ibn Harm

Tag: love

  • Language and encryption

    I am not sure that encryption is still needed in the 21st or 15th (AH) century since language is so convoluted that there might not be a single text which is free from abiguity. Milan Kundera noted the same phenomenon in his The unbearable lightness of being which describes a romantic failure as a lack of patience regarding “learning each other’s idiosyncratic language.”

    Kundera wrote that each person has her own language, and that a succesfull romantic relationship consists of learning the language of the other, of having the patience of learning the “code” of the other.

    If this is not ambiguous enough for you consider one of my projects https://encryption.zoam.nl/1 which uses obfuscation and a Roman cipher. I created it a while ago but I remember sending it to a friend who has a masters in computer science and who could not crack it.

    1. It needs a password but if you know my background it should not be too difficult to crack. ↩︎

  • On love

    I did not realize it before so consciously but it is possible that you and you soulmate have different interests. This is where philosophy and religion could provide unifying principles. The themes of family are for example considered very highly in many religions, as well as some philosophical traditions.

  • On Jewishness

    Without a doubt it is possible to say that Judaism has won the battle of the soul. Since Jewish identity is automatically gained through the line of the mother the hierarchal pattern is established. Furthermore choice stays intact because it is established that one can be Jewish without works of faith. The only possible critique one can have is aestetical.

  • The problem of translation

    Today we start with investigating language d.v.

    The problem of translation concerns tje problem of not knowing how the mind lf the reader will receive the message that the translator transmits.

    It is unknown what words have which associations to the mind of the reader so that a translator who wants to convey a clear translation also is able to do so if he understands the psyche of the reader.

    Only through repeated experiences will the translator come to know the mind of his audience so that he might choose words more carefully in order that etc.

    Or the audience should respond in the only possible way that does not leave room for doxa.

  • The Science of Dating

    Now for a somewhat vulgar continuation we will discuss the science of dating i.e. Bayes will be used to model attraction between souls.

    Recall that P(a | b) = (P(b | a) * P(a)) / P(b).

    Recall that P(a) is the initual probability with regards to the prior.

    Thus P(a | b) is the attraction a hypothetical person feels towards her love given that event B has occured.

    Cont. P(a) is the initial attraction etc.

    Cont. P(b | a) is the updated attraction.

    And P(b) = P(b | a)*P(a) + P(b | !a)*P(!a) which models the probability of event B occuring regardless of event a viz. the person being attracted to her with a degree of belief.

    But here is the conondrum that it is not possible to know whether person n+1 makes her decisions in time or based on logic.

  • On love #1

    Acknowledgements

    I am borrowing the concept of “Con-Text” from S. Ahmed’s What is Islam? A full bibliography is given at the end of the post.

    Introduction

    Now for the million dollar question we will venture into one of the great mysteries viz. the topic of love. I anticipate that one blog post will not be enough to end all intercourse on love so d.v. more posts will follow in time.

    Love and Soul Mates

    In the symposion of Plato one of the men who are invited to give a speech on the topic of Love details a myth in which humankind originally did not consist of merely two sexes but of three. In this world there was a third sex which was a monstrous human-hybrid made of both the female sex and the male sex. This creature symbolizes the concept of the soulmate.

    The idea that two souls are bound together in heaven and then by the grace of God may d.v. reunite on earth is attested to in the Quran. Multiple ayas (viz. “verses”) of the Quran describe souls as being paired. It is on this topic that philosophy and theology reunite in theoria. We can for example consider Quran 81:7 (Surah At-Takwir) “and when the souls are paired” but also Quran 4:1 (Surah An-Nisa) states: “O humanity! Be mindful of your Lord Who created you from a single soul, and from it He created its mate.”

    I have seen the idea of soulmates also expressed in internetfora discussing Jewish theology although M. Goodman’s A History of Judaism (Penguin Books, 2019) does not make explicit reference to it. Goodman was a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford. As far as my knowledge goes no references to soulmades are also made in the Bible. So if the idea of soulmates is present in Jewish thought it would arise from the Con-Text.

    Bibliography

    Ahmed, Shahab. What is Islam?. Princeton University Press, 2015.

    Goodman, Martin. A History of Judaism. Penguin Books, 2019.