Alexander Koptyakov
Applied Love
Writer: Philo-sophy – from Greek – is the love of wisdom. But, if we are talking about a real questioning about the organization of the world, then religion appeared earlier. Appeared and developed. From answers to the questions “why the thunder is thundering” and “why the wind blows”, to the monotheistic religions of our time. At the same time, I consider it a profound delusion when they immediately slide down to the question “Who organized the World?” And argue whether “He” exists. From this all the problems. Religion answers precisely the question "How the World is organized" and "What is the place of human beings in the World?" The very word “religion” – “re-ligare” from Greek – reconnection, reconnection of what is already connected. Take two points in space. How many lines pass through them? One. The only one. And when we draw this line, or describe it by laws in science, there is a connection in our minds of two points, which are already connected, without you and me. In this sense, the concrete philosophy, which describes the World better than anyone else, approaches the concept of "religion".
Engineer: Personally, I can draw many lines through two points.
Writer: But only one of them will be a straight line, a trajectory along which the light travels!
Consultant: I'd rather stay on the philosophy floor. It is no longer as crowded as on the floors of methodology and science. In addition, the higher you are, as they say in our management, the less pressure on you from above! :) But I won't climb to the floor of religions. I'm afraid that at this altitude I may not have enough oxygen. In fact, historically, different peoples approached the ultimate foundations in different ways, so it turns out that there is nothing new – the same square, triangle, circle. You, the Writer, even though you say temptingly, that everything is simple and clear there, and the light in one straight line passes through two points. Well, do you at least admit that the light can be of different colors?
Writer: My light definitely shines and warms me, I will not tell about others and I will not impose. Each lamb will be hung by its own tail. See you again, my friends!
04 Knowledge and Faith
Writer: Who wrote this?
Engineer: I wrote this. This is the definition. You yourself said that no one understands what “love” is, and cannot express it in words if they ask what it is. I thought for a long time, found some elements, but finally the puzzle came together after reading the book you gave me.
Consultant: Bravo! The best writers and philosophers of all times pounded their foreheads in an attempt to express what “love” is, and our Engineer thought and thought and gave a definition! By the way, what book did the Writer give you?
Engineer: The Holy Bible. The Old Testament and the New Testament.
Consultant: ?!
Writer: What Gospel have you read in the New Testament? From Matthew, from Mark, from Luke, or from John. There, of course, all the books have the same story of Christ, but the first three were written independently for different communities: Matthew wrote for the Jews who believed in Christ, Mark wrote his Gospel for the Gentiles who believed in Christ, Luke has many historical details about the childhood of Jesus and his mother, Mary. And John wrote, knowing about the books already written, and his predecessors' stories are more supplemented than repeated.
Engineer: I read everything. Old and New Testaments – from Genesis to the Apocalypse. I can’t read books differently. I always read it completely first in order to understand the boundaries: what is at stake and what is not in the book. And then I go back to the moments that were hooked.
Writer: There are fifty books in the Old Testament, if you count non-canonical ones! I can't even believe that you have mastered everything.
Engineer: It was difficult, I will not hide it. But it was precisely while gnawing through the stories of the Old Testament with me that an insight happened, as our Consultant says. Just don’t be offended, it’s you who go to Church, and I am a man of science, I love facts and cause-and-effect relationships. Let me tell you in order how I saw it.
Consultant: It's getting more and more interesting!
Writer: Calm down, let him tell us what he understood…
Engineer: Let's start with the fact that laws are not invented, but discovered. The real laws, I mean, are related to the organization of the universe. Apples fell to the ground before Newton discovered the law of universal gravitation, and will continue to fall. In any case, first some pattern is caught, a hypothesis is made, the collection of facts begins, the identification of cause-and-effect relationships, the hypothesis is corrected. And only then, when the facts obtained by scientific methods are not refuted by experiments, a law is postulated. And even in this case, the field of application can expand, and new experiments will lead to a new law, in relation to which the old law will be a special case, working on a partial subdomain – one of the projections of a more multifaceted reality.
Consultant: Square, triangle, circle.
Writer: Don't interrupt! Please continue.
Engineer: It must be admitted that there are incidents in science. For example, the laws open to the microcosm do not work for the macrocosm and vice versa. String theory tries to combine the quantum mechanics of the microcosm and the general theory of relativity of the macrocosm, but we are already talking about at least ten dimensions of space-time.
