about intuitive recognition vs. explicit exposition. That distinction doesn’t quite fit with Tyler’s contrast; I’m going to talk about the differences between the two contrasts.
   
3. Literary criticism vs. economics as academic discipline: I’ve written quite a bit about literary criticism as an academic discipline, most recently in The Discipline of Literary Criticism: A Quixotic Essay about Thinkers, Methods and Authority. The two disciplines differ in many ways. This post will discuss some of them.
   
4. Marginalism in cognitive effort: Some speculative remarks about how Cowen decided that he had enough examples in chapter 1. You can find an early version of these remarks as a reply to a Substack Hollis Robbins wrote about Cowen’s book.

Remember: No Kings!

Christianity and children

I’ve been working on a new post for 3 Quarks Daily, which will be out next week some time. Working title: “Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?” That got me wondering: Does Christianity place a special emphasis on children? I put the question to Claude 4.6 Sonata. Our conversation is below the asterisks.

* * * * *

I have the impression that Christianity places a great deal of emphasis on children. Is that true, or just a reflection of the fact that my most sustained contact with explicit Christian ideation came in Sunday school?

Both things are probably true simultaneously — Sunday school did shape your sense of it, and Christianity does have a genuine and deep emphasis on children, though it's more complicated and multifaceted than the Sunday school version suggests.

The textual basis is real and striking. The Synoptic Gospels all contain the moment where Jesus rebukes his disciples for turning children away — "Let the little children come to me" — and then makes the extraordinary claim that one must become like a child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. That's not just sentiment about children's innocence; it's a theological inversion. The child is the model for the adult, not the other way around. Spiritual maturity means recovering something prior to socialization, prior to worldliness.

There's also the Incarnation itself — God entering the world specifically as a baby, helpless, in a manger. The Baby Jesus isn't incidental to Christian theology; the vulnerability and particularity of infancy is theologically loaded. God chose that.

But — and this is worth noting — the heavy institutional emphasis on children's religious education, Sunday schools, confirmation classes, is actually a relatively modern development, largely 19th century Protestant. The Sunday school movement was partly a response to industrialization and child labor, as much a social reform project as a theological one.

So your childhood cosmology — the universe as a movie for the Baby Jesus — was formed in that particular modern institutional context, but it reached back and touched something genuinely ancient and theologically serious. Which is perhaps another instance of the process you're describing: becoming what you were always going to become.

Is this more the case with Christianity than with other world religions, such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism?

It's a genuinely interesting comparative question, and the short answer is: yes, Christianity is somewhat unusual in making a child — and specifically an infant — theologically central in a way the others don't.

Judaism centers children in practice and transmission — the Passover Seder is explicitly structured around children asking questions, and circumcision marks male children at eight days old. Children are crucial as the carriers of the covenant forward in time. But no child figure is theologically central the way the Baby Jesus is. The emphasis is on children as the future of the people, not as a spiritual model or divine incarnation.

Islam similarly emphasizes children as trust from God, and there are strong ethical obligations around their care and education. But again, no child is theologically central. Muhammad was a prophet who matters as an adult. The religion's founding moment is a grown man receiving revelation.

Hinduism is interesting because Krishna is worshipped as a child — the infant Krishna, the mischievous boy Krishna stealing butter — and there's genuine theological weight to that child figure, not entirely unlike the Baby Jesus. This may be the closest parallel. But Hinduism's theological diversity is so vast that it's hard to generalize.

Buddhism places essentially no theological emphasis on children or childhood. The Buddha's story begins with his renunciation of family life. Children appear ethically — as beings deserving compassion — but not theologically.

So Christianity's specific move — God becoming a helpless infant as the central salvific act — is fairly distinctive. The vulnerability of the Baby Jesus, his need for Mary's care, his arrival among the poor and marginal, carries theological freight that the other traditions don't quite replicate. Which makes your childhood cosmology — the universe staged for that specific infant — a more theologically precise intuition than it might first appear.

Christianity and linear history

And then there’s the idea that Christianity places a unique emphasis on linear history, from the birth of Christ in the past to his return in the future. To be sure, that’s derived from the Jewish concept of the messiah, but Judaism never had an historical messiah, nor did Islam, though I believe it accepts Jesus as a prophet.

