
They say that there are two hard things in computer science — cache invalidation and naming things. Naming things (variables, functions, classes, objects) right is an important part of writing clean code. For code to be clean and clear to its future readers, it needs to correspond to reality of what it models to the appropriate extent. In the case of naming things, this means that names should indicate what things are.

Aristotle wrote about the properties of things extensively, and one of the more useful categorisations of properties is the division into *accidental* and *essential* properties of entities in the universe. Essential properties properties without which something must have in order to be classified as that thing. Accidental properties on the other hand are not particular to the thing that we are investigating, and without them it would still retain its identity. Aristotle identified several categories of accidental properties, but the ones most useful for us as programmers are those related to appearance.

A good name is one that aids in understanding the nature of the thing it refers to. Because of this, we should strive to name things after what they are, and not by what they look like.

For example, we might call Socrates an Athenian. An essential property of the class of Athenians is that they are born, reside, or are citizens of Athens. If he, instead, was born in Corinth and resided there his whole life, it would not be right to classify him as an Athenian. Any other property of Socrates, for example his snub nose or bushy beard, is accidental to his being an Athenian.

In the real world finding essential properties of entities around us is quite difficult. For example, what are essential properties of giraffes? One might say: spots and a long neck. A giraffe could be born, due to a rare genetic mutation perhaps, with an extremely short neck and it would still be a giraffe. Likewise I could draw a crude outline of a spotless long-necked animal in pencil and you could guess that it is a drawing of a giraffe. With the knowledge of modern genetics we can peer into the implementation of the universe, so to speak, by sequencing the genes of a giraffe cell and conclude that an essential property of being a giraffe is to be a collection of cells with particular genetic material. The appearance — spots and a long neck — doesn’t have much to do with it.

That is perhaps satisfactory for identifying species, but we might further ask: what is an essential property of being Socrates? That’s quite difficult to define and deconstruct, so for the most part we treat this sort of thing as a black box. There are philosophical attempts at answering this question, but from the programming point of view we might just say that in the source code of the universe there exists a class called `Socrates` which has some number of unknown, encapsulated properties, an interface (albeit a somewhat obnoxious one, especially if you’re an Athenian minding your own business in the agora) that is intuitively understood, and a singleton member. 

# Lessons in software

Since software engineering is [basically applied philosophy](https://www.intercaetera.com/posts/faith-before-reason) we can draw lessons from this line of reasoning for our own code. Unlike in the real world, when you’re working on a software application, you typically can inspect the source code underlying an abstraction, either because you have written yourself or because it is a part of an open-source library. However, since the cognitive capacity of any single human brain’s short term memory cache is very limited, we want to use names to index complex things. 

Memorising names without context is difficult, though. It is sometimes necessary for the most fundamental building blocks of our understanding — primitives — or when working in abstract or otherwise unfamiliar domains. In general, however, you almost always want to structure your abstractions in a way that reflects the real world, because most are familiar with it, and thus you have a larger chance of making your abstractions understandable. 

In practical terms this means using names which correspond to the business domain of the product you are developing. A part of the job of a software engineer is also to name and structure the parts of the business which have until now been understood only implicitly or glossed over. To do that we have to identify essential properties of the parts of our system in order to name them correctly.

# Case study

Let’s say we have an application for automating marketing pipelines. We have some user groups as inputs, events which happen to the users and reports which collect our data. We call our UX designer and she comes up with the following mockup:

![Marketing mockup upright](/assets/marketing-mockup-upright.svg)

How would you name the components and actions in this UI? With just a cursory understanding of the business domain you might attempt to name them by what you see. So the rectangular components might be called *cards*. They will be grouped in *rows* and perhaps *subrows*, and connected by *arrows*. By right-clicking the UI, the user will be able to add cards *horizontally* to an existing row or *vertically* to create a new row. 

This sounds like a useful way to name things initially, and you might communicate with the rest of your team using these abstractions: of cards and rows, of adding cards horizontally or vertically, connecting them with arrows and so on.

The team spends two weeks developing the page, and after that time the UX designer comes back armed with feedback from the users and slightly updates the mockup:

![Marketing mockup sideways](/assets/marketing-mockup-sideways.svg)

Horror strikes you. You now realise that while the change would be trivial to implement visually, and the business logic has not changed at all, almost every single name which you have used so far no longer makes sense. What is the error?

