Category: science and religion

Kavanaugh, Trump 2024, and the Messiah – or – How to be a prophet in your spare time

David Porush3 Comments

“Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving. Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.” – Isaiah 6:9-10

I was the first person on Earth to predict the Trump presidency and explain why he was going to win in my blogs of March, June and July of 2016. My friends are still in awe at my 127.3% accuracy prophesying current events, up 12.6% in the last fiscal quarter. In fact, just this morning (October 8, 2018 at 9.07 am), I collected the downpayment on my Tesla ($20.25) from the bets my classmates made with me last Wednesday (Oct 3 at 10.34 am). Even though Senators Flake, Collins and Murkowski looked like they were going to vote against his nomination to the Supreme Court and the FBI was in the middle of its investigation, I still confidently assured them Judge Kavanaugh absolutely would be confirmed. I could have gotten really good odds at the time, but that would have been taking candy from babies and anyway, I’m forbidden to benefit from my gift. No Tesla. It’s part of the deal I made with the same Divine force that granted me my power.

In a moment, I’m going to tell you what else is going to happen. In fact, I’m going to lay out a complete prophecy describing the future of the Trump imperial reign and its impact on centuries to come. But first let me tell you how I knew the outcome of the Kavanaugh Kerfluffle. Prophets and magicians shouldn’t reveal their secret methods, but I don’t mind because you’re not going to believe me anyway. At best, you’re going to dismiss me as a formerly smart person who went whacko, or a religious nutball, or a paranoiac, or as my sore loser buddies did this morning, just someone who keeps getting lucky. Continue reading “Kavanaugh, Trump 2024, and the Messiah – or – How to be a prophet in your spare time” →

Hell for Jews? The Case of the Epikoros

David Porush1 Comment

How do Jews get to hell?

The short answer is they don’t, because Jews don’t really have a hell, at least not in the sense of the fiery, eternal torture chambers Dante elaborately portrays in The Inferno (1321). Instead, they have a very Jewish idea of eternal punishment: call it a hell for the disputatious.

Gustave Dore 6th ring Dante Inferno
Gustave Dore, 6th Circle, Dante’s Inferno (Paris: Hachette, 1861) from Open Culture

In Canto X, Dante and Virgil, his tour guide, find the sixth ring of hell is filled with open graves, perpetually burning the still conscious bodies in them. Dante asks why the graves are open, and Virgil says,

 “They’ll all be shuttered up
when they return here from Jehosaphat
together with the flesh they left above.

Within this region is the cemetery
of Epicurus and his followers,
all those who say the soul dies with the body.

Later, Dante interviews one of the corpses in hell, and the zombie says,

“…  our awareness
will die completely at the moment when
the portal of the future has been shut.” [Digital Dante]

In other words, they will not be resurrected with the rest of the dead when the time comes (Jehosaphat is a euphemism for the Catholic messiah, who shares his initial). Their immortal souls, their “awareness,” will die when the they are summoned for final judgement. Epicurean souls won’t be reunited with their bodies with the Resurrection of the Dead. They die forever.

Dante seems to be deriving his ideas from a very specific discussion among Jews from a thousand years earlier. In the Talmud, rabbis discuss how heretical Jews can lose their souls forever, and they single out the “epikoros” for particular doom.  Though he didn’t know Hebrew or Aramaic and didn’t read the Talmud, Dante really knew his Catholic theology, which took a good deal from the Jews, and Dante is channeling it here. But where Dante takes the epicurean connection literally – Epicurus is one of the souls he sees – the Jews have a very different notion of hell, one revealed by their funny refusal to acknowledge Epicurus.  [1]

The three eternally fatal heresies

Jews, as in other religions, will be resurrected to go to the World to Come, but if they do one of three things, they’re dead meat [2]

#1 Deny that the Resurrection of the Dead is promised in the Bible [Torah]

#2 Deny that the Bible’s Author is Divine

#3: Be an “epikoros”

When we first encountered this list, my classmate Dr. Jack Brandes noted that it doesn’t make much sense. Why does denial that “resurrection of the dead is to be found in the Torah” take precedence over the denial that the whole Torah is Divine? Surely denial of the whole is more fundamental than any single proposition and should come first.

And we can add to Jack’s query, what the heck is an epikoros anyway? Why does it have its own word, one that hardly occurs anywhere else in Talmud and is named after a Greek pleasure-seeker? Why is he so singularly bad? After all, we’ve just come from pages of the Talmud that discuss rebellious sages and false prophets, and they seem much more worthy of eternal punishment than a common garden-variety sensualist or atheist, yet they are only condemned to mortal death. The epikoros, by contrast, faces eternal death. Where’s the equity here? “Lo fair!” as my son’s classmates used to shout in kindergarten in Israel, “No fair!”

Worse, when the rabbis finally get around to describing the epikoros nine pages of Talmud later,[3] they seem to have saved up their greatest outrage for him in a self-serving festival of indignation. What does the epikoros do that’s so bad? Why, he has the temerity to make fun of those same rabbis and Torah scholars. He mocks them for being useless or self-serving, or questions the absurdity of their rulings or disparages them for making senseless rules that make life harder just to keep themselves busy (“They forbade us the raven but let us eat dove”). He insults them in front of others. The over-sensitivity of the sages to even the merest slight leaves plenty of room for cynicism. It looks like they’ve constructed a great, self-serving Catch-22: if you make fun of us and our authority, like for instance for defining an epikoros as someone who mocks or questions us, then you are one, and you are going to die an eternal death.

Yet, by contrast, the section (Cheilik – “Portion” –  in Sanhedrin) has some of the most elegant and monumental displays of exegesis and story-telling in the Talmud. The rabbis’ eloquence is warranted because here they aren’t just adjudicating civil or capital penalties in this world, they are describing awesome cosmic events like the resurrection of the dead, when the Messiah comes, and the ultimate fate of your immortal soul.

So maybe when they come to the matter of the epikoros we should look at their condemnation as more than just an extended fit of self-serving peevishness.

Indeed, if we delve this strange word more closely, it tells a deeper story, one that reveals a startling unity to these seemingly mismatched list of three big sins. It uncovers a hidden sophistication carrying so much theological power that our cynical view of the rabbis as a bunch of racketeers protecting their turf is replaced with admiration for these learned mortals who have undertaken the dauntless task of trying to read the Divine Mind.

How to lose your portion in the world to come

Sometimes transliterated apikoros, apikorsis, apicorsis, epikores, or even ‘apikoyris’ with a Yiddish inflection, the word epikoros sticks out in the lexicon of the Talmud. It isn’t Hebrew and it doesn’t have an obvious precedent in Aramaic but seems obviously to come from the Greek philosopher Epikouros or as we know him, Epicurus.

Epicurus (341-270 BCE) taught that death was the end of both the body and the soul. He insisted that only the material world is real and he denied the existence of God or Heaven as logically absurd. After all, what kind of supreme being would introduce so much pain and misery into the world? For what purpose? Anyway, who has ever brought back a shred of proof of an afterlife where the soul receives reward or punishment?  All we get is this one go-round in the material world, so we better make the best of it. The proper role of philosophy is not to guide humans into good behavior that will ennoble their spirits and please the gods for some reward in the afterlife, but to teach them how to fulfill the ultimate goal of life: seek pleasure and avoid pain, especially the physical and psychic suffering that attends death.[3] In short, Epicurus was the very archetype of the heretic.