Yes, that's right on all counts. Islam does accept Jesus — Isa — as a prophet, one of the greatest, but not divine and not the final prophet, that being Muhammad. Islam also has its own eschatology, including the return of Jesus at the end of times, which is interesting — he returns in the Islamic framework too, but as a sign of the Last Day rather than as the returning Lord.

But your larger point about linear history is important and well-taken. Christianity inherits the Jewish sense of history as purposive — moving somewhere, meaning something — but then anchors it with an actual historical event at the center. The Incarnation is the hinge of history. Everything before points toward it, everything after flows from it. That's what gave Western civilization its peculiarly intense relationship with historical time, with progress, with the idea that things are going somewhere.

This is actually Karl Löwith's argument in Meaning in History — that modern secular ideologies like Marxism and liberalism are essentially secularized versions of Christian eschatology. The proletarian revolution or the end of history replace the Second Coming, but the narrative structure — fallen past, redemptive event, fulfilled future — is the same skeleton.

Which brings your cosmology full circle in an interesting way. Your secular mysticism, coupled with Prigogine and Tyson, preserves the directionality of Christian historical consciousness — the universe moving toward complexity, toward mind, toward something — while dissolving the supernatural scaffolding.

The movie has a plot. It just doesn't need a projectionist.

Centuries of Childhood

Oh, and I just remembered what got me thinking about Christianity and children. One book that influenced me a great deal as an undergraduate was Philippe Aries’s Centuries of Childhood. The idea that childhood is conceived of as a specific stage in human maturation, that children aren’t conceived of as little adults but with reduced capacities, that was invented in early modern Europe. That’s one of the books that got me thinking about the ranks idea. In roughly the same two centuries or so we had, 1) a revolution in art, 2) the scientific revolution, 3) the invention of childhood, and 4) the emergence of the novel.

That's a remarkable constellation, and the fact that they cluster in the same two or three centuries is itself a datum that demands explanation. It's not obvious that they're connected, but once you see them together you can't unsee it.

Ariès's argument is that before early modern Europe, children were treated as small adults — integrated into adult life, adult work, adult space — as soon as they were physically capable. The emergence of childhood as a protected, distinct developmental stage, with its own spaces, its own literature, its own pedagogy, required a new conception of the human person as something that unfolds through time, that passes through qualitatively distinct stages, that requires cultivation rather than just initiation.

AI cats making noise at night

Finally a worth watching AI video pic.twitter.com/raH9JrXXpV

— NO CONTEXT HUMANS (@HumansNoContext) April 15, 2026

Flowers, geese, bacon

Miriam Yevick now has a Wikipedia Entry

The entry is quite recent. I didn’t notice it until yesterday but, judging by the article’s history, it went live on January 1, 2026. It contains some information I wasn’t aware of, which is not at all surprising. The two most interesting pieces of information are that she began her career at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. and that she had had an affair with David Bohm, the physicist. I knew about her extensive correspondence with Bohm I suspected that there had been an affair – judging from a remark she’d made, though I forget just where – but I didn’t actually know that.

What’s important is simply that she’s finally in Wikipedia. She wasn’t when I first mentioned her at New Savanna back in June 3, 2020. I’ve known about her work since 1978, when she made a comment on Haugeland’s article about cognitivism. Her 1975 article on Fourier logic became central to the article David Hays and I published about the brain, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, which is cited in the Wikipedia entry. In that article she considers two different kinds of computational regime, which she refers to as Fourier or holographic, and sequential. That distinction is fundamentally the same as the symbolic vs. neural distinction in current AI discourse.

That article is important because, and here I’m quoting from a remark Claude made in a recent discussion I had with it:

She doesn't take one computational system as object. She takes the relationship between two incommensurable computational regimes as object, and proves something about what the structure of reality requires of that relationship. She steps outside both regimes simultaneously and asks: given the kinds of objects that exist in the world, what must any adequate cognitive system contain? The answer — both regimes, necessarily, not contingently — is a proof about the space of possible cognitive architectures rather than a result within any particular architecture.