The error was in naming things after what they look and not what they are. Perhaps *cards* is not a bad name for the rectangles on the diagram, but neither arrows nor rows exist any more. You learn from a domain expert that the arrows represent *splits* (as in *split testing*) that evenly divide the flow of the campaign. In the updated diagram the campaign progresses from the left to right in *phases*. Instead of adding cards horizontally or vertically, the user simply *creates a card* or *creates a phase*.

The fact that the parts of our campaign are in cards, that they are laid out in rows or columns and are connected with arrows or lines is completely accidental to what they represent. By naming our components and actions after their essential properties, we can make our code clearer and more resilient to changes, ensuring that the names only change if there is a radical shift in the nature of our abstractions and not in their accidental properties.


Naming Things


During the time between Christmas and New Year, I usually force myself not to work on anything productive and indulge in a lot of entertainment in a relatively short period of time so as to scratch that itch for a while and focus on other pursuits in the new year. This time I replayed *Skyrim*, and while most of it was unrelated to the content of this blog, one very specific line of dialogue was spoken in the game which I found interesting and worth sharing.

> “*I only know what she told me. **She had a theory about soul gems.** That the souls inside of them don't just vanish when they're used... they end up in the Soul Cairn.”*

Emphasis mine, that particular sentence is an excellent writing device to get out of having to explain an outlandish claim. A genius character just “has a theory,” which, of course, eventually ends up being proven correct. Even in a world in which magic is commonplace, dragons attack travellers along the roads in between cities and the world’s deities can be freely found and talked to, it is still an excellent question: how exactly does one come across a theory *like that*?

# Science 101

We have been picking at the faults in rationalism, scientism and blind belief in The Science numerous times on this blog, however I feel like it would be in order to look into the nature of the scientific method itself. The discourse has been dominated by the “trust the science” types for what feels like a generation now, forgetting the motto of the finest organisation studying natural philosophy in history — the Royal Society’s “*Nullius in verba”* — that the scientific method is primarily a tool for verification rather than discovery. 

While it would be prudent for software engineers to know the scientific method by heart, it is rarely necessary to actually employ it in our day-to-day. The errors in software that we develop can usually be solved with tools, heuristics, spontaneous creativity, or careful observation. I have yet to see a bug in my career that would require unleashing the full force of the formalised scientific method. It is slow, tedious and laborious, but it is invincible. There is no problem in any discipline of engineering that is resistant to it and one gets to the solution in the end given enough time.

Scientific method can only work on “what is” rather than “what should be,” so the entire process must avoid normative claims. “Make program better” is not allowed. One has to be descriptive and rigidly logical, otherwise the entire thing goes crumbling down.

The scientific method, as we know from school, consists of the following parts: stating the problem, proposing hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, conducting experiments to test each hypothesis, observing the results of the experiments, and deriving conclusions. Whereas stating the problem can be banal (”the program crashes”), coming up with hypotheses is the real first hurdle of the scientific process. Where do hypotheses come from?

This question confuses the materialist because there is no immediately obvious materialist answer to it. We could wave our hand and dismiss it by saying that “one just comes up with them,” but that’s not good enough. It is the most mysterious part of the scientific method, because hypotheses seem to appear from nothing. One might be sitting at a problem for days, trying to come up with a solution in vain, then stand up and go for a walk in the forest for an hour and, in a flash, a theory might appear in his head that eventually turns out to be true.

What is needed to explain hypotheses is faith. A scientist *must* believe that the world is driven by a rational system of physical laws that work predictably. That statement is not falsifiable though, and thus there is no way in which it can be accepted as scientifically true. We may always say that everything we have seen “up to this point” was rational and logical, but every second in the infinite universe we could encounter something that breaks the laws of physics and throws the entire theory out of the window. And even that is not true — there are plenty of things that have already happened or continue to happen that defy rational explanation. However, once we believe that the universe is rationally ordered, we can make predictions based upon the things that we see and know.

The reason why Europe was at the forefront of advancements in natural philosophy for most of recorded history is undoubtedly due to the fact that this belief in a rational order behind the universe has been in our “intellectual water supply” for centuries. During the transition in Ancient Greece from thinking in terms of symbolism, mythos, and [the domestic and municipal religions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cit%C3%A9_antique) to philosophy we see the first occurrences of this idea. Five centuries before Christ, the Ephesian philosopher Heraclitus named it *logos*, which is difficult to translate, but is generally rendered as “word,” “reason,” or “account.” It was later picked up by the Stoics, Plato, Aristote, Philo, Plotinus, and a whole manner of other philosophers, traditions and schools.