But if it is obvious their idea of a heretic refers to him or his followers, the rabbis are confoundingly silent about it. True, maybe their silence is because of their general reluctance to acknowledge Greek sources. They even warn against teaching Greek (see Perpetual Chanukah in the West – or – Why the Pythagorean Theorem is More Than Just Math). Greek philosophy was especially dangerous since its intellectualism and soaring embrace of knowledge of the universe was naturally appealing to the Jewish mind, just as science and philosophy are today, and Epicureanism certainly seduced many Jews over the centuries.) So perhaps the rabbis were simply following their policy of not acknowledging Greek thought.

Yet, they not only avoid any mention of the connection, they pun around it, as if to efface its source. They use an Aramaic word with similar spelling – apkayrousa – to define an irreverent Torah student (Sanhedrin 100a). Later commentators seem to contort themselves to follow this lead to a completely different and much less plausible etymology. Rashi, (1040-1105) expands the Talmud’s version by saying it alludes to “epkorousa,” [אפקרותא – disrespect]. Meir Abulafia (1170-1244, known as the Ramah), and Maimonides (1138-1204, known as Rambam) both agree the word derives from hefker, abandoned property that’s up for grabs. (Their agreement is even more remarkable because Ramah called Rambam a heretic for denying the Resurrection of the Dead.) In turn, Rambam explains his derivation of the word most completely. “The word epikores is Aramaic,” he insists. “Its meaning is one who abandons (mafkir) and denigrates the sages or a specific Torah scholar or denigrates his teacher.”[7] We can see where he’s coming from. Both words share three root letters: P-K-R, פקר. Mafkir comes from hefker. By connecting it with disrespect for a teacher, it gives a new and profound sense of walking away from your half of a transcendent teacher-student relationship, Indeed, in his next sentence, Maimonides gives more examples of heresy, and then just a few sentences later he announces his Thirteen Principles of Faith, one of the most influential codifications of Jewish belief ever written.

Is it possible they ALL were unaware of the popular Greek philosopher of pleasure? No.

Epicurus is counted as one of the greatest of the Greek philosophers, rivaling Plato. Plutarch and Cicero wrote about him in the 1st century CE. In the 3rd century CE, contemporary with the rabbis holding forth in the Talmud, he’s treated in a bestselling work, The Lives and Opinions of the Greek Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, and he was well-known throughout the Medieval period (witness Catholic theology and Dante).  Maimonides was well aware of Greek philosophy in general as a follower of Aristotle, and mentions Epicurus several times in his Guide for the Perplexed (1190).

For a thousand years these heavy hitters are insisting on a hidden meaning of the word, purposefully ignoring the obvious, to get at something else. What gives? What are they after?

Breaking the circuit

The surprising answer lies, I believe, in going back to the original Greek name. The main part of epikoros is the Greek χορός – chorus or koros – a circle of singers, probably part of an ancient ritual. In classical Greek theatre, it evolved into the group of players who stand together, sometimes in a ring, and dance across the stage back and forth singing verses of point and counterpoint to the theme of the play or actions of the main players. Koros in turn is traced back to the Proto-Indo-European[8] root gher, meaning “trap” or “catch,” a core concept signifying the containment around something. It is easy to see how it also evolves into the Greek cognate of chorus, χόρτος – khórtos, meaning “enclosure”[9] like an animal pen or corral. To evoke this shared primitive origin of the concept, have you ever sung a well-rehearsed song with others in a tight circle? You were probably moved beyond mere geometry to experience a spirit of solidarity, intimacy.

The other part of the name is more familiar, the prefix epi– , meaning “on top of,” commonly used for words that survive intact from ancient Greek like epiphany (a shining or appearance from above, a manifestation or revelation of heavenly presence), or in science for technical terms like epidermis (the top layer of skin) or epicenter (the point above the enter of an earthquake). But the prefix can also carry a sense of contrast, opposition, something after, above, atop, or even against – in short, different from – the root. An epi-gone is an inferior successor, like Fredo the weak brother in The Godfather, or like the imitators of the great artist Caravaggio to whom the term was applied.[10] 

Epikoros might well have chosen the name for himself: a radical who broke out of – superceded – the circle of Platonic belief. (The little we may know of him makes him sound like a compulsive self-aggrandizing rebel, rejecting his teacher Democritus and other predecessors, including Plato and Pythagoras, to claim he was self-taught).

In his treatment of the word, David Curwin, author of the brilliant Hebrew etymology website Balashon, notes

… hevker is related to bakar בקר – “cattle,”, and was so called because cattle would graze in abandoned or ownerless land, … this goes back to a general association between cattle and property [11]

Imagine cattle herded into a pen. One breaks out and gets lost, to wander ownerlessly. There’s our Jewish epikoros: someone who opposes or breaks out of the closed circle to embrace a terrible fate. Like, Maimonides’ mafkir, the epikoros acts willfully, intentionally.

Epikoros cuts the circuit between heaven and earth. What you do on Earth has no consequences, because there’s nothing else, so seek pleasure. He is the archetype of the radical denier, that wise guy who has to say that one other, defiant thing, the pathologically compulsive skeptic whose goal is to break the circle of belief in anything that he can’t grasp with his appetites or senses. But his behavior, the rabbis are warning him, has led him to abandon his soul.

I believe the rabbis are not disingenuous here but are knowingly digging deeper to get at this more ancient, resonant aura around the word epikoros. But how does that explain their fixation on their own pride and sensitivities? And though they are excellent linguists to be sure, how would they have gotten access to etymology pieced together only recently by centuries of painstaking archeology and philology?

One explanation is a mystical one that goes to the root of their belief in their own authority: they are transmitting knowledge preserved in the Oral Torah that Moses also received on Sinai, antedating Epikoros by 1000 years. When they invoke “epikoros” as derived from hefker, they do so with the confidence preserved by an oral tradition that is much deeper and older than mere superficial cultural allusions.  If their word play is more than a cynical effort to protect their monopoly on Torah authority, then it’s a test of our status, too: either we are heretics, or we believe this tenet on which rabbinic Judaism rests.

The road to Jewish Heaven is paved by scholars

At first glance, the epikoros’ offense seems the least dire of the three Big Ones and the one mostly driven by the very earthly concerns of defensive rabbis.

But when viewed through this deeper meaning, the list of three offenders defines three versions of the same form of heresy: they all break the circuit of authority from God through Moses into the Oral and Written Torah and from thence into the Mishnah and to Gemarah (the discussions of the rabbis of mishnah) that comprise the Talmud.