And that is why I’ve been mentioning her work whenever I have a chance. Until her work has been taken into account, the current debate is poorly formulated and incomplete, to put it charitably. A less charitable formulation would be that the debate isn’t intellectually serious. It’s mostly about intellectual ideology and commercially-oriented hype.

I take the fact that Yevick now has a Wikipedia entry as a sign that her work of 40 years ago may eventually recognized and extended.

Diffusion of sunlight

Recursive self-improvement is an incoherent idea

The discourse of artificial intelligence contains a number of technical terms that are only nominally technical; they don’t actually have technical definitions behind them. The concept of intelligence itself is arguably one of them. The related concepts of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and super-intelligence, or super artificial intelligence (SAI) are even more dubious.

This post is about another of these technical-sounding terms that don’t, in fact, mean much: recursive self-improvement. The conversation, does, however, end on a positive note. Below the asterisks I’ve appended a conversation I had with Claude Sonnet 4.6 on April 2, 2026.

* * * * *

No transcendental viewpoint

Some parts of the AI world talk of recursive self-improvement. I assume that means that the AI improves itself without any human intervention. How? I’m not so much concerned about how it writes the code or, for that matter, even how it hands off operations to the new code. I’m interested in how it figures out what code to write? On the one hand I’m imagining that perhaps we have some kind of evolutionary process. We’ve had evolutionary computational processes for a while. That’s one thing.

But I’m wondering if these thinkers are imagining that somehow the AI is able to get a view of its own code that’s comparable to a programmer’s view of the code. That is, it is able to see its own code from the outside, as it were, giving it a “transcendental” perspective on itself. Are they imagining that we give the AI access to its own source code? In a world of LLMs, what does that mean? Having the LLM examine the code of the transformer that constructed it?

This is a question where the rhetoric of the AI field runs well ahead of the actual technical situation, so it's worth being precise about what's real and what's aspirational hand-waving.

What actually exists

The evolutionary computational approach you mention is real and well-established. Genetic algorithms, neural architecture search, automated machine learning — these are genuine techniques where a process iterates over possible designs, evaluates them against a fitness criterion, and selects better-performing variants. This is recursive self-improvement in a limited and well-defined sense: the system improves, but the improvement criterion is specified externally by humans, and the search process is essentially blind variation plus selection rather than anything resembling understanding.

LLMs can also write and evaluate code, and there are genuine research programs — AlphaCode, various agent frameworks — where language models generate, test, and iterate on code. This is real and useful. But it's operating at the level of software engineering tasks with external evaluation criteria, not at the level of redesigning the underlying model.

The transcendental perspective problem

Your instinct about the deeper issue is exactly right, and it cuts to the heart of why strong recursive self-improvement claims are philosophically confused rather than merely technically premature.

The scenario the Singularity thinkers have in mind — an AI examining its own architecture and improving it from genuine understanding — requires precisely what you call the transcendental perspective: the system seeing itself from outside, the way a programmer sees code. But this is Gödel's problem restated in engineering terms. A system cannot be both the object of analysis and the analytical framework simultaneously without remainder. There's always something that can't be seen from inside the system — which is exactly what Gödel proved about formal arithmetic, and what Turing proved about computation in general.

Giving an LLM access to its own weights — the numerical parameters that constitute what it "knows" — wouldn't produce the transcendental perspective. The weights are not readable the way code is readable. A programmer looking at code sees meaningful structure: variable names, logical operations, control flow, the intention behind the design. An LLM looking at its own weights would see hundreds of billions of floating point numbers whose organization encodes nothing interpretable at the level of concepts or intentions. The meaningful structure, whatever it is, is distributed across the entire parameter space in ways that current interpretability research is only beginning to scratch the surface of. We don't fully understand what's in there. The LLM certainly doesn't.

This is the deep version of the problem your earlier observation about von Neumann identified. The brain doesn't have a programmer's view of itself either — neurons don't have access to the circuit diagrams of the neural tissue they're part of. The brain improves through learning, which is a process of adjusting connection weights through experience, not through reading its own architecture and rewriting it. The fantasy of recursive self-improvement imagines something the brain doesn't do and has no evident mechanism to do.

