In which I navel-gaze about Moses and Aaron and God. A lot.

[raspberryhunter]

Interactive Complexity as Indigenous to Human Systems is the crazy Office-esque crack!AU of Moses und Aron I wrote for yuletide (I talk about my other yuletide fics here), set in a corporation where Moses is the Chief Scientist, Aaron is his salesman/spokesman, and God is the CEO, and instead of talking about God and religion they talk about science and algorithms. NO I DO NOT KNOW WHERE THIS CAME FROM. MY SUBCONSCIOUS MAY NEED TO GET OUT MORE.

It's also, in a sense, a companion story to "Waters." "Waters" treats what I had to say about my personal feelings about the religious philosophies M&A espouses and alternatives thereof, but it doesn't actually explicitly delve into the Moses and Aaron relationship at all (...they're not even characters in "Waters," no wait, I guess Moses gets one speaking line), and I wanted to do that. I also wanted to engage with what seekingferret called the game of telephone -- where the message from God gets changed and filtered, with a monotonic loss of transmission from God->Moses->Aaron->Israelites. (My other fic rejects that idea, so I wanted to do it here.)

And also, I wanted to reconcile Numbers 20 with M&A. There's a glancing reference to "the rock" in Act III of M&A that makes me believe that it is meant to have happened after the Meribah incident. How did that play in to the world of M&A? What happened at Meribah in the world of M&A, and how did that relate to the Act III drama where Aaron is cast out and (in my libretto stage directions) drops dead at the end? In the Bible version, Moses is involved and culpable; how would this even be possible in Schoenberg's conception? And even taking Numbers 20 alone, it never sat right with me that Moses got punished so severely for what seems like a really trivial matter; why was that? This fic is a partial answer to all these questions. (Only partial, because it assumes a closer personal relationship between Moses and Aaron than we really get in Schoenberg, not least because they don't start out as brothers.)

The real impetus for this story, though, was that I watched the Ruhrtriennale 2009 version of Moses und Aron, and that production utterly sold me on the relationship between Moses and Aaron themselves, and I found Aaron rather engaging (though of course flawed, as he is) in that production as well, but I just didn't find Moses at all likeable or sympathetic (okay, fine, "O wort, du wort, das mir fehlt" was shattering), which I think may have shaped some of my reactions to the opera. I mean, it's not the production's fault, because they were clearly trying (and from time to time succeded); Moses is not supposed to be likeable or sympathetic, he's supposed to be above such mundane things. But it makes a difference because Schoenberg clearly expects us to buy in to Moses' philosophy, which is hard for me personally to do when I'm busy thinking, "Man, Moses is really a jerk." Plus which people aren't actually like that -- I mean, solely superhuman jerks! And apparently when I'm confronted with this kind of situation, my response is to try to figure out away to make the character understandable. Through fic!

So I set out to make him a protagonist such that I, at least, could see where he was coming from, without losing sight of the fact that he really is a brusque and unyielding sort of personality. (I am totally aware that this completely goes against the spirit of what Schoenberg was doing, by the way. I think that Moses, like God, is supposed to be not understandable. But if anything this only encouraged me.) But I had to transpose it to the modern era to make his character comprehensible. And then I was at work and talking to a coworker about the necessary evil of HR, and I wrote down in my yuletide file, "Aaron is SO HR! ...no, wait, Sales." and it just sort of snowballed from there. I wrote pretty much the entire draft in a couple of days, before I had more than the bare seeds of ideas for the other fic.

I succeeded in terms of my own reaction. I feel very strongly about the purity of science, about how it can't be compromised for the sake of how you feel about anything. And translating Moses' unbendingness into that milieu made me much more sympathetic towards his point of view.