Who is the epikoros?  His transgression is the most personal, immediate, and pedestrian of the three Big Ones, but in some ways that makes his sin the most dreadful of them all. He diminishes, even in apparently slight ways – he slights – the authority and respect due the sages and teachers who interpret and transmit the Torah. Why is this worthy of the ultimate penalty? Because their authority is absolutely equivalent to the Torah’s Divine authority. In fact, the two are indistinguishable. Offense Number One is to deny that the Torah tells us that the dead will be resurrected after the messiah comes, even though it doesn’t, at least in any literal way. Then how do we know?  We’ll show you! And immediately the rabbis put on virtuoso performances of exegetical brilliance proving the case. The sages’ job, and the project of the Talmud, is to unfold the hidden meanings in the text of the Torah. Though they are human and imperfect, as the varying interpretations show, they are acting in good faith, they’re pros at what they do, and their conclusions have the force of Divine law.

By rejecting the superficial meaning of epikoros to invoke the deeper more ancient one, they are actually enacting the lesson: the apparent surface meaning of the Torah doesn’t say anything about resurrection of the dead, but our elaborations show it does incontrovertibly. Epikoros sounds like it refers to one thing, but it really means another. Watch this …

If you deny our reading, as arcane and incredible as it first seems, it is as serious as denying the Torah comes from God. And just as you must build a fence around the Torah, you must also protect not only the dignity, authority and majesty of our rabbinic project of unfolding its hidden meanings, but also our personal dignity, authority, and majesty, even if it makes us look like a mafia and even if we are only human. In short, the sages’ bravura performance in Cheilek, this famous awesome chapter in Sanhedrin, achieves transcendent coherence. It’s a meta-text that both renders a proof and performs the meaning of that proof.

The proper translation of Olam HaBah is not the static “World to Come” but the dynamic “World that is Coming”: Heaven is unfolding, approaching, in process, and we’re always on the way to It. The Talmud and our earthly interpretation of Torah is its accomplice and mirror, also always in process, always unfolding, revealing the hidden vectors of an Olam HaBah that’s approaching us. The two are coming to greet each other on the road. Mock the authority on which the belief rests, become too disputatious, and you’ve become an epikoros. Renounce ownership of your place in it, and your very soul will be destined to roam Ownerlessly, orphaned in a desolate, unnamable space with no hope for redemption. For Jews, that’s really hell.

David Porush

San Mateo, CA 2018

ENDNOTES

 

[1] My purpose here is not to highlight the differences between Jewish and Christian concepts of hell, a subject that’s been explored extensively and well by others. See J. Harold Ellens’ Heaven, Hell and the Afterlife [2013]; Alan Bernstein’s Hell and Its Rivals [2017].

[2]  Sanhedrin 10B; 90A et seq. Sanhedrin 99b-100a

[3] See the entry on Epicurus in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/

[7] Rambam on Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1. (https://www.sefaria.org/Rambam_on_Mishnah_Sanhedrin.10.1?lang=en )

[8] The forebear of most European and Near Eastern language from the Early Bronze Age, about 4000 BCE

[9] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%87%CE%BF%CF%81%CF%8C%CF%82#Ancient_Greek  ]

[10] See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/caravaggios-imitators-pale-beside-the-painters-irresistable-geni/

See https://www.etymonline.com/word/epi- and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%90%CF%80%CE%AF#Ancient_Greek

[11] “According to Tur-Sinai’s note in Ben Yehuda’s dictionary,…” David Curwin, “Epikoros,” in Balashon  https://www.balashon.com/search?q=epikoros

The Quantum Theology of Cheese

David Porush1 Comment
Abrtaham + 3 Angels eeckhout 1656
“Abraham and the Three Angels”  Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1656)
“[Abraham] then brought some curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared, and set these before them. While they ate, he stood near them under a tree.”
– Genesis 18:8

Consider the miracle and mystery of cheese. You take milk. You combine it with the sloughed-off lining of the stomach of a calf called rennet. Store it away and in a few days or weeks and voila! We got cheese!

Neolithic tribes worshiped cheese. Since then, cheese has been intimately entwined with civilization. But for Jews, cheese poses a special problem. The Torah forbids Jews to cook the meat of the kid with the milk of the mother, possibly because of its intrinsic cruelty. In the mystical tradition, milk represents mother’s nurturing and it comes from sheep and cows and goats, animals we domesticate and nurture. Meat requires spilling blood. It is predatory and reminds us of our bestial natures. Milk, then, needs to be protected from meat. They should never touch, and when they have to interact, Jews erect barriers in time and space to separate them. Over the centuries, this has evolved into an elaborate system of kosher rules separating all meat foods from anything that has touched milk. So while serving our body’s need for sustenance by eating milk and meat, kosher laws remind us of the sources of our food. We discipline our cognizance and actions in eating them at separate times off of separate dishes and cooking them in separate pots. Kosher eating is mindful eating.

With all this invested in the barrier between the two realms, then how is it possible that cheese, made with lining from a cow’s stomach, somehow gets an exemption?  The sages of the Talmud give us what seems like a technical reason, but as Aeschylus said, “Wrong should not get by on a technicality.” If we look closely though, we’ll see that the technicality anticipates discoveries only recently made by science. The details of their apparent foreknowledge suggests that the Torah is a channel for knowing things that are only slowly revealed over the millenia by science. To put it more simply, though as a rational modern I resist this conclusion, it seems science is catching up to wisdom revealed thousands of years ago to the Jews. To see that this is more than just a coincidence and the Talmud’s technicalities reveal a true understanding of the science of cheese, we’ll have to dip into we’ve learned more recently about the science behind the magic of cheese. Continue reading “The Quantum Theology of Cheese” →

The Quantum Theology of Matzah: Science delves the spiritual mysteries of yeast

David Porush6 Comments
Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread; on the very first day you shall remove leaven from your houses, for whoever eats leavened bread from the first day to the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel. (Ex 12:15)

What’s the difference between bread and matzah?

Screen Shot 2017-04-18 at 11.16.48 PMThe youngest child at the Passover seder asks, “Why on other nights do we eat bread or matzah but on this night only matzah?”  The Torah says that the matzah didn’t have time to rise before the slaves had to flee Egypt, so Jews focus on this inflation and all its many symbolisms: inflation of self, of ego, of pride, of valuing material achievements, Pharaoh’s  tyrannical sense of himself as a deity, and so on.

But this answer skips over a more fundamental question: Isn’t matzah really, after all, just bread? Both matzah and bread are just flour, and water, so aren’t they just versions of the same thing?  If they’re different, what’s the difference? What makes bread bread and matzah matzah? Why do we say an extra prayer over matzah?

The simplest answer is yeast. But what does yeast do? Yeast makes flour and water into bread. Yeast makes bread rise. It also makes grapes into wine. Grape juice is just a soft drink, but wine is literally a spirit. A cracker is a good delivery platform for dip, but bread is the staff of life itself. Wine leavens our spirit. Bread sates. It’s no wonder humans worshiped bread and wine for thousands of years and even now many religions still sanctify them and use them to sanctify us. And it’s no wonder the Passover haggadah calls matzah “the bread of affliction.” Matzah is dead bread. Yeast adds life to inert foodstuffs, transforming them magically into something spiritual. By ingesting wine and bread, we take some of that magic into us.

Humans recognized and harnessed the magical properties of yeast millenia before they learned to write 5000 years ago, but we are now just discovering the truly mysterious – even mystical – properties of  yeast, and these new scientific discoveries seem to answer our questions about matzah. In other words, science gives us a window into the spiritual mysteries of yeast.