# John 1:1

The revolutionary impact of Christianity that destroyed the primitive ancient order of domestic and municipal polytheistic religions and replaced it with the belief in a universal, personal God, the author of the universe, solidified the *logos* as an intellectual idea in the places where it spread. The Gospel of John begins:

> *Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.*  
> In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum.  
> **In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.**

As Christians, we believe that the Gospel was written under divine inspiration. This means that the Bible was not merely created out of thin air, but written by a person. Saint John was an educated man who undoubtedly was acquainted with the concepts of Greek philosophy at the time, and used language that was familiar to him, hence the concept of logos. Due to the lack of a word which would accurately represent *λόγος* in Latin, it was rendered in the Vulgate as “Verbum” — “Word.”

This deficiency of Latin, understood even by pre-Christian Roman philosophers, of lacking words sufficiently representing concepts found in Greek unfortunately caused a great deal of meaning to be lost in translation for us, especially those acquainted only with the Bible in national languages. Some do a better job than others (in French, for example, it is rendered as *le Verbe*), but the lack of familiarity with the idea of logos causes shallow and/or poor interpretations of this verse.

One of many innovations of Christianity in this respect, though, is the identification of the logos with God, and more specifically with Christ. The Word, after all, was not only in the beginning, and was not only God and with God, but also was made flesh and dwelt among us. This means that, contrary to the view of Christianity that it imposed upon us by contemporary culture and the cultists of Science, it has always been in the interests of Christians to know and understand the world. One of the objectives of Christianity is to glimpse at the nature of God, and since the logos, the rational order behind all creation is God, to study that creation means to learn more about its creator.

However, from the Bible we also know that man was created in the image and likeness of God, and as such we have the unique ability, found nowhere else in all of creation, to see the manifestations of logos in the world around us. Because of this, we have the ability to find connections in the conceptual space that have a possibility of being true — the hypotheses that later can be tested using the scientific method.

# Hello world

There is very little difference in the nature of philosophy and programming. In both disciplines one deals with layers upon layers of abstractions, which are groups of points in the conceptual space with some kind of a common factor, increasing or decreasing in scope. The only notable distinction between the work of the philosophers of old and the work of contemporary software engineers is that the former deal with the structure of thought in a theoretical way, whereas the latter do it in a more applied way and with a shorter feedback loop.

Indeed, if we look at the process of me typing these words on a keyboard, they first come out as key presses, that are translated to an electronic signal by the keyboard’s circuit board, travel down the cable to the computer, where they are processed as current, then binary and assembly, pass through a driver in the Linux kernel, are interpreted as text, sent through the window manager to a terminal window with Vim, committed into a Git repository, pushed through SSH across the ocean, deployed, and displayed on your screen as pixels that form letters that form words that form sentences that form paragraphs that form ideas. Each one of these steps is an abstraction that had to be developed. Some have been formalised, others are understood implicitly. Whether that happened in natural language, in the formalised logical notation or in C is hardly relevant.

What is relevant is that no part of this structure could ever be developed without following the path of logos to the appropriate extent. If that does not happen, the final product will lack quality. Deficiency of faith in logos and looking for logos without regard for reality seems to be correlated with the dichotomy of [romantic and classical](https://www.intercaetera.com/posts/romantic-programming) understanding of the world. One becomes a romantic when the entire system is beheld as a one universal whole, and then not analysed thoroughly enough. A romantic scientist will perform experiments that do not correspond to the previously established hypotheses in any way, ending up with inconclusive results. A romantic programmer will write messy, unmaintainable code, with various levels of abstraction intermingled close together.

In contrast, one becomes a classicist when the individual parts of the system are not unified enough to create a structure that corresponds with reality. The vision of the order clouds reality. A classicist scientist will disregard the results of experiments that do confirm his hypothesis and looks for connections where there aren’t any. A classicist programmer might preemptively create abstractions that do not correspond to reality, resulting in code that is rigid and likewise unmaintainable. 

In light of this, it’s easy to understand why the struggle to define “code quality” has been such a futile endeavour. Seemingly everyone in our field tries to do it, but inevitably fails, and then brushes the matter off as “subjective.” But quality is neither subjective nor objective, rather it is something that exists at the boundary of the two. For code to have good quality it needs to follow the same rational order that animates reality.

Science and faith are not in conflict, but one is actually a consequence of the other. Much like good science precedes good engineering, good faith precedes good science.


Faith Before Reason

Years ago, during the long summer of New Atheism, in a rarely frequented corner of the internet I found an essay which attempted to establish a religious framework that should be followed by a post-religious society. One that would be in line with reason, discovery and science, one that would cultivate the spirit of curiosity and would be free from the perceived barbaric nature of revealed religion.