So back to the laws and the Bible. In the Old Testament there are ten commandments, read – laws. There are only two in the New Testament, but they replace the previous ten. What are these laws about? About social behavior. What to do and what not to do. At first I thought, "Isn't Moses taking on a lot?" – where did he get these ten laws, why exactly these. And so, reading one of the countless stories about who gave birth to whom, who went where, who exterminated whom, it dawned on me: “Jews are a unique people!” It is not known why, but from the very ancient times they began to write down everything that happened to their people. Methodically, meticulously, in detail. For many hundreds of years, they have been fixing the facts of the life of the Jewish people with perseverance, which would be the envy of laboratory assistants and sociologists. And it turns out, having such records, one could see social patterns unfolding over the centuries, which is absolutely impossible for one person to do, observing the facts only during his life, even having the stories of his parents, who, as a rule, are also rejected in the heat of youthful immense energy.
Writer: This is how animals live. Instincts, copying of parents and own experience. It is confirmed that not only labor made a man out of a monkey, but also writing.
Consultant: The son of Abraham was Isaac… :)
Engineer: You're laughing in vain. When you have fourteen genera from Abraham to David, then fourteen genera from David to the migration to Babylon, and fourteen more genera from the migration to Babylon to Christ, and all the stories of each are described in detail, then you have such an array of data, such a Big Data that it is a matter of technology to bring out working social laws. I'll get better – social laws that work on the size of the population and on time intervals calculated in centuries. Although there may be exceptions when someone, for example, stole something and was never caught.
Writer: It's a matter of planning horizon.
Consultant: Wait, wait. So we can agree to the point that there is no Faith, but only there is knowledge and not yet open laws. The more I learn, the more the borderline with what I don't know. And if God is located in the area of faith, then by increasing knowledge, a person cognizes God.
Writer: “Because in much wisdom is much grief, and increase of knowledge is increase of sorrow.” Ecclesiastes.
Engineer: Let me disagree with what is on the board. I would divide everything into known and unknown. We will refer knowledge and faith to the known and distinguish two sub-areas in each area: with a plus sign and with a minus sign, like this:
Now, any fact that a person operates with can be attributed to one of these five areas.
If it is known that something exists and it is proven, it is “knowledge-plus”;
If it is known that something does not exist and it is proven, this is “knowledge-minus”;
If something is known to exist, but there is no evidence, it is “faith-plus”;
If it is known that something does not exist, but there is no evidence, it is “faith-minus”;
If it is not known whether something exists or not, it is “unknown”.
And we are talking about knowledge, not about consciousness, that is, about each person separately. The same fact for different people may be located in different areas in their reality map. At the same time, a person acts, not proceeding from “I believe – I do not believe”, but more often from “exists – does not exist”, that is, both knowledge and faith are taken into account.
Consultant: It turns out that if I assert that there is no God, but I cannot prove it, then for me this is “faith-minus”?
Writer: I told you that this is an empty and harmful conversation. It makes no sense to argue about “who” made the World. It makes sense to discuss “how” the World is organized.
Engineer: I agree. Let's do an experiment. Consultant, take this apple, lift it up on your outstretched hand. As I say – let it go!
Consultant: Come on. That's it, I'm ready.
Engineer: Tell me, do you “know” that the apple will fall to the floor when you let it go, or do you “believe” in it?
Consultant: What does it mean – “believe”? I know the apple will fall to the floor.
Engineer: Okay, let it go.
Consultant: Attention! Letting go…
Engineer: Oops!
Consultant: Well … that's cheating! It's not fair. What kind of experiment is this? Of course, it did not fall, because you grabbed it on the fly with your hand!
Engineer: Don't you think that this is how our life works? You cannot talk about anything in the future as what you know. Only about a certain probability.
Engineer: Everything that has happened in the past is, for the most part, knowledge: “knowledge-plus” or “knowledge-minus”. Someone, for example, does not believe that the Americans landed on the moon, but this is “faith-minus”. But basically everything that is in the past for a person is facts confirming knowledge. But from the present moment to the future, no one can give anything a one hundred percent guarantee. Too many forces are at work at the same time.
Consultant: That the Sun may not rise tomorrow? Just don’t talk to me about the possibility of an eclipse, I’m not a native. Even if there is an eclipse, even if there are clouds, the sun continues to shine.
Engineer: The sun is a star. The stars light up and go out. By the way, after the moment it goes out and we find out about it, eight minutes will pass – that is how much light flies to the Earth. Of course, the likelihood that the Sun will go out tomorrow is negligible. And you can make plans, taking into account that it will appear on the horizon in the morning, as usual. But this is still only “faith-plus”.