The quantum biology of yeast and enzymes: gateway between life and death

Yeast is a single-celled living creature. When we let these creatures feed on their favorite food – sugar or carbohydrates – they digest it into sugar’s components: energy, alcohol, carbon dioxide, and some residue molecules that add flavors. Even pre-literate cultures were in awe of the way yeast brought bread and wine to life and worshiped it as divine. Now, modern biology is coming to grips with this ancient wisdom: yeast is the gateway between the living and the inert. But how, precisely, does it perform this trick? After tens of thousands of years, the new science of quantum biology has finally given us a glimpse of how yeast performs its magic.

The process the ancients observed as a result of yeast’s action is bubbling, rising fermentation – chemists call it catalysis. In the cooler processing of wine, the alcohol is retained in the liquid for our pleasure. Carbon dioxide is partly released when wine is moved in barrels. Some winemakers leave some of this carbon dioxide in the wine, and wine with lots of it is nicknamed “bubbly- like champagne – but most wine is “degassed.” When we bake bread, we don’t get drunk on it because the higher heat of baking evaporates the alcohol, but like it does in wine, the carbon dioxide gas creates bubbles. These expand and burst in the sticky dough, giving bread its texture.

High school chemistry labs often use yeast as an example of enzymatic activity. But what they didn’t teach us, because chemistry isn’t etymology, is that enzyme is just the Greek for “in yeast.”

Enzymes are present in all living things. They are incorporated into every living cell on Earth and are essential in every process that sustains life: digestion, neural action, making new cells and repairing old ones (growth and healing), reproduction, and so on. They’re not organisms, but no organism or living process survives without them. In short, they’re a good battleground for the eternal philosophical war between materialists and vitalists. Materialists believe the universe and everything in it, including humans and human consciousness, is a vast machine. It is made up only of physical things and the physical processes or forces between them. Vitalists argue that there is a meta-physical force in the universe that animates all life, a force that cannot be reduced to mechanical explanations. Human consciousness illustrates the problem and limitation of materialism: how does our experience of having a mind arise from mere stuff? Fundamentalist materialists argue that everything can be explained ultimately, by self-consistent systems of reason, like logic or mathematics. Religious vitalists argue that the metaphysical force is divine. And although there’s plenty of fake news and overheated press that periodically announces it, no one has ever created life from non-living stuff. No frankensteins, though the dream and nightmare of achieving godlike powers haunts humanity.

Yeast is so powerful a stage for this contest between mechanism and vitalism because although it is a living thing, science until recently seemed confident it was purely a chemical machine. True, how yeast and other enzymes brought life to non-living stuff so efficiently was still mysterious, but in the debate, yeast offered the best proof for the materialist view of life. It seemed to explain how life is introduced into inert matter without resort to purely non-mechanistic explanations. Until now.

It turns out that enzymes require quantum effects to do their work, and quantum mechanics defy a strictly materialist view of the cosmos. Quantum physics defies logic, though we’ve learned to use it in MRIs and computer chips, and most scientists and engineers simply put aside the way quantum mechanics rattles the foundations of science. In the majority version of quantum theory, every quantum process requires an aware being, an observer, to watch it work in order for it to become real. This has mind-boggling implications, not least of which is it hints at the essence we invoke when we say the extra prayer over matzah. In order for me to explain, I first need to review the craziness of the quantum world.

Five weird things about quantum mechanics

To most, even sophisticated scientists, quantum mechanics seems just weird. There’s no way to explain quantum processes without over-simplifying or resorting to analogies which only dimly picture its actual, full-on weirdness. But here are a few of the facts that you will need to know as we continue with our discussion of matzah. I leave it to you to decide how, or even if, you want to grapple any of it yourself:

  1. Sub-atomic entities behave like both waves of energy and particles at the same time.
  2. A sub-atomic entity isn’t in any one specific place until you observe it. Then it seems to settle on one. (Called “the Uncertainty Principle”)
  3. A single sub-atomic particle can be in two places at once. But if you affect one, its other self will react, even if they are separated by millions of miles. (Called “Superposition”)
  4. They can pass through otherwise impassible-seeming barriers and travel faster than the speed of light, and both backwards and forwards in time. (Called “Quantum Tunneling”)
  5. A subatomic particle holds multiple possible logically exclusive properties at the same time. When it is observed or measured, it “collapses” from its various possible quantum states into one state. I.e,. it stops behaving quantumly and starts behaving classically. (Called “Measurement”)

Quantum tunneling in yeast

To understand the quantum theology of matzah, the last is the most important. Until now, biologists have been content to leave the weirdness of the quantum world to physicists, because they thought they were immune to it. Biologists assumed there was an unbreachable barrier between the sub-atomic world of quantum weirdness and the macroscopic world of biology, which conveniently remained obedient to classical laws of physics. Thankfully (they believed) subatomic monkey business disappears when it pokes its head up into an organism, because the complexity of the organism automatically “measures” (observes) it, though no one specified how. They now seem to be really wrong. It’s awkward.

Resurrected by water, living yeast seems to make the inert come alive. Yeast explodes the flat mound of dough and makes it rise as little bubbles of alcohol explode inside. It adds tastes by creating new molecules. But what was once thought to be a classical, if incompletely understood, mechanical process, we now know requires quantum tunneling (see above, #4).

If you’d rather nap, this is a good time

Here’s the technical explanation: an enzyme in yeast takes a positively charged sub-atomic particle, the proton from the alcohol it has created, and transfers it to another molecule. This new molecule, with the addition of its extra proton, now has a positive charge. Like a magnet, it now attracts molecules carrying a negatively charged particle, the electron. So the new molecule that the yeast created (called nicotinamide alcohol dehydrase or NADH) becomes a very effective carrier and releasor of electrons. With NADH, the ingredients can now perform their actions very quickly, hundreds of times more efficiently. It’s like the brew now has an electric current running through it, with electrons able to hitch a ride and jump off when a chemical reaction needs an extra jolt of energy to make it happen.

So far so good. This is all safe, mechanical chemistry.

As it turns out, though, the speed at which electrons get transferred from alcohol to NAD+ to make NADH cannot be explained by classical chemistry. Quantum tunneling, number three on our list of weird quantum effects above, can. Again, at the risk of over-simplifying, a subatomic particle like an electron can travel across barriers instantaneously by using its superpower of quantum tunneling. As this effect occurs among millions of molecules in the dough, it speeds up the process enough for biologists to conclude it must be involved.[1] Since quantum tunneling have been confirmed in the activities of other enzymes, this is more than a guess.

This neat explanation of the quantum role in enzymatic action leaves one huge mystery, though: In order for the transport of the electron to occur, it can’t be just a probability, and in order for it to be more than a probability, it has to be observed or measured. The quantum Uncertainty – the electron can be here or there and therefore nowhere at all, really – has to become classical behavior: I see it now. Until now, biologists, scientists and other materialists have maintained that the sheer bulk and realism of the organism in which the quantum action occurs somehow collapses any quantum craziness, that the fact of the organism as a macroscopic entity itself performs the “observing.” But that argument no longer holds water and even seems like a tautology, fabulous circular reasoning, because enzymes drag quantum action and weirdness into the scene of the organism at every level. Enzymes, and the quantum, is ubiquitous in every process of every cell in an organism.