I was young then, and my mind was easily influenced by new, radical and rebellious ideas. The New Atheists (of the Dawkins and Hitchens variety) were experts at swaying crowds of people by performing a clever bait-and-switch. They claimed to encourage their followers to "think for themselves" while at the same time spouted wise-sounding nonsense that convinced the crowd that this is indeed what they were doing. These snake whispers proliferated from mind to mind, crossing culture and language borders. I believe a large part of this was the advent of popular science blogs and YouTube channels, which rode this train — exalting science and denigrating belief in religion. I must sadly confess that I, too, was one of the victims of New Atheist mind virus.

Even though I searched for this essay again, I found that the site where it had been posted has since been removed from the internet. However, the points raised in it left a lasting impact on my memory, because I have since never seen a more accurate and succint summary of the Modern Secular Religion. It attempted to formulate explicit beliefs which satisfied the requirement of blind adherence to Science, presented in a religious framework, but ended up making moral assumptions with brazen ignorance.

There are four pillars of the Modern Secular Religion, each building on the assumption made by the previous one. The fundamental truth is that each human being desires personal good according to the natural pyramid of needs, at the top of which is the desire to live a curious and interesting life. The means to obtain one's personal good must not interfere with anybody else's and therefore one must tolerate whatever means another chose as long as they do not cause tension and conflict. One should use reason and rational argument in order to find out how these means should be pursued efficiently and with tolerance for others. Finally, the ultimate goal of all humanity is to inspire curiosity and creativity in each other so as to understand and explain the universe by means of scientific inquiry.

The stage is set then, and I believe that this is a set of beliefs that most of my progressive friends would have no issues with accepting. The four pillars of the Modern Secular Religion then are: individualism, tolerance, rationalism and scientism.

We have already picked at rationalism and scientism at length [elsewhere](https://www.intercaetera.com/posts/the-cult-of-science). However, in this particular case, we can once again reduce the problem to the fact that we cannot derive moral values from scientific observations. Science and reason can tell us what is efficiently good (i.e. "a gun is good for killing people"), but cannot tell us what is morally good ("should I shoot the man who's trying to hit me through the head with a skateboard?").

Another heuristic I have found over the years of analysing this kind of thought is that where there is a façade of scientism and rationalism, which cannot produce coherent normative statements, one will usually find utilitarism not further behind. Utilitarian morality, thanks to its famous slogan: "the greatest good for the greatest number of people," sounds simple enough that it cannot possibly be bad. It is almost always taken as a moral default by people with no exposure to metaphysics.

Utilitarianism indeed is not just bad, it's also logically wrong. Every mathematician will tell you, that you cannot optimise a function with two variables. But ignoring the paradox of that for a moment, "good" is not a quantifiable metric. When taken as an end in itself, good tends to mean happiness, which tends to mean pleasure. Perhaps one day, with enough advancement in neuroscience, we might be able to measure how much pleasure or happiness a person is feeling, but that does not exactly mean that an increase in neural activity is an increase in felt happiness. We would have to be able to measure and assign a numerical value to every single individual feeling to determine whether it is contributing to one's "good".

We cannot derive a morality from rationalism and scientism, then. What about the other pillars? Perhaps we might consider some kind of utopian libertarian society that provides maximum freedom to everybody. However, to enforce tolerance between individuals with needs that eventually conflict, there needs to be a certain sovereign group above them which will enforce this non-aggression principle, only kicking the can further down the road. That group must either already have absolute sovereign power (or tend towards it if established recently), or be bound by another power which then is the sovereign. On top of that, there is no actual incentive for individuals not to oppress others, either overtly or covertly, because there is no objective morality.

It is also worth mentioning and dispensing with the myth of scientific progress — the idea that when it comes to science, the only way is up. A common belief, especially among people who haven't had even cursory experience with [philosophy of science](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method), is that the entire scientific epistemology was constructed from the bottom up, through verifiable and falsifiable theories which eventually lead up to conclusions that we may definitely say are true (this is called "logical positivism"). In fact, if we look at the history of scientific discovery, we will find numerous examples of not even individual theories (relativity, heliocentrism, [continental drift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener#Continental_drift_theory)) but entire disciplines (chemistry, astronomy) replacing antiquated beliefs which had been considered "true". These days it's mostly seen in pseudoscientific fields like economics and sociology, where we notice various competing models and theories, but this only shows how far we are from a truly "scientific" understanding of the universe.