Interestingly, I completely failed to communicate a major portion of this where seekingferret was concerned, which makes me sad (not about seekingferret at all, only about my inability to communicate). Seekingferret wrote a very thoughtful and interesting critique of "Complexity" where he reads it as Moshe and Aaron on a more equal footing. In a certain sense he is right, and I will talk about that below. But in another sense, that is not what I meant at all! In "Waters," both Moses and Aaron are missing the point to some extent, which is not what Schoenberg meant but what I get out of it when I watch it. In "Complexity," Moshe is meant to be right. All right, there is a place for image in our imperfect finite minds trying to come to grips with the divine -- and I do believe that (in this world where the Tabernacle was built), and the first half of the fic makes that point -- but in both the central conflicts, the Golden Calf conflict and the Meribah conflict, Aaron is asking to compromise the idea for the sake of the image, compromise the scientific truth for the sake of getting the job done. The choice, when it comes down to the important choice, is between making something look good (the image) and the truth (the idea). And Aaron, in choosing appearances/image, is wrong, wrong, wrong; it is never right to compromise the analysis. You just don't misrepresent science, you must not, for your job or your friends or anything else. And I failed in not making this clear, because in my worldview it is so very obvious that Aaron is wrong that it didn't even occur to me that it might not be obvious to someone who isn't me and didn't know me.

(Moshe is so totally my POV character in this one, despite Aaron being a lot more likeable. What he says about organizational theory? Is what I think about organizational theory. (Sorry if there are any organizational theorists reading this! Feel free to educate me!) And I'm a scientist/engineer by training/profession, and have my discipline's ingrained suspicion of HR and Sales and management (here I should append that my company has lovely HR, no sales as a separate department, and quite understanding management, but it doesn't stop all us engineers from being suspicious of all of them nevertheless). And Aaron talking about quantum correlations? Does not, in fact, make any sense. Oh, Aaron.)

The tragedy -- at least in my particular reimagining; here I'm departing from Schoenberg -- is that when Moshe unbends a little, tries to let Aaron in, when he tries to make that compromise because he does, after all, love Aaron -- that's the moment when we find that Moshe was right all along, that Aaron is wrong, that this compromise can't be made, and when you try to make it, it leads to disaster. As seekingferret says, Moses is right, but the world sets us up for failure.

Well, that's what I meant, anyway. Perhaps that's not what actually came out :)

I'm really glad he wrote that piece of meta, both because it made me aware of this flaw in my writing and because he speaks to something I hadn't thought about when I wrote it -- the Moses-God relationship. Which I think he's completely right about -- as written, the CEO is this shadowy figure On High. (Heh, "Christian New Testament God." Made me laugh. Guilty!) Because of ase's beautiful beta work, I don't think it is so much of a problem in the first half, at least to my reading, but it is somewhat glaring in the second half, especially in the characters' reactions to and aftermath of the pivotal scenes, and it didn't have to be that way. Is seekingferret's reading of M&A correct? I have mixed thoughts on this -- but the point is, it's something I didn't think about when I wrote the story, and I should have, regardless of what my eventual answer turned out to be. About that he was wholly right.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the conception of God is split between the CEO and Science (or math, or algorithms, I think is what the fic actually says, but I'm using Science as a catchall phrase). Although the CEO is intended to be the crackified (New Testamentesque?) persona of God, it's really Science, or the truth embodied by science, that bears the philosophical weight of the Moses-God relationship in the opera. Although I understood this implicitly while I was writing, I don't think I figured it out explicitly, enough to spend time thinking about what it implied in terms of the character dynamics and relationships (in particular, both CEO-truth and CEO-Moses). Ah well.

And now that I am thinking about it, I suspect there are a couple of parts I could tweak very slightly that could address these concerns and make everything work rather better, so why didn't I? Eh. Well, if I have seekingferret's permission and blessing, perhaps I shall.


Paean of praise to betas: "Complexity" did not have a Judaism beta (for fairly obvious reasons, but in hindsight, I should have gotten one). elements_ao3 whacked the word choice like anything. mithrigil deserves major points for pointing out, "To be completely frank, this is more like 'if Schoenberg wrote bible fanfic instead of an opera and put all his kinks in it' than fanfic for the opera itself," and so have I summarized it. And, as I sort of said above, if I'd considered ase's critique more carefully, I might have made my point of view more understandable. To the extent that it is understandable, I totally have ase to thank for pushing me to that level.