Wake up

In short, enzymes seem to be the essence of life itself.

“Enzymes have made and unmade every living cell that lives or has ever lived. Enzymes are as close as anything to the vital factors of life. …. [T]he discovery that enzymes work by promoting the dematerialization of particles from one point in space and their instantaneous materialization in another provides us with a novel insight into the mystery of life.”

– Johnjoe McFadden, Jim Al-Khalili, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology  (Broadway Books, Jul 26, 2016) p. 97

There’s simply too much quantum funny business going on everywhere in a living being to say one part of the organism is classical and collapses the other part that is quantum just by dint of being a big thing like a fish or a bird.

Another way materialists banish the quantum: the Many Worlds Hypothesis

Scientists have resolved the measurement problem another way. When the wave of quantum possibilities collapses into an actuality, the information contained in those probabilities has to go somewhere. Information, like energy, has its own law of conservation in the universe. Some quantum physicists suggest that instead of collapsing the quantum into the classical through observation, every time a quantum event collapses into a classical one, other universes are spawned. All the other probabilities that didn’t occur here do occur there, in these new universes. This is the Many Worlds Hypothesis, although I personally think the adjective “many” doesn’t do justice to its hyperbolic claim. The Many Worlds Hypothesis is mathematically satisfying and sidesteps any suggestion of metaphysics. But let’s look at how radical it really is.

There are a virtually infinite set of quantum events occurring everywhere at every instant everywhere in an organism, let alone the whole universe. Each of them would create an incalculable set of alternate universes. Now imagine all the quantum processes going on all over the universe every instant, each one spawning an alternative universe of its own, presumably where the same laws of physics apply so they are spawning and infinity of multiverses, too. When I do the dizzying visualization of this scenario, it leads me to ask: Which is the more ridiculous vision of the cosmos, the one where there are unlimited infinities of universes or there is a Single Entity observing everything? In my opinion, the Multiverse Hypothesis creates a vision of the cosmos that is at least as crazy as imagining an unprovable Big Guy in the Sky watching everything.

But who knows? That’s what they said about quantum theory in the twentieth century. And that’s what most well-educated, postmodern, rational, sophisticated people say about God.

Quantum theology of matzah: Where is He?

Quantum theology is a term used by a few but growing number of theologians and mystics. On one side of this philosophical tug of war are enthusiasts eager to seize on quantum theory to prove the existence of God. Many of their essays and speculations are plagued by vagueness, weak understanding of science, and an over-heated, optimistic leap into the irrational analogies between quantum science and the mystical. Their “proofs” often require taking analogous-sounding mysteries as literal equivalents. Quantum theology is largely the provenance of well-educated but reductionist fundamentalists.

On the other is a simple but rigorous contention

The case of yeast is different. In this dance between the material and the vital, between science and faith, science leads us to conclude something strange is happening in bread that doesn’t occur in matzah. The new science of quantum biology shows quite specifically how the process of life itself depends on quantum action. In every possible process where life is created or sustained, enzymatic action is involved. And with quantum action comes the requirement that someone or something is observing the process. The nose of the quantum camel, and the problem of a conscious observer, has entered the tent of biology, but they were summoned by the biology. In fact, the tent is the camel. Something or someone has to be observing quantum events in enzymes to make them operative in life. Someone or something has to be operating life. Omnisciently.

Sermon on Matzah

Put biophysics together with the metaphysics of matzah and you get many powerful sermons. Matzah is bread without human attention (shmurah matzah notwithstanding) and without the attention of a Cosmic Consciousness. It represents enslavement to inert material. It is both literally the bread of affliction, the food of slaves, and symbolically life without redemption from our inner Egypt, the body without a soul. Matzah invokes a God who redeemed the Children of Israel from slavery more than three thousand years ago and Who continues to operate the universe today by attending to its every quantum event. He is an incomprehensibly vast God Who observes every infinitesimal event, all the infinite infinitesimal events that occur every instant to sustain each living cell of each living organism. This is a God that watches everything actively. This God expands and unfolds His Cognizance as vastly, but more comprehensibly, than the universes imagined by the Many Worlds Hypothesis, where every quantum event creates disconnected alternatives. This God gives the universe an elegant unity. His watchfulness also makes life possible. It’s hard not to like this God and this idea of Him. Unless of course you find the very idea of anything not mechanical offensive to reason.

So one of the sermons on matzah is a kabbalistic one. Isaac Luria, the 16th century mystic of Safed, explains that the three matzahs on the seder plate represent Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom. Matzah invites us to stretch our scientific wisdom to its fullest extent beyond enslavement to our preconceptions, confirmation of our biases. It suggests the liberation of science from its prejudices. Is it really harder to believe in God than in the Multiverse Hypothesis? I don’t think so. The benefits of embracing both the intrinsic beauty of the metaphysical explanation and the elegance of its logic make a pretty persuasive case against scientific atheism. From the outside looking in, all the attempts to exclude a Universal Observer from the quantum situation look like contortions by science to avoid the obvious, the result of a fundamentalist-like commitment to a belief that there must not be a God in the universe.

This message in the matzah makes it the twin of Elijah’s cup, its secret sharer and, perhaps, the answer to the question it poses. One seder decades ago, when my children saw Elijah’s cup standing at the end of the seder, they asked, “Where is he?”

The matzah asks the same question about God: “Where is He?” and answers, “Not in this poor, dead bread that we eat because we are slaves. But yes, in everything that lives.”

[1] Prof. Judith Klinman of UC Berkeley first suggested that quantum processes were involved in the enzymatic action in 1987. She has more recently found experimental evidence for it. See, for instance, Judith P. Klinman and Amnon Kohen, “Hydrogen Tunneling Links Protein Dynamics to Enzyme Catalysis,” Annual Rev Biochem. 2013; 82: 471-496.

[2] Chasidus, which channeled Kabbalistic thought for common Jews, saysemphasizes the symbolism of the miraculous in matzah. By commemorating our redemption from Egypt in something so ordinary, we also rehearse the transformation of Hebrew destiny from the fantastic, demonstrably miraculous to the miraculousness of ordinary life, what we call reality.  “The symbolic acts that we, ‎the descendants of the generation of Israelites leaving Egypt at ‎that time, perform on the anniversary of that event, all reflect ‎the suddenness and haste in which the redemption literally ‎overtook them. These acts mirror the impact that G’d’s miracles ‎had on the Jews at that time. In contrast to this, when the same ‎people arrived in the desert of Sinai, prior to receiving the Torah, ‎seven weeks later, they had time to prepare themselves for that ‎event for three days, i.e. the miracles that occurred in connection ‎with that event did not take them by surprise. By that time they ‎had come to realize that G’d’s performing miracles was something ‎‎“natural,” not supernatural, seeing that the source of these ‎‎“miracles” was the same Creator Who had performed the greatest ‎miracles by creating the universe. When they reflected that out ‎of all the phenomena in the universe that they were aware of it ‎was only G’d Who could have created them by merely uttering ‎the necessary words, they no longer needed “miracles” to ‎persuade them that there was such a power, [even though ‎it remained invisible. Ed.] To reflect their new found ‎insights, the offerings presented on the festival of Shavuot did ‎not require matzah as a symbol of the Israelites’ recognition ‎that their redemption had been a miracle, in the sense of ‎something supernatural performed by G’d.‎” Kedushat Levi, Exodus, Pekudei 4

Perpetual Chanukah in the West – or – Why the Pythagorean Theorem is More Than Just Math

David Porush3 Comments
’כהיומ הזה’ – “…even like today” – Chanukah prayer
This is dedicated to my son, Avraham Benyamin (Ben) Porush, whose birthday is the first day of Chanukah and bris the last.