Finally, let us consider a footnote regarding the afterlife. What most followers of this religion would likely want to believe is that there indeed is no true life after death, that the particles of the body are scattered, the energy is released and the person simply ceases to be — except in the memories of the living. This is also supposed to serve as motivation to do good instead of bad. The problem is, naturally, that biologically humans tend to remember bad things better than good things. This is perhaps why the deceased person that is most commonly mentioned and remembered, even if not fondly, is a certain aspiring painter from Braunau am Inn.


Modern Secular Religion


"For Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee." *Confessions* is one of the first known literary autobiographies, written around 397 AD, detailing the life and conversion of St Augustine of Hippo. In the book, Augustine recalls many episodes of his own life, but also does not hesitate to spiral into more philosophical topics. Issues such as the allegory of Genesis, the original sin, or even less theological concepts such as memory or time are examined through the lens of his own life and experience. 

Augustine is a foundational figure to early Catholicism and Christianity as a whole. *Confessions* is a much less technical work than his other theological treatises (*On Christian Doctrine*, *City of God*), it is a moving account of a humble man who did extraordinary spiritual work on himself, and his ability to examine and question the matters of body, mind and soul eventually elevated him to sainthood and he is now counted as one of the thirty six Doctors of the Church.

Augustine is also responsible for bringing neoplatonic thought in line with Christian orthodoxy. Possibly the second largest, after the Bible, source of inspiration and cross-reference is Plotinus and his *Enneads*. Much like St Thomas a few centuries later with Aristotle, Augustine helped place Christian philosophy on solid, philosophical grounds and ensured that we did not dismiss the wisdom of those who came before us.

# Introduction to *Confessions*

Aurelius Augustinus is born in 354 AD in Thagaste, a small town in the Roman province of Numidia in present-day Algeria. His father was called Patricius, and his mother was St Monica. In childhood he studies briefly in the town of Madaura, and then in Carthage, but he returns to his town of birth often. As one of his early literary influences he cites Cicero's *Hortensius*, which he explicitly names as the reason why he became interested in philosophy.

Also in his adolescence he becomes interested in an eastern dualistic religion called [Manichaeism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism). He  becomes involved in the practices of manicheists and eventually meets one of their bishops, Faustus of Milevis, by whom he is greatly disappointed, recognising him as a good rhetorician but a poor thinker. He later moves to Rome and then Milan with a couple of his friends. His mother later follows him to Milan.

Throughout his time in Carthage and Italy he struggles with sexual immorality — he takes on several mistresses and has an illegitimate child. His sins of this nature later serve as his general exploration for why men sin.

He works in Milan as a professor of rhetoric and meets St Ambrose there, the bishop of Milan. Due to the influence of Ambrose's speeches, his reading of the Platonists (including, presumably, Plotinus) which enabled him to understand immaterial reality, miraculous discovery of relics of saint Gervasius and Protasius, as well as reading some of St Paul's epistles, he converts to Christianity.

On the Easter Vigil of 387 AD, he and two of his friends are baptised by St Ambrose in the Milan cathedral. Shortly after, he leaves Milan.

On the way back to the coast, in Ostia, he and his mother share a mystical vision in a garden. Shortly after, St Monica dies and is buried in Ostia. Augistine returns home to Thagaste and founds a monastic community with his friends. He writes many of his philosophical treatises there.

About fifteen years later he is ordained as a priest by Valerius, bishop of Hippo Regius. He continues to write philosophical and theological treatises, sermons and explanations of biblical stories. On multiple occasions he writes refutations of Manichaeism. Five years later Augustine is ordained a co-bishop of Hippo. A year later, St Ambrose dies, and in the same year, Augustine writes the *Confessions*.

*Confessions* consists of thirteen books. Books one to nine are almost entirely autobiographical, detailing episodes from Augustine's life and some of his reflections on the issues that he faced. Books ten to thirteen, significantly longer than the first nine, venture more into the realm of philosophy and theology and include a lengthy explanation of the first chapter of the Genesis.

# Notes

This post is going to consist of a few notes I took during reading of *Confessions*. I typically put up my book reviews on Instagram, but this one is too long for that. Note, though, that this is just a loose collection of musings on specific fragments rather than a coherent story, and is therefore unlike most things you might read on this blog. The parts recalled below are not necessarily in the same order as they are encountered in the book.

## Religious zeal

> He told her that I was as yet not ripe for teaching because I was all puffed up with the newness of my heresy and had already upset a number of insufficiently skilled people with certain questions.