There, I should probably have written an essay instead of fics and have been done with it :)

Comments

[seekingferret]

Huh...

So yeah, I think you're right that trying to foist some of God onto Science instead of the CEO tripped me up. Because M&A is so relational, and when you think about it, Schoenberg's idea of representing God is incredibly daring and bold and risky and so central to establishing who Moses is in the first scenes. And science isn't something that you can relate to in the same way because it's avolitional. Though maybe that's worth exploring- how do you have faith in something that can't make a decision to honor your faith? How does faith in a mechanistic 'God' work? (Consider our conversations about my Jewish definition of emunah and its two-sided obligations when I'm talking about faith).

I dug up this paper I wrote on M&A in college last night and skimmed it. I'll send it to you later if you want, but one thing I'd written that I'd since forgotten about is a claim that because M&A is so relational in its structure, neither Aaron nor Moses can function without the other- in addition to Moses having an Ich-Du relationship with God and Aaron having an Ich-Du relationship with the People, Moses and Aaron have an Ich-Du relationship that attempts to bridge the gap. And interestingly, I claim that Schoenberg deliberately minimizes Moses's role and expands Aaron's, compared to the original Biblical story. I did a close reading of Exodus in the paper and pointed out all the places where Aaron's role is minimal or nonexistent and Schoenberg expanded it. And one of my hypotheses of why the parting of the sea is removed is that in Exodus, Aaron's barely involved in that story. So it's interesting to me that in analyzing your story I claimed that Aaron's role has once again been increased relative to its inspiration. I think that says something about Exodus and its perspective on the relationship.

In any case, yes, it was clear to me in reading that Moses was right in the sense that the science was right, but it's also not clear to me that following Moses's position would have saved their jobs. Isn't the point of this story that they were faced with an impossible choice between obeying the science and pleasing the customer? I'm also, as a fellow science/engineering person, a little more skeptical than you that in engineering there IS a correct answer rather than a particular balance of the cost-benefit analysis. In my experience the engineer who's unwilling to unbend a little bit from his idealized design in order to fit the customer's needs is often the one in the wrong.

But one thing I think is great about the CEO in a relational sense is in the golden calf fiasco when Aaron yells at Moses for being unavailable for forty days, that you also have Aaron say "I even tried to contact the CEO, but she's gone mountain-climbing or something." That's such a brilliant point, that we don't in either the Biblical account or the Schoenberg account see Aaron try to make direct contact with God. Though there are some Midrashim that try to address the question. A lot of Midrash is devoted to trying to justify Aaron's actions, and several include details that suggest Aaron acted passively and miracles happened that created the Golden Calf, suggesting that God perhaps did encourage the creation, or at least allowed the people to get what they wanted. For example there's a midrash that says that Aaron just threw the gold in the fire and a calf came out.

As regards Merivah, now that is something I have opinions and theories about. Have you seen my story Two Princes? Two Princes. Which is more about the politics of Numbers 20 than it is about the philosophy of Numbers 20, because there's a great political drama in that story alongside the theology.

Generally speaking I read Numbers 20 as being about the simple fact that even saints screw up (I'm not sure if Christians actually believe that, but Jews sure do). The Rabbis teach that God holds saints to a higher standard of behavior, so that sins that would just get added to the tally for ordinary people become magnified in their punishment for the righteous, because God only demands of us what we're capable of. Thus the claim is that Moses's sin is inscrutable because if any of us had done what Moses did God wouldn't have punished us.

Moses's likeability is an interesting point. In my giant M&A primer post I wrote "Meet Moses. He's a giant asshole. No, I dare you to show me a bigger asshole than Moses." I think one of the really interesting character choices Schoenberg makes is in suggesting that Moses actively doesn't like the fact that he is being called to save the people. Like, he has a Jonah complex. I think this interpretation is defensible from the text in a reaching sort of way. You can point to things like Moses calling them a stiff-necked people, to the way the Israelite he saved from the taskmaster yelled at him, to his reluctance to accept the call at the Burning Bush. But you can counter that stuff with the other side of the coin, in the Bible- Moses's connection to his family, his clear identification with the Israelite nation, his defense of the Israelites when God wants to destroy them- Schoenberg strips most of that away.