Why does the Talmud warn against teaching Greek to Jewish children?

Pythagoras traveled through the Middle East for twelve years, imbibing Egyptian & Jewish philosophy.

The last pages of the Talmud volume Sotah portrays the decline of Jewish spirit after the destruction of the Temple. It marches through a long, dispiriting list of the horrible things that happen as Jews have to abandon customs that could only be kept alive when there was a spiritual center in Jerusalem and they lived as a nation inside their own borders.

In the middle of this lamentation (called Yeridas HaDoros – “decline of the generations”), the Talmud warns somewhat mysteriously that fathers shouldn’t teach Greek to their sons.What did the Sages have in mind? They can’t have meant Greek language, because the Rabbis were conversant with Greek and spoke it in the streets of Jerusalem. By the first century CE, and almost certainly earlier, it had displaced Hebrew as the lingua franca. And in various places in the Talmud, Greek is praised as the only language into which the Torah can be elegantly translated. Indeed, Sotah itself recounts a lament of Shimon ben Gamliel, the great Sage (50 CE) that shows how much the rabbis thought of Greek:

Continue reading “Perpetual Chanukah in the West – or – Why the Pythagorean Theorem is More Than Just Math” →

The Origin of the Weekend: The Slave’s Lesson

David Porush

shabbat candles in the windIt‘s only Monday, and I‘m already looking forward to the weekend. But since I’ve got a ways to go, it got me to thinking, Where did the idea of the weekend come from? 

The fact is, it took a nation of former slaves, the Jews, to invent the idea around the 14th century BCE. Moses liberates them from bondage in Egypt. They flee as quickly as they can, knowing Pharaoh is likely to change his mind again. He does, and while pursuing them his army is drowned in the Red Sea. Moses leads the Children of Israel, now a horde of several million, safely across into the Sinai desert, the wasteland east of Egypt. They come to Mount Sinai and camp at the bottom while Moses ascends to get further instructions from God. After 40 days, he brings down the Ten Commandments. One of the ten is this incredible innovation: set aside one day a week to rest and worship God and keep the day holy. Since then, the Shabbat, as Jews call it, has become one of the Jews’ extraordinary gifts to world civilization. Continue reading “The Origin of the Weekend: The Slave’s Lesson” →

Almost Really Real: How the word “virtual” deconstructed itself and what its curious etymology tells us about the future of virtual reality and truthiness   

David Porush10 Comments

Chasing virtual reality, what we used to call cyberspace, has spawned a multi-trillion dollar worldwide industry, which makes it a pretty sexy phrase, right? But do we really know what we mean when we use it? In normal conversation today, when we say something is virtually true we’re saying something like,

“It’s just about almost perfectly completely and for all intents and purposes as effectively true as truth … but not essentially, really true.” 

And when we call it virtual reality, we mean a technology meant to fool you into thinking you’re experiencing something you’re not. We’re saying it is “almost really” real, or virtually real – a beautiful oxymoron, and more or less accurate, depending on how cool your hookup gear and the simulations inside are. 

Since we’ve made a trillion-dollar bet on it, wouldn’t it be valuable to know what we mean when we use it? What deep human urge does it promise to fulfill? What itch is it scratching? Perhaps, armed with that deeper understanding, we may even be able to predict where it’s going. I think we can do that by looking at the curious history of the word virtual itself.  Continue reading “Almost Really Real: How the word “virtual” deconstructed itself and what its curious etymology tells us about the future of virtual reality and truthiness   “ →

Entanglement, Chesed, and the Quantum Theology of Incense

David Porush3 Comments

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Every Sabbath, Jews recite a curious prayer, a recipe taken from the Talmud (Kereisos 6b) for a kind of incense that was used in the Temple. It required eleven ingredients in specific measures, including “galbanum,” a terpentine-smelling extract of gum plants, and “Carshina lye,” which is toxic. It sounds altogether foul (although if you knew the ingredients of the most expensive perfumes out of Paris, you’d turn up your nose, too). Furthermore, the mixture was so sacred, if a priest violated the formula by one jot, he could be put to death. In fact, one of the most mysterious passages in the Bible is the only recorded instance of the punishment: Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Abihu, (Lev 10:1-2), get it wrong, even though their intention seemed to be zealous, and G-d takes their souls by fire instead of the incense.

Why is incense such a closely guarded bit of esoterica that it accounts for one of the most confounding events in Scripture and we recite its formula 3000 years later, even in the absence of the Temple, for fear we’ll forget it? What is so precious and dangerous that it has to be guarded by the threat of capital punishment? Does it harbor some key to the nature of the connection between the physical and metaphysical?

The esoteric formula is insistently technical, earthy, materialistic and sensory but it has spiritual consequences. Together the eleven substances produce a divine smell, the incense is the last most mystical offering of all, and the spreading of smoky incense comes at the climax of the service.

This extreme contrast between technicality and spirituality begs for closer inspection. Is there more than materialistic, sensory explanations for the stagecraft of incense? Why is it such a closely guarded bit of esoterica? Is it possible the ritual harbors some key to the nature of the connection between the physical and metaphysical that is so precious and dangerous it is guarded by the threat of capital punishment, we recite the formula 3000 years later even in the absence of the Temple for fear we’ll forget it, and it accounts for one of the most confounding events in Scripture?

Kabbalists connect ketores to the kabbalistic aspect (sefira) of G-d called chesed, usually translated as “kindness,” but meaning much more. [1] The ketores produces a transformative scent. It influences all who smell it. Of all the senses, and of all the kinds of worship – singing, praying, hearing – smell lingers and suffuses. It creates and alters the ecology of a room. Sharing a scent in the air binds people together and it’s the most memorable. The kabbalistic analogy is clear: like acts of kindness, ketores emanates and spreads throughout the congregation and out into the world in unforeseen ways. It binds humanity together and elevates them, entangling their consciousness with each other and the metaphysical. In what follows, I will suggest the incense experience is related to newly-discovered aspects of nature, specifically quantum entanglement, and this relationship not merely metaphorically, but in substantive physics. Ok, that’s weird. Let me try to explain.

Quantum Biology Breaches the Walls Between Reality and Consciousness

For the last century, most physicists treated the troubling and enigmatic implications of quantum mechanics as something to be banished to the realms of philosophy and metaphysics. Physics still largely quarantines the absurdity of subatomic shenanigans from the observable macroscopic world we live in by claiming the two realities are unconnected. The world we experience continues to behave in an orderly, Newtonian, commonsensical fashion. Things don’t change each other by magic. Stuff can’t be in two places at once and no where at all. And most important, reality is there whether someone’s looking at it or not. But quantum mechanics put the nose of the camel of consciousness into the tent of scientific cosmology: a conscious observer had to watch events in order to make them real.