Once Augustine discovered Manichaeism, his mother, a devout orthodox Christian, became worried and asked a local bishop to do something about his heretical views. The bishop told her that due to Augustine's new-found zeal as a recent convert, there was little that he could do. Instead the bishop hinted that Augustine, thanks to his own cleverness and inquisitiveness, will find questions that the manicheans will not be able to answer. He was later proven correct.

I regret to say that I was caught up with something similar during my adolescence, once I discovered figures such as Dawkins and other such priests of the contemporary secular religion. As a literal fedora-tipping atheist at the time, I thought most people stupid for believing these "Christian superstitions." The reason for this is, of course, not that the people themselves are stupid, but rather they just have more interesting things to do with their lives than discuss religion with someone who had just recently read *The God Delusion*.

Indeed, my own story in this regard progressed very much along the lines of St Augustine's — I found some questions which the rationalist secularism could not answer, I turned to the wisdom of the ancients. I started reading the Ancient Greeks, the Church Fathers, the apologetics, and eventually discovered the answers to what I looked for.

## Popular orator

> And I know now and with sure confidence confess to You that I loved the man more for the love of those who praised him than for the qualities for which he was praised.

In Carthage Augustine meets an orator called Hiereus, a Greek-educated Syriac who made a career in Rome. He was someone who we might these days call a celebrity. Augustine admired Hiereus not really for his ability or virtue, but rather "went with the crowd," and considered him to be at the apex of worldly honour and glory. It was something that Augustine desired for himself early on.

This is a trap that we ourselves fall into every day. We follow the crowd instead of seeing the world for what it is. We make our decisions based on popularity instead of any serious objective metrics.

His experience with Hiereus put first significant dents into his understanding of Manichaeism and its materialist view of the world.

## Foretelling eclipses

> And men who do not know this art marvel and are amazed, and those that know it boast and are made much of, in their evil pride turning from You and losing Your light: an eclipse of the sun they see so long before it happens, yet they fail to see their own eclipse actually present.

Having met the bishop of the Manichees, Faustus, Augustine becomes sorely disappointed because it turned out that they were proud "snares of the devil," and their teaching held no substance. Manichaean hierarchy was also such that parts of their philosophy were restricted to those not initiated beyond a certain level. Augustine compares this to astrologers, who can predict eclipses and exploit the people who do not know how eclipses work.

This is also a caution against those who dictate actions of others from within an opaque circle that cannot be seen or understood from the outside. We should be careful when taking advice or acting upon orders of people whose motivations are unclear or fake.

## Arena

> His curiosity got the better of him, and thinking that he would be able to treat the sight with scorn — whatever the sight might be — he opened his eyes and was stricken with a deeper would in the soul than the man whom he had opened his eyes to see got in his body.

Augustine recounts a story of a friend of his, Alypius, who struggled with the sin of concupiscence. Alypius very much enjoyed watching gladiatorial battles in the arena, a barbaric pastime which was forbidden to Christians. He wanted to stop, but was encouraged by his friends to go. So he went, but decided to keep his eyes shut so as to avoid seeing the brutality of the games. At some point, though, he heard a loud noise and, ovecrome by curiosity, he opened his eyes "just for a glance," but having seen the scene, he could not close them again.

This is related to Augustine's later attempt to explain his trouble with sexual immorality. His conclusion is that all it takes is a first step to become sinful and therefore we should avoid as much as possible taking that first step. That first step is the moment where we choose to defy the Christian morality and we become like Eve in the Garden.

Also, listen to your parents and don't do stupid things just because your friends want you to.

## Pear tree

> But what delight did I find in that, which I would not equally have found if I had done it alone?

Almost half of book two is devoted to an incident of robbing a pear tree — a memory Augustine admits that he remembers very well, even though it was something as a matter of fact insignificant. He and a group of friends stole pears from a tree in a neighbour's garden. As he notes, they did not want to eat the pears, they weren't poor or hungry, and in the end the just threw the pears to the pigs. He wonders why he chose to do what he did, which was of course immoral.

Robbing the pear tree lays the foundation for what will later become his examination of original sin. Due to the fallen nature of man, there are sometimes inclinations in us to do things which are forbidden merely because they are forbidden. There was no practical reason for stealing, but he and his friends did it anyway.

This seems to contradict the common idea we hear these days that people commit crimes merely because they are in need. People steal because they need food, they excessively drink or do drugs at the behest of "friends", they commit sexual transgressions for want of love. This is all true, and there certainly are many people whose crimes like this might be excused — but there also is in us a perverse proclivity towards sin which is inexcusable in itself, and it needs to be fought on a personal level. All of us have a tendency to do wrong if circumstances present themselves, even if we do not stand to gain or lose anything, and for that we should also avoid finding ourselves in such circumstances.