Writer: If the stars are lit, then someone needs it … Did you know that the ancient Greeks had two words for time? "Kairos" and "Chronos". “Chronos” is what you drew on the board – an arrow of time, a sequence of present moments that turn the future into the past, faith into knowledge. And “kairos” is a qualitative, not quantitative, like “chronos” characteristic. In one word, “kairos” is “on time”. “A time to take stones away and a time to get stones together; a time for kissing and a time to keep from kissing; A time for search and a time for loss; a time to keep and a time to give away; A time for undoing and a time for stitching; a time for keeping quiet and a time for talk; A time for love and a time for hate; a time for war and a time for peace.” Ecclesiastes.
All my martial arts teachers said that not only the speed of movement is important, but also timing.
Consultant: Don't you think it's “kairos” we break up today? :)
Engineer: I suggest you go and watch the sunset. You never know what might happen tomorrow :)
Writer: :) See you again, my friends!
05 Definitions and Laws
Consultant: Last time you said that laws are not invented, but discovered. I agree with physical laws. But religious commandments are still social laws, and, whatever one may say, they are invented. Take traffic rules, for example. If stones fell to the ground under the action of the law of gravity a million years ago, then until traffic appeared, there were no rules for this very traffic. After all, this is a pure convention, that you have to stand at the red light of the traffic light, and go at the green one. They could have come up with the opposite, everyone would have agreed and essentially nothing would have changed.
Writer: I remember when we were traveling in Venezuela, and early in the morning the taxi driver drove us through the empty city to the airport (we were going to fly to the highest waterfall in the world – Angel), he slipped through a red light several times without even thinking to stop. But then he suddenly began to slow down in front of a green traffic light and look left and right. Later, a friend explained to me that in Venezuela, many drivers and passengers of cars stopped at intersections were robbed, and they stopped stopping at traffic lights.
Engineer: One way or another, traffic rules are needed. And you need to follow them, otherwise everyone will get up in accidents and traffic jams. The actual patterns of better efficiency are evident. Therefore, here, too, I believe that the traffic law was discovered, not invented. And Moses had a revelation, of course, on the basis of knowledge about the history of his people for many centuries.
Consultant: And then Jesus came and said that the previous laws are canceled, here are the new ones!
Engineer: Not certainly in that way. Rather, he showed laws of a higher order from which the previous ones can be derived. It is as if people always stopped in their cars at red, and as soon as the green light came on, they would press on the gas without looking around – the law is above a specific situation. And the newly discovered law says that someone may not have time to brake, not see the signal. Therefore: look around – at the traffic lights, and at the cars in front, and at the cars behind, and at the cars on the left and right, and at pedestrians. The main thing is not to create an accident and not cause misfortune to yourself and others, and not to go only to the green light of a traffic light or to cross only to the “zebra crossing”.
Writer: “Let there be no thought that I have come to put an end to the law or the prophets. I have not come for destruction, but to make complete.” Gospel of Matthew.
Consultant: By the way, have you noticed that we are not erasing your definition of love from the whiteboard? I suggest leaving it for now. I started to have some thoughts from my professional practice. In any case, a succinct phrase for our philosophical conversations: “Love – is a property of all alive things, demonstrated in its interaction with another essence as a single whole with itself”. There are some philosophical categories: “love”, “alive”, “whole”.
Engineer: Yes thank you. I haven't really explained anything yet. And in this definition, every word is important and makes sense.
Writer: "Definition". Don't you think that the etymology of this word says about delineating limits, boundaries?
Engineer: And there is. You cannot embrace the immensity. And is there any sense to include in the model the laws in force on Mars and the Moon, when their application is studied only on Earth? We always carve out a piece of the world that we can “bite off, chew and digest”.
Consultant: Life-space according to Kurt Levin. By the way, you put the sign "Df:" – as we designated the definitions at the university. And this is an abbreviation for "Definition", which literally means – the establishment of boundaries. But I have a question about the text itself. You wrote “Love is a property of all alive things…”. What does “property” mean? How red or green, soft or hard?
Engineer: Rather, as cold or hot. Love as a property of living things is always there, but it manifests itself to a greater or lesser extent. I was looking for something accurate and versatile. Do you remember the “Love is…” chewing gum with a one-frame comic strip on a wrapper? Kim Grove from New Zealand began painting them on napkins for her future husband in the 60s. On each picture there is a situation with a girl and a boy and a caption with the continuation of the phrase “Love is…”. I think it is difficult even to calculate how many definitions of love were given in this format, because comics continue to be drawn to this day. But it is universal that love manifests itself in action or inaction in relation to another.
Writer: Why didn't you just write that this is a property of one person, manifested in relation to another person?
Engineer: Well, for me a person is a part of the living world. At the same time, I cannot say that not a single living being except for a human being is capable of manifesting love.
Consultant: Subject has been dealt with. But then it follows from your definition that the object of love may not be a living thing – some “another essence”. The stone on the road is also an essence.