In the last decades, this quarantine has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Experiments in the 1960s through 1980s s that two objects separated by any conceivable  connection, even at other ends of the universe, are entangled and somehow affect each other instantaneously. Science itself has stormed its own articles of faith with experimental results that show consciousness, human or at least intelligent consciousness, is implicated in making reality. Until recently, the last of these walls, between the macroscopic and the sub-atomic, held. What happened down there didn’t affect what happened up here in real reality.   Still, physics had a whole armory of ways to wall off these disturbing phenomena from commonsense reality. saying that when the quantum world interacted with a macroscopic phenomenon, that macroscopic entity “observed” the probabilistic quantum, collapsing it into a stable realism. Its formal name is “Decoherence.”

But in the last ten years, quantum biology has shown that behaviors in our familiar world of nature are directly connected to and reliant on quantum processes. The orientation of migrating birds. The operation of genes. Photosynthesis. The comfortable quarantine that has kept our sense of reality simple and free from philosophy and metaphysics has now collapsed. And that collapse is utter and complete. It can’t be confined, because it is now likely to be shown that the whole universe interacts at all levels with quantum weirdness.

Entanglement suggests the cosmos is interactive

One of those quantum phenomena that is impossible to ignore at the macroscopic level is entanglement: spooky coordination between the behavior of objects that have no material, physical or any other possible connection either invisible or theoretical. Even objects – photons – that are traveling apart at the speed of light or are separated by vast distances instantaneously coordinate their reality. When one is tickled, its entangled twin across the universe laughs.

Perhaps we can get comfortable with the way this betrays our commonsense notions of reality for photons, because they are weird little buggers to begin with, both wave and particle, expressions of a probability formula that ineluctably shows they don’t even really exist in any proper sense of the word until they are observed.  But entanglement isn’t confined to photons and other sub-atomic particles. As two physicists explain in a recent book:

“We talk in terms of twin-state photons because that situation is readily described and subject to experiment. In principle, however, any two objects that have ever interacted are forever entangled. The behavior of one instantaneously influences the other. An entanglement exists even if the interaction is through each of the objects having interacted with a third object. In principle, our world has a universal connectedness.
“Quantum entanglement for large objects [like chairs or people] is generally too complex to notice. But not always.”

Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, QUANTUM ENIGMA: PHYSICS ENCOUNTERS CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford UP, 2006)

This wasn’t written by tripped-out tree-hugging hippies, but by two well-respected tenured physicists at UC  (admittedly, it is Santa Cruz, but nonetheless…). They chronicle how orthodox physics has suppressed these enigmatic but unavoidable conclusions of quantum mechanics. And the most disturbing of these enigmas is the relationship between human consciousness and the spookiness of the quantum level. Once things, including human things, interact with quantum weirdness they are entangled with it. And, by the way, everything in the universe interacts.

These aren’t just mystic metaphors  They are the serious and real consequences of quantum physics. They troubled Einstein and generations of physicists since, but experimental evidence shows they are incontrovertible.

The science that studies how quantum mechanics breaches the wall of classical biology is called quantum biology.  Birds navigate using quantum processing in their nervous system. In order for photosynthesis to convert sunlight into plant food at 90% + efficiency, it uses quantum mechanics. Enzymatic reactions transform one organic substance into another, like milk into cheese via rennet, or juice into wine via yeast, or flour and water into bread, also via yeast. Those enzymes also require quantum mechanics to achieve the speed of reactions needed to perform this magic. Many cultures recognize the transformation of these three foods as magical, spiritual, metaphysical, and even worship or at least pay tribute to them through rituals of sanctification. But Judaism hints at the complex intertwining of metaphysics of their physics (or organic chemistry), if we read it through the lens of the traditions and rituals attached to cheese, wine, and bread.

Another event that relies on quantum biology, and all the metaphysical implication it brings, is smell. [2]

I always wondered why ketores is recited after the end of the Musaf amidah. It seems like such an odd and specific intrusion in the climax of the service. But connecting the incense with chesed brings it all together. When we recite these technical instructions for making the incense as a prayer, we are reminded of the elaborate instructions for building the mishkan, the Sanctuary of the Temple, from which these verses are taken. We both remember and look forward to rebuilding it.

Ketores is designed to create the most beautiful, pungent, memorable, unique, and transporting scent, wafted on smoke to fill the Temple. We’re supposed to remember that Divine smell – or rehearse the rabbis’ memory of it  –  and also remember their pain at its loss. As Proust knew, no sense evokes memory more than smell. We are supposed to long for that smell as we long for the Temple, with the curious admixture of ache and inspiration, in the hope of the time when we can smell that smell again in the rebuilt Temple. This is an ultimate nostalgia, nostos algia, pain for home.

Metaphysics in the physics (and chemistry) of incense

The recipe for ketores specified in the Talmud, specifically the part of the formula that will produce an emanating smell is an enzymatic reaction produced by lye, which relies on quantum mechanics. Lye, which is highly alkaline, catalyses and binds all the other ingredients into an active, dynamic new compound that transcends the sum of its parts. The prayer about it specifies that urine could be substituted for lye to produce the same outcome, but it is undignified for use in the Temple. Chemically if not ritually, urine makes sense: it would introduce the same highly alkaline catalysis, depending on the diet of the donor. (At the risk of boring you, lye is produced by a membrane cell chloralkali process, which is itself also a quantum biological process.)

When we learn that ketores means chesed because it spreads out and connects all of us in unseen and ineffable ways, it is not just metaphorical. It is literally true at the level of physics.

The Quantum G- Hypothesis

From the viewpoint of orthodox science, the ultimate heretical implication of quantum mechanics is what we could call the “Quantum G-Hypothesis.”

THE QUANTUM G- HYPOTHESIS

The universe is sustained by an unimaginably dynamic and omniscient Universal Consciousness.

It (or properly, Who) observes every one of the infinite number of infinitesimal quantum events occurring everywhere in every sub-nanosecond.

This continuous observation by a Universal Consciousness enables reality to unfold. 

The Quantum G-Hypothesis actually does away with some fairly absurd and, so far, unprovable assertions. The Many Worlds Hypothesis, String Theory, A Universal Robot Consciousness; Decoherence; Random Collapses of the Wavefunction, and some other gyrations too technical to delve here. They seem more like contortions designed to preserve logic in the face of experimental and mathematical proofs that show logic’s limitations. These still dominate the way orthodox physics is taught today. I predict they will be short-lived. 

On the other hand, embracing the G-theory explains scientific mysteries without introducing any idea inconsistent with science. It explains the “Unreasonable Efficacy of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” as Eugene Wigner described it in his 1960 paper. It explains the otherwise unreasonably, inexplicable, and statistically far-fetched coincidence of constants in the universe that have enabled life to arise: Planck’s Constant, the strength of electromagnetic, gravity, and weak forces, among others. It solves philosophical problems, too. It explains how Free Will and Determinism can both exist without contradiction. And it explains how consciousness arises from matter.