## Enemy insults

> Just as the flattery of a friend can pervert, so the insult of an enemy can sometimes correct.

Augustine recounts an incident from his mother's life, where, while in service in a local lord's household, whenever she would be sent to the basement to draw wine from a barrel, she'd take a little sip. Eventually the habit worsened so much that she would drink full cups before returning. One day she had an argument with one of the maids who, in a fit of rage, called Monica a drunkard. Realising the fault in her behaviour, she stopped drinking immediately.

We should sometimes pay attention to our enemies, because even if their criticisms are entirely malicious, there might be a grain of truth in them that we might learn from. Likewise, we should not only listen to those who flatter us, because flattery is often insincere.

## Measure

> For the passage is itself a pleasure, yet there is no other way to achieve sufficiency than that which necessity forces us to travel.

Now in the theological/philosophical second part of *Confessions*, we find Augustine musing over the right measure of things that fulfil our bodily functions. We need to eat, but we also derive enjoyment from eating. When do we know that we have gone past the health threshold and are now eating merely for pleasure?

We are evolutionarily predisposed to derive pleasure from things which are good for us. We enjoy the taste of foods that we, at least historically, needed to be able to function properly, hunt, and so on. However, in the modern world of omnipresent abundance, we must take care to only derive pleasure from things which are rightly ordered and not overindulge. Gluttony, pride and lust are not only sins, they are also unhealthy.

## Bible

> I know no books so destructive of pride, so destructive of the enemy who stands up in the justification of his sins, resisting reconciliation with You. I know, Lord, no writings so pure, none that have so powerfully persuaded me to confession, and bent my neck to Your yoke, and invited me to worship You for worship's sake alone.

The Bible is the best book. It is a source not only of wisdom, but spiritual joy. And, what's more important, it's the foundation of our civilization, the most important text in the history of mankind. Read it often, lest you become consumed by sin.


On Augustine's "Confessions"

Spoiler alert: it's not love.

To educate and pass on knowledge we need to explain things. An explanation, in Aristotelian terms, is a sequence of premises and conclusions that lead us from one point to another. Aristotle, having many firsts under his belt, described these basics of logical and analytical discourse in *Posterior Analytics*, which is probably the first treatise on philosophy of science and tackles the subject of "what does it actually mean to know something".

# The four causes

In Aristotelian terms, the way one acquires knowledge is by discovering and demonstrating a "middle term" between two different things, preferably starting from first principles (that is, propositions that are self-evident and do not need to be demonstrated). Aristotle, to this effect, identified four types of explanations why and/or how anything exists:

- The **material**: what is it made of — wood.
- The **formal**: the form or blueprint that defines it — desk.
- The **efficient**: what created it — a carpenter.
- The **final**: the purpose for which it was made — so that I can write comfortably.

According to Aristotle, any middle term falls into one or more of these four types. This allows us to create complex explanations and stories which make explanations rigorous and true, but also memorable. It might be a remnant of the oral tradition of our past that we remember things better if they form a coherent story.

For example, a familiar story: on your car, on which side is the fuel cap? It should be very simple to remember, because it is either "left" or "right." Yet I would always forget this when approaching a petrol station until I learned that the placement of the fuel pump symbol on the gauge indicates on which side the fuel cap is. Quantitatively speaking, that entire story is more information to remember than just simply "left" or "right", but it is easier to remember than just the side itself because it has a logical cause and effect.

Approaching this example from a different direction, we can see that it is an example of the final cause at work. Why is the fuel pump symbol on the right? Because the fuel cap is on the right. The missing middle term is: "the fuel pump and cap being on the same side". So the full demonstration is: "Why is the pump symbol on the right? Because the pump and cap are on the same side, and the cap is on the right."

Aristotle posits that everything in the universe has a final cause and this is one of the most contentious points of his metaphysics. Denying it means that it is possible that the universe does not have an end in itself and everything might actually just be pointless. Indeed, if one asks someone in the street whether he or she believes that everything in the universe has a purpose, I would be surprised if the answer were anything other than "no."

# Survival of the fittest

I suppose one might at this point smile indulgently and say that while this concept of everything having a final cause (we also call this *teleology* from Greek *telos* meaning "end") could have certainly made sense in Aristotle's day, surely Darwin's theory of evolution proves it wrong. After all, we know now that all creatures were not intelligently designed with a specific final cause in mind, but evolved over time in order to have certain traits.