So I can understand struggling to like Moses, and yeah, I agree with you that the main effort Schoenberg makes in that direction is the "das mir fehlt" line, which savaged me the first time I heard it and still hurts like hell every time I hear it. As I also wrote in my big M&A post, "All he has is his God, and he feels abandoned by God, because God was supposed to bring redemption and deliverance and instead has only brought estrangement. Poor Moses. But don't feel bad, Moses is still a huge asshole."

But I don't know... ultimately I get over it, because I identify so deeply with Moses's struggle?

[raspberryhunter]

Hm! I see what you're saying here about the difference between Science and God, and perhaps this goes back to the Old Testament / New Testament dichotomy you were talking about before? *thinks* Or, more likely, perhaps just down to my peculiar relationship with God and faith, in which part of my struggle is not feeling like I have at all a handle on what God may or may not be trying to tell me. (This is just me, by the way! Mormons in general have a very, very strong belief in a two-way communication channel between self and God, to the extent that I feel fairly keenly the lack of such a relationship.) So your question on having faith in something that can't make a decision to honor your faith is actually one that I struggle with in terms of God, because where I'm standing I don't know that it's not the case. (Though I know what you're going to say back, I think: that it's our decision (or at least is in Judaism?) to have faith in a God that is making such a decision back. In Mormonism, I think that is also true -- but that this part of the discussion is often elided to some extent in favor of promoting an immediate relationship with God that is very difficult for me. ...and now I think I'm talking in circles, so hopefully this paragraph made any sense at all.) Interesting.

It also, I'm sure, makes a difference that the work I do is, like Moshe, principally analysis work rather than actually building gadgets (the gadgets we do build are mostly front-end for performing the analysis work), because I think you're right: when building things, allowances for the customer's wants are extremely important. (And I think that's true, as I said in the post, for the image from time to time: we are limited by our finite senses and brains, and we have to make images, that's the only way we can understand things -- one of the things I struggled with with "Waters" is that the very title is an image, but finally made my peace with it, mostly because I liked the title so much :) And, once ase finished rapping me over the head with beta, water shows up as both an image, something underlying the image, and the fragment of something connecting the two, so.)

When building there are no right answers, except to build as well and as carefully as possible? --but when doing analysis work, there is a right answer, or at least an uncorrupted one -- perhaps what you're producing is a cost-benefit analysis, but there's the accurate cost-benefit analysis and then there's the one that (maybe isn't even so different! but) looks good and will help you sell more of the algorithm or widget or whatever it is you're developing. And it is so, so tempting -- maybe you just show the results that came out well, not the tests that went poorly. (Oh, don't even get me started on data cherry-picking.) Or you made some optimistic assumptions in your analysis that you don't mention, or downplay a lot. Or you neglect to point out the condition under which your algorithm won't work at all. Or you carefully select what you graph to make things look good. I mean, obviously some of these are worse than others, and some of them are practically expected, and none of them are as bad as what Aaron did (except, oh God, data cherry-picking, and even that depends on how much of it you do). But it's a constant battle, I find, to maintain one's integrity to the work. And my company actually feels pretty strongly about doing good and solid and truthful work, and these problems still crop up because you want to please the customer and make it look like your algorithms are doing a good job, and because there is a fine line between selling your work truthfully/optimistically and making it look exaggeratedly good. (I always err on the side of underselling, but this is (one of the reasons) why management always has to look over my charts before I talk to the customer...)

And it probably also makes a huge difference that for a very large portion of my life, I fully expected to go into academia (and if I'd had just a bit more confidence, I might well have done so), and it would have been in a field that's not the field I currently work in. As a result of both those things, I still have the picture of academia as not so much ivory tower as the ultimate good :) (This is changing as I come more in contact with the academic papers in the field I currently work in, which are sometimes brilliant and sometimes make me roll my eyes because they clearly have not had any experience with real-life problems at all.)