At the same time, this vision – or scent – of a Quantum-Mechanical, Reality-Unfolding, All-Observing God moves in the opposite direction, from science to an appreciation of spiritual matters. It gives us a pretty good understanding of what Jewish mystics see in God: an Unfolding Ever-Present Consciousness observing every infinitesimal event in the universe, even at the ineffable and impossibly infinite quantum level.

Finally, it explains the inner meaning of incense. The ritual appears to be a symbol of the entire enterprise of the mishkan and Temple, to provide a place on Earth for G-d to abide. The sacrifices were offered in order to negotiate the boundary and open a portal between Earth and Heaven summoning G-d Himself to make a personal house call. The organic chemistry and quantum biology of incense suggest it was exemplary of, an avatar and instantiation of, an entangled process that goes on everywhere all the time in the universe between Divine attention and  ur experience of material reality.

 

ENDNOTE

[1] This blog was inspired by a Shabbat drash (2016), by R. Yitzchok Feldman of Emek Beracha in Palo Alto in which he expounded on the mitzvah of the incense used in the Temple.

[2] See “Quantum mechanics may explain how humans smell,” PhysOrg (Nov 2007) 
Tim Folger, “How Quantum Mechanics Lets Us See, Smell and Touch,” Discover (Oct 23, 2018)

The end of the book, tech-mediated telepathy, and other hallucinogens

David Porush

This is a heavily redacted prophesy about the end of the book and the coming of machine-mediated brain-to-brain communication I wrote in February 1993 to Kali Tal as part of a longer exchange about hallucinogenic drugs, the coming of mind-to-mind communication through VR, and other things.

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Bumpercar enhanced empaths

Tools are human.

There are no technologies without humanities.

Artificial intelligence is a metaphor for the psyche. (And not much more, believe me.) Just as the idea of a psyche is a contraption of cognitive psychology and philosophy, and the brain is a concoction of neurology, so is AI just an idea of what it wants human intelligence to be. (A machine.)

Multimedia, even as virtual reality, is a metaphor for the sensorium, a perceptual gadget beholden to poetics and media studies. It’s got a wonderful future, but it’s just a stab in the dark theater of our desire to be more intimate and stimulating.

Nothing is yet quicker than the light of the slow word.

Yes, we are in the late age of print. What we whiff now is not the smell of ink but the smell of loss, of burning towers or men smoking cigars in the drawing room, thinking they are building an empire. Hurry up please, it’s time. Yes, the time of the book has passed. But it will persist to give glorious pleasure, like other obsolete forms that continually renew themselves and the soul: the poem, dance, graffiti. The book is dead, long live the book.

We will continue to read from paper just as we continue to write poems and tell stories. Or put bannisters in elevators. Yeah, like that’s gonna help you if that cable snaps. The persistence of obsolete forms, attached to the idea of the material thing called a book, which is after all just one of many technologies for delivering the word that began with scrawls on clay and stone. Think of the book as a metaphor for the process it inscribes, for getting one’s solo thoughts into many other heads, one at a time. Just one of many technologies we’ve devised to get what’s in my brain into yours and vice versa.  Tech-mediated-telepathy. TMT.

When Sony debuted Discman, a portable, mini-CD the size of a Walkman, capable of holding 100,000 pages of text, a discussion on the Gutenberg listserv complained with pain, with nostos algia, wistful pain for home: “The smell of ink … the crinkle of pages…”

“But you can’t read it in bed,” she said, everyone’s last redoubt, the last-ditch argument. As if it was lovemaking. It was lovemaking. As if.

Meanwhile in far-off laboratories of what Stuart Moulthrop calls the “Military-Infotainment Complex” at Warner, Disney or IBApple and MicroLotus, a group of scientists work on synchronous smell-o-vision with real time simulated fragrance degradation shifting from fresh ink to old mold. Another group builds raised-text flexible touch screens with laterally facing windows that look and turn like pages, crinkling and sighing as they exfoliate.

“But the dog can’t eat it,” someone protests. Smiling silently, the techies go back to their laboratories with bags of silicon kibbles.

Swimming across this undertow to save ourselves from being swept away, tilting at this windmill, we should keep alive the idea of what the book was and can be, Don Quixote. Tristram Shandy. Gravity’s Rainbow.

In an age when people buy and do not read more books than have ever been published before, perhaps we will each become like the living books of Truffaut’s version of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, vestal readers walking along meandering rivers of light just beyond the city of text. We face their task now, resisting what flattens us, re-embodying reading as movement, as an action rather than a thing, appropriating the metaphor that we think will diminish what we love.  Silently scanning with and absorbing meanings in the mind. Becoming. We should view the book as a network, a node in a network, each word an implicit hypertextual link to archeologcal layers of meaning rendered by what has already been written elsewhere. Always already been and being written.

And as we appropriate the term for the electronically mediated telepathic future we should also resolve to colonize the territory, invade it, dominate it. The network is ours to inhabit. Imperial booty. We will read there. Read minds.

But how?

Think of what we yet need to do to get VR to work, I mean really work: a map of how cognitive modes function in the neurophysiology of the brain that then can be mimicked by a dumb ole binary machine, even a massively interconnected one … with *enhancements*, baby, quantum mechanical implants in the brain.

As we get better and better at doing that, we’re gonna achieve some pretty good turnaround time in transcribing thoughts into evanescent images beyond words. We will produce other sensory kinesthetics (I should say performances). The time between upload and download shrinks, the kinesthetic performances become better and better at representing what’s in our heads, especially since the gear is our heads, and pretty soon you get telepathy, or tech-mediated telepathy, its asymptote.

Now amp up the part of the brain that integrates connections into feelings of transcendence – is it the dorsal raphe nucleus? — with a pattern that does something like Ecstasy or MDMA –forced massive sudden depletion of the serotonin reserves, so the big whoosh comes flooding down (or up) from the brainstem, and you get your waterbed bumpercar enhanced empath … Holy shit there’s more here than I thought. You just did it to me, that miracle, the intrusion of another world into thus one, transcendence at the interface.

I think I know what YOU MEAN.

 

“Dear Telepath: I Just Want to Be a Letter, Preferably a Vowel” – or – How I learned to stop worrying and love the apocalypse

David Porush

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Slim Pickens rides the atom bomb in “Dr. Strangelove” (1964)

Dear Telepath,

I am 16 years old and I am going to go crazy.  I can’t stop thinking about the Apocalypse. I keep seeing and hearing things, and they all add up to one fact: It’s coming. I feel like it is pointless to even do things because I know it is all going to end soon, either by mass starvation with the death of bees, an asteroid hitting our planet, or by nuclear bomb, global warming, bird flu, or human flu, or AIDS, whatever. I am trying to cut high fructose corn syrup out of my diet and every time I think I have triumphed I realize that it’s in everything!!!!!! Splenda causes lesions to the brain, meat causes heart attacks, organic foods are twice the cost of non-organic, yet non-organic foods have pesticides and toxins.

Continue reading ““Dear Telepath: I Just Want to Be a Letter, Preferably a Vowel” – or – How I learned to stop worrying and love the apocalypse” →