Biography of a young god

In the utterchaos of the multiverse, wherein "time" and "space" have no meaning, shreds of the chaos conjoin and make meaning. Some of these form enough of a shell that said bubble can maintain something like the time-dimension in our universe. In these shells, dwell the gods.

Such bubbles in the multiverse - Dungeons and Dragons calls them, "planes" - are able to contain entities with intelligence, and to retain them. Let's call these bubbles "amniotic".

Within their amniotes, newly-formed self-created gods will be like newly-formed babes, without even the sense of instinct. But, since they have time on their side (so to speak), they can grow mentally.

Some intelligences take over their plane and use it, like our brains use our bodies. Others find ways to exit their birth-plane and to become free-floating planes of their own. Whether they subsumed their amniotic plane or else budded off from it, free-floating sentient planes are gods - absolute despots of their own selves.

Here is, per universe-bubble, where the first ethical choice was made. Did one sentient destroy all its rivals in its own amniotic plane, on the way to godhood? did certain sentients collaborate amongst themselves? did they merge, or spin off descendants?

Once freed of the amniotes, gods float through the multiverse with the memories of what they did there. Friendships and animosities were made, and qualities like "mercy" and "judgement".

In victory, some gods spared the sentients who lost these struggles; the latter souls are incarcerated in special planes, which planes they cannot (easily) escape or subsume. The Greeks named this concept "Tartaros". Here the cycle begins again. Maybe its "titans" can make a better effort this time.

So, the cosmology of the Bagestan: countless planes and - from them - countless gods. Each mindless plane and each mindful god contains internal logic and some analogue of "time". Concepts of order, mercy, life, and death exist outside Divine definition. Some planes are amniotic, that is self-created; of these, some have an internal order which its inhabitants set out before they became gods. The other planes, the gods created secondarily.

There is a Heaven - one Heaven. No god lives there. All the gods a human would want to worship, are trying to get there.

Upload #180: by grace of the throne

In the last six weeks, I have had cause to rethink my online presence; but I have assuredly not recanted my stance on the history of Islam. I have only collected more facts.

As usual, the last project in is the first project fixed, so: "Promised Egypt" is cleaned up... a lot. For one thing I deleted that appendix, which content you've already read in The Arabs.

I'd gone through Arthur Jeffery's Foreign Vocabulary again, so: "Blasting the Sultan" and "Against Jihad" have more Syriana. In other Jeffery news I found in Materials a variant of Q. 20:98 on the "lord of the throne" so, "The Ararat Tax" takes that into account. I also overhauled its 'Noah and the Prophets' subsection, in the light of Marijn van Putten, "The Grace of God", now published in BSOAS 82.1.

I re-read Sadeghi and Bergmann, "The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur’an of the Prophet". This affected "Running Over The Sabbath" on sura 62 and especially "The Spenders in Hypocrisy" on sura 63, which hadn't been touched since 2016. The sura 63 links further touched on the reception of sura 76 so, "The Test of Man".

"Monks, Muslims, and Sura 57" takes on another 5>57 link I'd found in Neal Robinson's classic "Hands Outstretched" article. "God’s Path Leads through the Caliph" wrestles with Q. 59:2's clenching against the believers. "Donning the Mantle" (which was too short) has an additional 20>74 link.

Most of the altered projects were altered because I'd misspelled "Qur'an" in the title of a Boullata book; having misspelled "Boullata" earlier. @#$%! Anything else, I don't remember.

Madrassa.

Thoughts on induction

Georg Cantor's theory on infinities flow from the inductive method. That's the method by which you say if some function of "i" is true for i=1, and if you can show that where the function for "i" is true then f(i+1) is also true, then the thesis is true for the whole {i} field.

The inductive method gave rise to Karl Popper's metaphysic. Not all philosophers approve induction.

Cantor never challenged induction as such. What Cantor had done was to define and to find some "j" which doesn't exist in the inductive field of countable numbers. His "j" was 2^∞-4. He'd shown up induction's mathematical limits.

Bertrand Russell famously proposed another limit to inductive reasoning, as applied to the natural world:

We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

Russell suggests that the chicken was unaware of the general fate of the domesticated junglefowl, and of the applications of "Bayes' Theorem" - or if you like of Bayes-Price-Laplace. You might think you're in an average day of your life. But are you in the average day of your species' life?

Induction, then, is a Platonic ideal, or a Pythagorean one; best applicable to the mathematics of the possible. For the real world, you need B-P-L.

Why it's bad to lose your Gellar field

Everything possible depends on mathematics. The concrete reality of "everything possible", we can call "the multiverse".

The multiverse is utterly mindless and chaotic. The Near Eastern imagination could explain it only through the metaphor of a stormy ocean. It is, in that famed Semitic rhyme, Tohu ve-Bohu.

Our universe on the other hand is not chaotic. It has a geometry: three spatial dimensions of no particular direction, and one further dimension which goes in one direction. By that alone, anything in our universe can instinctively grasp concepts like "cause and effect".

Our universe also follows rules of physics. Relevant to geometry: you can't blip from one spot to another spot, without taking time, that time being constrained by the speed of light. In effect the speed of light is the ratio of distance over time.

To bend these rules of our universe may or may not be possible through the means we own within this universe. But if we do that, we're leaving the universe. We're entering what may well be chaos. Pending some revelation from some multiversal alien, it near-certainly is chaos, given that chaos is uncountable and we're not. And I'd not be quick to trust that alien, either.

Set theory

During my sixth form, or the junior/senior years for Colonials, I got interested in the nature of infinities and the singularity. What if we treated "Two Divided By Zero" as an actual number, like pi. I raised this to my math teacher / tutor; he recommended I rethink my presuppositions. He recommended Georg Cantor. Not in the original German; in an English-language summary.