I'd be very interested in that M&A paper if you'd like to send it (raspberryhunter at gmail). I also think, as I said, that I could make some small changes that would change the tenor of the CEO/Moshe relationship to something you would be more happy with, and I'd love to send those to you at some point to see what you thought. Though I think perhaps it's worth having more of this discussion first :)

But hm, so in general I agree that neither Moses nor Aaron (or their relative philosophies) can function without the other, which is part of my argument in both fics (and as you probably saw I even tagged "Waters" to that effect). I'm not convinced Schoenberg believed this, or at least I think he had a struggle with it as well -- I'm not at all convinced that Schoenberg thought Act III was a tragedy. I think he really did think Moses was right to throw Aaron out (perhaps it makes a difference that my libretto says Aaron drops dead at the end, thus strongly suggesting to me that either Aaron himself or God agreed with Moses?) and that Moses' viewpoint would then triumphantly be The Viewpoint (suggested to me by his addressing of the soldiers). Then again, I am also not convinced that the Act III libretto is a final draft -- it just doesn't read that way to me -- so perhaps if Schoenberg had reworked it again, this might have come out one way or another in a more clear way.

I like to think that Aaron and Moshe both overestimated the importance of Meriba-in-the-fic, though I suppose it also depends on what one thinks Aaron and Moses were thinking in Numbers 20. (I did read your Two Princes fic! And loved it! But in your fic, I think, Moses is the one who was clearly in the wrong? I suppose now that I'm no longer at least nominally trying to be anonymous, I can go and have discussions with you on all those too :) ) And the thing is, I think they both would've been in trouble if they hadn't made the deadline, yeah. But I don't think the CEO would have fired Moshe, (even as it was, Aaron assumed Moshe hadn't been fired), and even if Aaron had been fired (and maybe he would have been), Moshe would have been able to fight for Aaron, in that scenario. But he couldn't fight for Aaron precisely because of what happened. Hmm, I see none of that made it into the fic, and it should have... Why can't people just read my mind instead of the actual words? ;)

...I actually have no idea what Catholics believe about saints screwing up. I'll try to remember to ask someone about that at choir rehearsal. From the discussions recently, I know they certainly do believe that clergy can be very much mistaken! I believe the official Protestant line is that we're all saints and sinners, so yeah, a Protestant would say we all mess up. (Except for Jesus, presumably, but he was/is God, so that's different.) Mormons believe in principle that even the greatest people screw up (again excepting Jesus Christ) -- in fact, one of the best stories about Joseph Smith involves him browbeating God into letting him do something he really shouldn't -- and I believe this is the accepted reading of Numbers 20. (In practice, it is Not the Done Thing to criticize living leaders, much like you described the Hasidic sects in our previous conversation.)

It still bothers me, though, both because it's such a stupid mistake (and I don't think of Moses as stupid in that way -- though I like your interpretation in "Two Princes" because it does give a political/personality gloss to it that explains why it happened) and because the punishment for both brothers seems out of line with the magnitude of the offense. I know (and you've said) the answer is that he (they) ought to have known better! But still. Schoenberg, in particular, I think, would say (and pretty much did in Act III, I feel) that this was an Aaronesque touch, to emphasize the image of the rock rather than the idea of the Word, and that choosing the image over the idea (or using the image for himself rather than for God?) was what condemned him, not the bare act. Which I think is a very interesting interpretation, and one that appeals to me because at one stroke Schoenberg explains why it was done and why it was so important and merited such a punishment.

Identifying with Moses' struggle: ...I guess I neither identified with it nor was able to get over Moses being a total jerk when it was about religion, but when I translated it to science, I do identify with it and Moshe's behavior doesn't bother me? I... am not sure I like what that says about me. Well. There it is.

...So, in conclusion, heh. I guess in general this story said more about me than I had thought. That's a little frightening. :)

[seekingferret]

Though I know what you're going to say back, I think: that it's our decision (or at least is in Judaism?) to have faith in a God that is making such a decision back.