Engineer: I propose an experiment. Take a rusty nail, walk up to any car and scratch a long and deep line on the hood or door in front of its owner. With a very high probability, you will be faced with a manifestation of the owner's love for his car, as if you scratched his skin, or even his heart, and not some piece of metal.
Writer: Priest Andrei Tkachev told a story from his life when he was in the hospital after having appendicitis removed. And in the same room another boy was lying and asked to eat, but the doctors forbade him, only his lips could be moistened. His own grandmother secretly brought in a fresh roll and gave it to her grandson. The boy died the next morning. It turns out that the grandmother showed love, fed and killed her grandson.
Consultant: It all depends on the context.
Engineer: And yet, as we can see, love is not just tender feelings, but action. And the action associated with the boundaries of the whole. Writer, remember, you said that you feel good when your wife feels good, and bad when she feels bad. For me, there is definitely love here. If I saw that my little child is holding a pair of knitting needles in his hands and is trying to shove them into an electrical outlet, then I would hit him on the hands or yank him, completely without affection, but definitely with love that exceeds even the instinct of my self-preservation.
Consultant: Are you saying that Matrosov's feat is also about love?
Engineer: For me, if a person sacrifices himself for the sake of others, then his understanding of the living whole definitely goes beyond himself.
Writer: Can I tell you about the heroes? ”Hero” is as much a devalued term today as “love”. I'm not talking about superheroes, it's about real life. Won a sports event or a TV show – and you are already a hero. For me, the hero is exactly the one who sacrificed himself for the sake of others. And you don't have to die while doing this. If he saved others and died – the hero was posthumous, he did not die – an alive hero.
Consultant: And if I donate a hundred rubles or even a thousand to a drunk who begs for alms? After all, I also sacrificed something of mine for the sake of another?
Writer: First, you never know the situation. Maybe he really needs to eat or even drink this afternoon so as not to die at night. And secondly, tell me, if I take a hundred rubles from my left pocket and put them in my right pocket, will I donate a hundred rubles? Not? And by and large, how does one person's pocket differ from another person's pocket? Where there is true love, there is no sacrifice. “I want mercy, not sacrifice,” said Jesus Christ. He loves all people, and went up to the Cross for everyone. According to your definition of “love” it turns out that He interacted with all of humanity, dead, living and not yet born, as a single whole with Himself. At the limit, I think it is possible to be in love with all people. It should be infinitely blissful and infinitely painful at the same time. Jesus, being God, loves us all, not as brothers and sisters, but as children. Children who continue to hate and kill each other…
Consultant: Here I will refrain from commenting. For me, Jesus is a historical figure. The man who organized the world's first global transnational organization. I know that an Orthodox priest can only be ordained by another priest, or several, therefore, in Orthodoxy, an unbreakable chain can be drawn from any priest to Jesus Christ. He, in fact, launched a startup two thousand years ago with the twelve apostles, pointed to love as a core value and the Kingdom of God as a mission. Incidentally, I am among the three of us in the most advantageous position here. If the Writer is one sixteenth – a priest, then I, if the relatives do not lie, one sixteenth – a Jew.
Engineer: One sixteenth, how's that?
Consultant: It's very simple: every person on this earth has one navel, two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, and so on. So, if a Christian, in order to get to God, needs to live his life in a special way, repent of his sins and receive communion, then a Jew in order to get to God just needs to remain a Jew, for the Jews are the Chosen People of God!
Writer: Is that why you decided to learn to play the violin at forty?
Consultant: Who knows? Maybe – the genes. And, as I remember, you started going to church at the age of thirty-three.
Engineer: The age of Christ…
Consultant: Moses is closer to me. At forty he went into exile to gain wisdom, then forty years later he returned, brought the Jews out of Egypt and for another forty years led them through the desert.
Engineer: By the way, they almost immediately found the Promised Land, but the Jews refused to fight for it. God wanted to destroy everyone for cowardice, and Moses barely persuaded Him, recalling the promise that the Jews would find the promised land. Ultimately, a compromise was found – the Jews will still enter the lands of Israel, all except those who refused to fight. So it took forty years to walk in the desert for a generation to change. Moses, by the way, also did not enter the new lands.
Consultant: Moses agreed with the stakeholders in Egypt, wrote the documentation in the form of tablets, trained the users, and put the system into operation. I believe that the project has been successfully implemented!
Engineer: Who are the stakeholders?
Consultant: This is a management term – people who, in one way or another, positively or negatively, can influence the implementation of the project. By the way, I have a wonderful story about the violin and a new approach to project management that came into business from information technology. Remind me, I'll tell you sometime.