Green Oasis

Something about his voice made me tune in. It was a cross between a kindergarten teacher reading storybooks and the voice-over guy who does almost all of the movie trailer narrations. The effect was simultaneously overly dramatic and condescendingly disingenuous. He sounded conscious of his own profundity. His tone grated on my nerves, but it made me listen to his General Conference talk about personal testimony, the only talk that I payed much attention to all weekend.

“If you want to know that you know that you know, a price must be paid.… I know what I know, and my witness is true.”

What does that even mean? What price do I have to pay if I want to know that I know that I know that I know? Can I get by with less if I just want to know that I know?

All joking aside, I can only make sense of what Douglas Callister said if what he means is that he is really, really, really confident that what he believes is true. That isn’t what he said, however. He said that his witness is true in some absolute, unmistakable way. “You can trust in me,” he seemed to say.

In fairness, he also taught that the only witness which counts in the end is our own, but his tone seemed to imply that we could rely on his beliefs until we knew for ourselves, no need to doubt.

I think most people will agree that we human beings are limited. We can’t know everything. Our knowing is confined to some subset of everything.

I would go further to say that we can’t know anything with absolute certainty. We rely on the trustworthiness of our own minds. To know anything absolutely, our minds must be in perfect working order with all the facts available to it. Here, we run into a bootstrapping problem: how can we know that our minds are in perfect working order? It is nonsensical to think that we can use our minds to judge their own fitness. If a mind is unfit, then it could erroneously judge itself fit because of its unfitness.

It is tempting to wonder whether God could intervene here making it possible for us to know something with absolute certainty. I can’t imagine what form that intervention would take. We would still be forced to wonder how we could be sure that our impression that God gave us perfect knowledge is true? How do we know that we know? Answering that by “prayer and fasting” we can know that we know seems ignorant of the problem at hand.

I can’t see any way to escape this trap. The honest must admit to themselves that they will never know something with absolute certainty. There must always be doubt, if we are honest. We may be very confident in our beliefs, but that doesn’t make them true. In other words we can say that we believe that we know, but anyone who says that they know that they know isn’t being honest with themselves (or the church).

Shalom Auslander, author of Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir, was interviewed on Fresh Air. It continues to amaze me how similar the two communities are: Mormon and Orthodox Jew. He discusses what it was like growing up in an Orthodox community, how it exacerbated his family’s troubles, and why he can’t get God out of his mind but wishes he could. The title of the book comes from his dilemma of whether or not to circumcise his son and how it ruined his joy at being a new father.

This post will serve two purposes. The first is to subtly notify the world that I’ve finally finished Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. OK, so maybe I’ve blown the subtle part. While I found the book very interesting, enlightening even, it was hard to get through all 700 or so pages before I found something else to read. It just didn’t hold my attention. Every few months, I’d pick it up again. After years of episodic reading, I read the last page in the wee hours of Sunday.

The second purpose is to note an odd bit of synchronicity. This morning, I stumbled upon an example of a striking audio illusion that I had seen mentioned toward the end of Gödel, Escher, Bach only a few days ago.

You can find an even more striking example at the Wikipedia article on Shepard tones.

Canon 5 of Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer is an example of a spiral canon which ends a tone higher than it starts. The canon can then be played at that higher pitch and end one tone higher yet again. This could be done ad infinitum leading to ever higher pitches, though we would eventually be unable to hear the music.

Hofstadter suggests that this audio illusion could transform Bach’s canon into a piece which would only sound as though it were ever rising.

Interestingly, Gödel, Escher, Bach itself takes the form of an endlessly rising prose canon which I suppose means that I’m not finished reading yet.