Actually, that's not what I would say back. Instead, I'd invite you to consider the positivist 'theology' being set forth in all the 'New Atheist' literature. Absent a volitional deity, the positivists have faith in the Scientific Method but not in Science as in the forces of nature. I recall being absolutely shocked in Hawking's introduction to A Brief History of Time when he conceded that as far as he were concerned (philosophically speaking) gravity could stop working tomorrow, and he'd just have to turn the Scientific Method to whatever replaced it. Science in those terms is an avolitional deity following rules we don't understand. You can't have faith in that. You can't have faith that the sun will shine tomorrow.

So obviously there are those who reject this kind of positivism and decide that functionally at least they will have faith in the laws of nature. Hawking takes this approach on a day to day basis- until something observable changes he plans his life under the assumption that the sun will shine tomorrow. But, I mean... where does that faith come from?

I'm not saying this as any form of argument about the existence of God- God being convenient is not actually a compelling argument. I'm just saying that if "it happened yesterday, and the day before, and every time we've tried it" is the best assurance you're going to get, you take it, but it's not to me the basis for a genuine faith relationship.


in general I agree that neither Moses nor Aaron (or their relative philosophies) can function without the other, which is part of my argument in both fics (and as you probably saw I even tagged "Waters" to that effect).

Yeah, well, you tagged it "and if there were a third way?" but I wasn't really making claims about a Moses/Aaron dialectic. I find dialectics interesting, but sort of shallow. Moses and Aaron are people, not stand-ins for philosophical approaches, and when I say they can't function without the other I mean in a relational way, not in a "and their relative philosophies" way. Aaron and Moses believe that their philosophical gap is unbridgeable, because they are stubborn people who can't communicate with each other in the same language, and your Miriam is trying to present the third way because she loves them, not because she's interested in achieving dialectical synthesis. Right?

So yeah, that's why this is a tragedy, not because Idea triumphed over Image, which I imagine you're right, Schoenberg would largely say was a success. But it's a tragedy because it ends with Moses casting his own brother out of the nation, completely unsure of what his next step is, doubting that his belief in God will ever let him be anything more than a lonely man in the wilderness. Though I think you're right, that Schoenberg never set the third act because he wasn't ever satisfied with the text, not because he never had the music to go with it. (In my big M&A post I wrote something like "Yes, my favorite opera is unfinished. I know you're not surprised." I love and have always loved incomplete masterpieces. I love watching the artist running up against his limits.)

[raspberryhunter]

Oh! I wonder if we have been talking at cross-purposes this whole time. Because, yes -- I would have to say that (donning my scientific/atheistic hat) I believe in the Scientific Method and not particularly in the Forces of Nature. When I've said "science" in this whole discussion, I actually mean the Scientific Method; I agree with Hawking. I don't really have faith in gravity or quantum mechanics in that sense, and now I see why this seems so weird to you. Because it seems weird to me too.

Because theories of science are always subject to change. Having faith in Newtonian mechanics would be silly, even though for hundreds of years they were the accepted Way the World Works, because we now know that they're only an approximation, that at relativistic speeds or at the quantum mechanical level Newtonian mechanics fails. But of course science is always like that. Tomorrow we might find that our understanding of particle physics is totally wrong. (Probably not today -- my grad school advisor was a little sad that they found the Higgs and validated what we know, because it would have been much more interesting, he said, if they hadn't!) As a scientist, I don't believe in having faith in a scientific theory; that nullifies the whole point of it being a theory.

But I wouldn't say that I have faith in rules that aren't understood. What I have faith in is that induction will always work, that logic will always work. That mathematics continues to be consistent. That mathematics continues to be a useful model to describe the world. That making predictions and experimentally validating them remains a valid way to understand what's going on. That the universe really does work according to laws that are discoverable and that are mathematically beautiful. That we will continue to understand more and more about the world works -- if gravity stopped working tomorrow, we'll eventually be able to understand why, and how that plays into a universe in which gravity did work up until now. This is what I mean when I use the vocabulary of faith to describe how I feel about science -- not the results of science, but the process of science. And I do have a relationship with it; these assumptions are fundamental to the way I interact with the world.

