How The Game Is Played

Old heresies never die....

So lately The DaVinci code has caught the popular imagination. I'm going to make a few decidedly un-religious comments or observations.

First, the fact that people are treating this as some great new insight just goes to show the lack of education across the united states these days. When I was in college there was a book published called "Holy Grail, Holy Blood." Thats 25 years ago. Holy Grail, Holy Blood is the origin of the whole "the holy grail is Jesus's child" line of reasoning. Noentheless its the first or second thing I hear anyone talk about when mentioning the DaVinci code.

Almost as enduring as heresies are secret society myths. I was thus not terribly surprised to hear that Knights Templar and the Masons mentioned in the next breath. The Knights Templar secret-scoeity-conspiracy-theory is about a old as conspiracy theories get and has always been tied to holy-grail stuff. The poor masons get almost as much attention.

My father-in-law was a Socttish rite mason, another good and dear friend of mine was a mason as well, and in fact at one point in my life I came the closest to being recruited that they can do (they aren't allowed to recruit, you have to ask to join. I was told I was a "fine young man" and they'd be happy to talk to me if I was ever interested.) Let me just put it this way: If these are the height of international conspirators then the biggest threat we have is maybe being philosophized to death :)

It doesn't surprise me that these are all recycled in the latest religous conspiracy theory book. What does surprise me is how many people don't seem to know they are being recycled for the umpteenth time.

I can't leave the subject without commenting on this whole 'code' business and what total nonsense it is. Information theory understands the existence of something called a stochastic systyem. A stochastic system is a random noise generator coupled to a rule-set to pick interesting patterns out of the randomness. Stochastic systems create information. The information is not in the random noise but created through the selection process.

This code business is a classic stochastic system . The random noise field is a large text of characters and a random selection of a starting place and a skip-length. Give it enough time and it will produce rocgnizable patterns-- in this case words and sentance fragments we pick out. But in picking out those all we are really doing is ignoring the whole rest of the random field which, mathematically, has no more or less significance then the part we've chosen to focus on.

If you want a practical example of a stochastic system in action, go to your TV and tune to snow. Stare at it. The entire visual system of the human animal (and arguably our entire thinking process) is a large pattern matcher. If you stare at the snow you will see patterns emerge and disappear. But the fact of the matter is that the snow on the TV is just about the most perfectly gaussian-distributed random field of visual data you can get. The patterns are, literally, all in your head,

And the same is true for this code business.

Much more intersting, to my mind, is how and why our thinking systems are stochastic systems. For that I'd recommend a really good book, Gregory Bateson's "Mind and Nature." It gets deeply philosophical at times and is certainly not as easy to read as this Davinci Code nonsense, but I promise you that if you have a decent intellect and a strong intellectual curiosity, it will be a lot more rewardng in the long run.

Posted at 03:58PM Apr 11, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[1]