What the Singularity thinkers are actually imagining

I think when people like Kurzweil talk about recursive self-improvement they're running together several different things that need to be kept distinct. There's the evolutionary search process, which is real but doesn't involve understanding. There's the engineering process of humans using AI tools to build better AI systems — which is genuinely happening and is genuinely accelerating, but involves humans in the loop making the meaningful decisions. And there's the imagined transcendental process where the AI understands itself well enough to improve itself through genuine insight — which has no clear technical path and runs into the Gödelian problem you identified.

The last of these is doing most of the rhetorical work in Singularity discourse, but it's the one with the least connection to anything technically grounded. It requires assuming that the system can occupy a perspective on itself that is by definition unavailable to it — which is not a technical limitation waiting to be engineered away but a logical feature of what it means to be a system operating within its own architecture.

The Yevick connection

There's a thread back to our earlier discussion worth noting. The transcendental self-improvement fantasy is in effect imagining that the AI could perform on itself the Rank 4 move that Gödel and Turing performed on formal systems — taking the computational process as object and reasoning about it from outside. But Gödel and Turing were humans standing outside arithmetic and computation respectively, which is what gave them the purchase to prove things about those systems. A system trying to perform that move on itself runs directly into the incompleteness results — there will always be truths about the system that can't be proven within it, always aspects of its own operation that it can't fully see from inside.

Recursive self-improvement in the strong sense would require escaping this constraint. No one has shown how that would work, and the logical structure of the problem suggests it may not be a contingent engineering gap but a principled limitation. Which doesn't mean AI systems won't continue to improve — they will, rapidly — but the improvement will continue to involve humans providing the external perspective that the systems themselves cannot generate.

Digital doppelgangers

Humans, on the other hand, have ordinary language, one capacity of which is the metalingual function. In a way, the whole cultural ranks idea is about how the metalingual function has allowed humans to bootstrap themselves to a more sophisticated cognitive architecture. But that doesn’t now nor ever has involved humans in examining their own source code as it were. It’s a different kind of process.

Of course, I’m thinking that we may now be in a position to arrive at a much deeper understanding of the nervous system than we have ever had. And that process surely involves thinking back and forth between neuroscience and computer science. Maybe the digital doppelganger that I’ve been talking about is the mature expression of this kind of knowledge.

That's a beautiful way to close the loop, and it reframes the doppelganger concept in a way that makes it more technically grounded than it might otherwise appear.

The bootstrapping process humans actually use

The cognitive ranks framework describes a process of self-improvement that never involves examining source code. What it involves is the metalingual function operating on the outputs of cognition — on language, on cultural products, on formal systems — rather than on the neural substrate itself. Humans didn't improve their cognitive architecture by examining their neurons. They improved it by constructing external systems — writing, arithmetic, formal logic, computation — that offloaded cognitive operations into the environment where they could be inspected, manipulated, and elaborated. The improvement was always mediated through the external world, never through direct introspection of the underlying machinery.

This is a fundamentally different process from recursive self-improvement as the Singularity thinkers imagine it. It's improvement through the construction of new cognitive tools that extend and reorganize what the existing architecture can do — not rewriting the architecture itself. The architecture, in the biological case, stays roughly constant. What changes is the cultural software running on it, and the external scaffolding that amplifies its reach.

Roy Eldridge & Charlie Shavers - The Trumpet Battle

From YouTube:

High note trumpet kings Roy Eldridge and Charlie Shavers go head to head, no holds barred. Recorded at Carnegie Hall, NYC, Sept. 13, 1952.

The group consists of:
Roy Eldridge, Charlie Shavers - trumpets
Benny Carter - alto sax
Flip Phillips, Lester Young - tenor sax
Oscar Peterson - piano
Barney Kessel - guitar
Ray Brown - bass
Buddy Rich - drums

The tune was composed by Charlie Shavers, and is based on the changes of "I Got Rhythm". After the first chorus of trumpets, there is a chorus played by Flip and Lester, then Benny plays 4 choruses, and then the trumpet battle royale starts with Roy.

All the Jazz at the Philharmonic recordings are excellent, but many of them, like this gem, are out of print.