(And it's not so different from a religious faith in some ways; faith in God doesn't mean one has faith the sun will come up either, because God could of course decide, for whatever reason, that the sun wouldn't come up today. But either way, we might as well plan our lives under the assumption that the sun will come up tomorrow.)

There are of course various philosophical reasons why one might not buy in to such a faith (in process-of-science), or individual tenets of that faith. But something deep in me really does believe, in some fundamental unshaken way, in all those tenets. ...This is becoming a very interesting and somewhat disturbing discussion for me, thank you for bringing it up. I had never articulated it in exactly this way before. I also wonder if this is part of what disturbed you about "Complexity," this worldview coming through, because now I'm certainly a little disturbed. Perhaps if I'd just written straight lighthearted crack, without trying to transpose the serious bits, there would not be this issue at all!

(I don't know why I keep thinking about Ted Chiang, but I think his story Division by Zero is relevant.)

As for your other point, hmm. I also don't think I agree that Moses and Aron can't function without the other personally in Schoenberg (although I agree with you in general; I do think that's the case in "Waters," and the case I was trying to make because I do believe that with that structure of family undercut, they're both lost) because Moses seems to me to be very sure of himself suddenly in Act III, in a way he's not in Act II, and also because for the first time, as far as I know, we see Moses address the people (or, well, an alle) instead of Aaron, at the very end, without Aaron as intermediary. (At least, that is what my libretto says; my memory of Straub-Huilet is that they don't really stage it quite like that.)

I wonder if Schoenberg would have said (about Act III as it currently stands) that casting Aaron out was what let Moses finally communicate with the people. Though again I'd like to think that he would have changed it around :) because -- although I think it is supported by the text of Act III -- I don't agree with that at all!

Because yes -- like you're saying, so Schoenberg!Moses wins the argument, well, yay for him -- but when one actually considers it as a real person, it's still a tragedy, because what has he lost: Miriam's dead, Aaron's cast out/dead, he's so obnoxious that I can't imagine that Zipporah likes him at all at this point -- and without family, without that to balance him, what is left for him?

And yes, that's right about Miriam -- she loves Moses and Aaron, and what she wants more than anything else is for them to stop fighting and realize that they love each other -- of course she'd be even happier if they agreed with her philosophy, everyone likes to be agreed with, but whatever. (Interestingly, I had almost exactly this conversation with my beta -- "What does Miriam really want here?" and that was my answer.)

[seekingferret]

More, later, but I have a rant about "Division by Zero" somewhere. Really, really awful math. Does not at all appreciate the relationship between math and empiricism. Doesn't appreciate at all that there is a relationship.

But one of the things we are learning about that relationship is that it has limits- Pauli Exclusion Principle, Godel's Theorem, Halting Problem, etc... One of the particularly bothersome problems for me with having faith in the scientific method and the discoverability of the world is that we already know it's not the Alpha and the Omega. (heh, sorry) Though I have the same problem as a person of faith, only it's called: Why did God create an entropic universe?

[raspberryhunter]

Does not at all appreciate the relationship between math and empiricism. Doesn't appreciate at all that there is a relationship.

Ah -- but that (to drive the metaphor further) is the mystery of faith! Why is there such a relationship? Why ought there to be a connection between empirical counting and the Principia Mathematica? What has the axiom of reducibility to do with showing a toddler one object and then two objects, and her understanding that those aren't the same? Clearly it seems there must be a deep connection between the mathematical abstraction of "one" and the empirical idea we use in everyday life, and we all assume this is the case, but I don't comprehend what it is or why we can generally choose to conflate the two. That part, I take on faith. (And a real, pure mathematician could really not care less anyway. What has a mathematician to do with empirical anything? That's not what math is about. Well, that's what math is about to a scientist, yes, or to an applied mathematician; but not to a pure mathematician, to whom it is a beautiful but essentially artificial structure.)

