Sunday Superposition is an end-of-the-week collection of spiritual themes and stuff I find interesting.
The end of independence
The spiritual theme this week is surrendering one's will.
There was a line of dialogue from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that always confused me. Miss Bingley, appalled at Elizabeth’s willingness to walk alone for miles through muddy fields to see her ailing sister, remarked that it showed “an abominable sort of conceited independence.”
When I read this book, I was no longer at the peak of my ultra-independent Objectivist days, but I was still stuck on the slopes of that mountain. Why would someone find independence abominable or conceited? Wasn’t independence the ideal? Shouldn’t we all strive for the utmost independence?
I think the scene was meant to highlight Elizabeth’s unvarnished rural appeal in contrast to Miss Bingley’s urban snobbery. But my reaction to the line hinted at a deep-seated problem that would dog me for much of my adult life.
I am by nature a stubborn and independent person. I had few friends growing up and spent a lot of time doing my own thing. It’s not that I was unable to attract friends, I just found other people inscrutable and unreliable. I had learned early, through impatience and disappointment, to do things for myself. I hated relying on other people.
The result of all that was a sense of ultra-independence that made something as dry and barren as the Objectivist philosophy momentarily appealing.
It didn’t occur to me in those days before I had come to Christ that not only is it impractical to be ultra-independent, but awfully lonely. I don’t know of a single example of a successful person who was “abominably independent.” Even the most competent and reclusive figures in history—people like Isaac Newton—had small circles of colleagues and friends who helped them do their work and make life worth living.
When I finally came to Jesus, I had already climbed (or more accurately, stumbled) down to the foothills of Mount Independence. I was willing to allow Him to have sovereignty over some parts of my life, but not all. Not because I loved those parts, but because I thought I could manage them better than He could. Oh, yes, there is such a thing as an abominable sort of conceited independence.
But reality intruded on this delusion, as reality often does.
The older I got, the more it became necessary to work with other people and trust them to some degree. I came to put my trust in a few public figures and institutions, as well. Some experiences were good. I made a few lifelong friends I cherish. But I also learned, very painfully, that most things of this world, especially people, can and will hurt you if you rely on them. They will let you down. They will disappoint you. That is the one thing you can count on with anything of this world, no matter how careful you are.
After several painful experiences, I realized there was no way to discern with 100% accuracy whom or what you can trust. You just have to risk getting hurt, over and over.
The result of this realization was a period of angry denial, a momentary lapse into my ultra-independent ways, and finally exhaustion.
There comes a point, whether out of weariness or frustration or both, that a person accepts that there is no such thing as independence, but there is also no earthly person or institution you can completely trust.
What a horrible thing to have to accept.
I don’t know what I would've done if I’d come to this point when I was still an atheist.
Isolate myself? No, impossible.
Seek comfort in earthly pleasures like food, booze, and drugs? No. Those are dead ends. Worse than dead ends, actually, because they take more than they give.
Throw myself into work? No. I know from unfortunate example that workaholism is also a dead end.
There’s nihilism, I suppose, but that’s extremely unappealing.
So, what’s left?
What’s left is the be-all and end-all of everything: Jesus Christ. What's left is looking to Him instead of to my own efforts or to anything or anyone else in the world.
I wasn’t designed for independence. I was designed to rely on Him, and to be powered by Him.
At this stage of my life, I’m finally willing to walk down to the valley, away from Mount Independence, and let Jesus have it all, especially those things I thought I could manage better than He could.
I wish I could say that I reasoned my way to this place with Vulcan-like logic, but the truth is that it took more weariness than I can handle and exhausting other possibilities before I finally turned to the Cross and said, Let my abominable, conceited independence die here.
Sunday Science Smorgasbord
AI can better retain what it learns by mimicking human sleep: Apparently AI needs downtime to shunt what it learns in the short-term to long-term memory. Researchers found that without this resting period, an AI tended to forget things it had learned. One researcher points out, however, that it may not be necessary to model AI off of human brains. Dolphin brains, which are partitioned so that one part is resting while the other is active, might serve as a more efficient model.
To see black holes in stunning detail, she uses ‘echoes’ like a bat: Astrophysicists use time-lags of signals from gas swirling around black holes to map the regions around them, similar to the way bats use echolocation to navigate. This technique has been in use for a long time, and led to a breakthrough in determining masses of supermassive black holes from features in quasar (active black hole) spectra. Astrophysicists are now combining time-lags in X-ray signals from near supermassive black holes and models that employ ray-tracing—a technology used to render images in video games—to figure out the intricate structure of the region surrounding these black holes. It’s an amazing feat considering how small and far away these regions are.