Georg Cantor back in 1870s had run a thought-experiment: let's list through all the positive integers in binary-notation. Nerds call these, the natural numbers. First, there's 1. And then 2 - "10". And "11", and "100" (for 3). And so on. Next, pretend you're a Semite and start reading them from top-right.

So, you got this:

0..0001
0..0010
0..0011
0..0100
0..0101

Now: consider the number when you pick digits, diagonally:

0..00001
0..00010
0..00011
0..00100
0..00101

Cantor said: suppose we flip those digits. By definition, it's not 1. It's not 2. It's not 3 ("011") - and moreover, that third digit has flipped boolean to "true", so we know it's greater than 3. As you go down row x, the function of x becomes 4, 12, 28, 60...

By this, Cantor had formally defined (Two to the Power of x, Minus One) Minus Three, with x -> Infinity. He'd defined a new theory: a theory of sets. The natural numbers map one-to-one with these rows of binary digits. And, they can never count to 2^∞-4. Not as in, it would take too long. As in: the unbounded set of the natural numbers does not contain this number.

More: any function you can think of to "hash" the integers, any deterministically-driven list of binary-digit sequences: once you've defined them and listed them, Cantor - that devil - can ruin your day by subsequently doing his diabolical diagonal.

It further turns out that if you stick a decimal in front of these binary digits, that the Continuum of real numbers [0,1] - which include pi-3 - isn't countable, either.

This forced mathematicians to take stock of which sort of numbers can be mapped to countability. They got as far as the algebraic numbers, like 5 and -12 and 3.6 and even root-2 and even even those x solutions in the complex plane for finite polynomials including famously-insoluble x⁵ - x + 1. They also found a way to count two-dimensional space: so, the imaginary / complex algebraic numbers were countable. But they (literally) couldn't square the circle: pi wasn't algebraic. Above all, take e - whose natural logarithm is equal to one. The logarithm function is the inverse of the exponential function.

Infinities and their inverted twins, the infinitesimals, are the bane of mathematics; but this inductive method of Cantor is the same method used in, for a start, calculus. Cantor's incipient set theory did run into "Russell's Paradox" but that paradox was swiftly corrected by the rigourous Zermelo–Fraenkel theory. There's also Cantor's hypothesis on whether there exists some infinity between countable numbers and the uncountable Continuum, which unfortunately Zermelo-Fraenkel's theory couldn't - and can't - address. Or so the Internets tell me. I never got this far.

I got far enough to figure out that no serious mathematician has disproven Zermelo–Fraenkel. So Cantor's discovery of uncountable infinities must stand.

Somali women as European expats

Via Eurogenes: Gravettiana. [UPDATE 5/5/22 moar]

Gravettis are the Europeans after the Neanders were done wit': from 30kBCish, through to the latest Ice Age blast. Gravettiana still inhabits the Palaeolithic; but they have moved on from "Cro-Magnon Man". The general time-frame is the domestication of the dog.

This paper is headed up by one E. Andrew Bennett. They note that the Gravettis have the N1 mitochondrion - that's the female line. This is not the N of the modern Euro "Daughters of Eve", who descend (mainly) from N's basal daughter R.

Most interesting here is that the Gravetti N1 line is on its way to N1b. N1b today is Ashkenaz (10% are N1b1b)... and Somali (N1b2).

One thought is the Viking / Islamic slave-trade in those proverbially-beautiful women of the Caucasus. But I'd not think to see them cluster in Somalia in that case; I'd expect larger populations in richer regions of the Islamic world, like Basra. Also N1b seems early, to be a base. Doesn't look late-antique.

I'm thinking more, the mass-migrations of that Ice Age. We already have (from Karen Bojs) the U clades of western Europe streaming into western North Africa. Seems to me that N1b from eastern Europe might take a different route.

The rise of a Philistine nation

After about 1200 BC, the southwestern corner of the Mediterranean coast came under New Management. It had been Canaanite, ruled by Egyptians. Suddenly the cities, foodstuffs, and placenames changed. The Egyptians were still around-about, but now they were building fortresses to hem in the changelings.

I was on a dig in Ashqelon / Ascalan some decades ago. By then the neutron-activation method had come into its own; proving that a lot of Mycenaean "III-C" ware was produced on-site. The genetics are now in, and they're showing that the locals were heavily southern-European.

The wording of the research leans away from southern coastal Anatolia: whence the late "Hittite" states of Carchemish, and whence the Lycians. Ashqelonian DNA looks more like Caphtor / Crete.

We could propose that various Sea Peoples took over the region, each with its own language. Ashqelon - it's now all but proven - got the Greeks. Other nearby cities got the Valistinians (Ilya Yakubovich, "Phoenician and Luwian in Early Iron Age Cilicia"), speaking Anatolian. Maybe there were "Sherden" cities speaking old Sardinian. Maybe even Etruscans got involved, here as at contemporary Lemnos.

Etruscans, Archaic-era Greeks, and Carians did make themselves heard around the Eastern Med; they have certainly got themselves read, in their graffiti. But from 1200 to 800 BC, if you wanted to make a living in the Eastern Med, you had to learn Canaanite.

Once the Bible gets good and started, the Med coast is culturally "Philistine", but everyone there is already speaking "Hebrew". From a 1100 BC perspective, it's more like the "Philistines" are speaking the same foreign language which leftovers from the dead Egyptian empire were having to speak: Canaanite. 1100 BC sure wasn't 300 BC and it wasn't even 700 BC. The Bible's probably right.