(I mentioned this discussion to my husband, who said it reminded him of Eugene Wigner's paper on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences, which he was surprised I'd never heard of before.)

In physics, I don't know that we've conceded any limits, really. The Pauli exclusion principle only tells us what the universe can't or can't do, not what we can or can't learn. One might think that (say) the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (perhaps this is what you meant?) is more limiting, that we can't measure in nonorthogonal axes simultaneously without disturbing the state, so yes, there are specific things we can't learn about the universe locally. But more generally these restrictions on the rich mathematical space of a quantum state are really interesting and actually expand how much we can learn about the way the universe works, which is the interesting question.

[seekingferret]

Why ought there to be a connection between empirical counting and the Principia Mathematica?

There isn't some magical, inherent connection. This isn't a 'mystery of faith' kind of thing. There is a relationship because we designed a relationship, and in the 21st century we know how easy it is to design mathematical constructs that don't map onto any kind of reality. When I studied Number Theory my instructors spent a lot more time than was strictly necessary explaining the Peano Axioms to us so that we would understand that yes, even for something as simple as empirical counting, the relationship to mathematics is there because we designed the axioms, not because of the mystery of faith.

(I've seen the Wigner essay. I think it stretches the point. An essay in the NYTimes magazine that I should try to find again gave me this amazing quote, which is roughly "There are approximately 360 million people in America. That means that a million to one event happens to one of them every day." Surprising relationships do not signify magical relationships.)

[raspberryhunter]

Oh hey, are you trying to say that I got too overly invested in my own extended metaphor? Because that never happens to me. *rolls eyes at self* Okay, fine, you're right, that's kind of embarrassing. D, my husband (whom I should pressure to get a DW account so he can join in directly), also argued strongly for your point of view, pointing out that repeatability and predictability (and probably locality helps too) of a universe should be sufficient for some system of mathematics to be structured that describes it.

But in terms of Wigner's point, I still don't quite understand philosophically why it should be possible to design a mathematical system that regularly does have non-consciously-designed correspondences with physics (complex numbers; matrices -- I should say that D argued against this example because linear systems are sort of an obvious generalization, but I still like it because it doesn't seem obvious to me that it should be a good way to describe discrete quantum systems; group theory...). I tend to like to think that the universe is in fact based on something like a mathematical structure, but of course there are other explanations (a tendency to further develop branches of mathematics that have some empirical correspondences; selection bias by Wigner and me; perhaps even if the universe isn't based on mathematical structure, it's based on forms that reappear; etc.)

Sure, improbable events are "surprising" when they occur because any one person's experience is restricted to being a particular instantiation of a probability distribution, even if theoretically we understand the law of large numbers applies globally to a large population. And I think you're saying -- the same sort of thing for any of the explanations given above: they provide a global mechanism for which the correspondences may be surprising locally but make sense in the context of the mechanism. Now, I think it's mysterious (in a way that statistics is not) in the sense that I think there can be debate about the proper interpretation, whereas I don't think there's any debate about improbable events -- but I agree, not in the sense of not having an explanation.

[seekingferret]

Yeah, I mean, when you study closely the history of scientific discoveries based on unexpected mathematics, you often find that say, Einstein knew he had made a discovery that had a systematic relationship he didn't understand. So he talked to all of the mathematicians he knew and eventually somebody pointed him to a paper Poincare had written thirty years earlier- but that was only after he'd looked at and rejected hundreds of other mathematical frameworks. That's where selection bias comes in. It wasn't like Poincare's theorems had an inherent and immediately obvious rightness over other theorems that don't have any physical value.

We simply designed (or borrowed from existing work) mathematics that worked. I mean, it's interesting that a sort of convergence happened, where over the course of human history neither the physics or the math existed, and then within a thirty year period you had both, but you could equally hypothesize that had Poincare not written the paper, Einstein would have had to find a mathematician and force him to develop it. Or else maybe Einstein's great discovery would have gone nowhere. Who knows what physical discoveries we can't act on now because we haven't yet come up with mathematics to explain them?