Theory of evolution by natural selection is used widely as a hammer on metaphysics (especially of Aristotelian and, later, Christian variety) and on intelligent design. One could argue, though, that it does do only one of these things well, namely, offering an answer as to why certain traits in humans or different species are as they are without involvement of God, demiurge or any other kind of intelligent designer. 

Even if we argue within the context of materialism that rejects any sort of metaphysics, we still are stuck with a question why certain traits evolved as they did. Evolution optimises for *something*. "*This* evolved to do *that*."

We tend to just throw the phrase "survival of the fittest" around and move on, but actually every trait that is a result of natural selection has some final cause. Otherwise, the extent of our discussion on natural selection would have to be factual statements of what happened and not why it happened.

And on one hand, we want to avoid the "why" (because that's metaphysics, which thanks to the "Enlightenment" we really want to consider illegitimate), but on the other we want to have a narrative explanation for certain traits in humans or animals. (Why do giraffes have long necks? Why do we speak? Metaphysics.)

Was Darwin wrong? Probably not. He cleverly smuggled in a metaphysical final cause into a philosophical framework. That's a significant achievement, although it puts him along with [Galileo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method) into the hall of fame of successfully subverting scientific principles and being lauded for it by cultists of Science.

# Chance is teleological

To be honest, it appears that Aristotle himself was not exactly convinced about how bulletproof the idea of the final cause is. He seemed ready to concede that events caused by chance are not always subject to the final cause.

However, this is later convincingly refuted by Boethius (in *[De consolatione philosophiae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Consolation_of_Philosophy)*), who claims that it is not possible for an event not to have a cause at all. Actually, we might consider events random because we do not have prior knowledge of their cause, or because they occur at the intersection of two strands of fate. In either case, perhaps a more appropriate word would be "unforeseen."

First consider an example of a dice roll. We think this is a random act that has no definite end, that is the dice are not necessarily going to end up with snake eyes or two sixes or any other combination. However, if we had divine knowledge of the precise state of the universe at the time of the throw, the weight of the dice, their angle and position, we might be able to predict the way they will fall.

Another type of event is what Boethius poetically describes as two strands of fate — two different causal chains — intersecting in an unexpected way. For example, if I dig in my garden and find a crate full of gold nuggets, I might consider this a random event. However, there is a different causal chain of why that crate was placed there. Perhaps someone was on the run and hid it there for ease of escape long ago.

(Boethius then goes deeper into this as an argument for reconciling teleology and divine omniscience with free will. The argument, abridged, goes like this: if one were able to look at time, space, and the entire universe from "outside the system," one would see that everything is deterministic, including the actions of humans. However, since we possess reason and live "in the system," we have the ability to make free decisions within it.)

# Narrative fallacy

The issue of "why" is dreaded metaphysics, but understanding the final cause is actually essential to understanding the thing itself. Knowing something's purpose is key to knowing how it fits into the world. As such, the chains of demonstrations which show the final cause as the middle term are the most informative of all four options.

This is both a blessing and a curse, because while correct demonstrations are thus appealing and easy to remember, bad demonstrations that show false causes that compile into a nice narrative are very tempting to believe. Even if there is no causality between events (or the link is not known, or even unnknowable, to us), we seem to be more likely to believe the person who presents us with a nice story of their relationship, even if it is fake, than the person who says that they are truly unrelated.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb devoted an entire chapter (six) in *The Black Swan* to this phenomenon, which he calls "the narrative fallacy:"

> "We like stories, we like to summarize, and we like to simplify. (...) Explanations bind facts together. They make them more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding."

Interestingly, Taleb considers this a bug in the Platonic understanding of the world. I suppose this shows a certain difference between the Platonic and Aristotelian views on phenomenology.

Plato thought that the patterns (the Forms) are the phenomenological causes of what they signify (i.e. that we perceive something as beautiful is because the Form of Beauty causes it), whereas Aristotle thought the opposite (i. e. in the absence of beautiful things there would be no Beauty).

> "We fool ourselves with stories that cater to our Platonic thirst for distinct patterns: the narrative fallacy."

It is very useful for believers in scientism to get everyone to ignore final causes because it makes it a lot easier to fall into narrative fallacy if everyone is not used to identifying them all the time. Likewise, when we lament that as we grow older we lose the childlike curiosity, perhaps the reason is not inherent in the process of growing up but in being exposed to more materialism.

We all long for stories, and the ability to truthfully and narratively explain the final causes of things is a superpower that cannot be rivaled. It is the ultimate tool of rhethoric and the magic spell to convince the masses. Storytelling and careful exploitation of the narrative fallacy is the strongest force in the universe.


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