re: #4 Cosmic X

There was a Nova special on the creation of Watson—the machine that eventually beat the Jeopardy champions. I’d recommend it.

One of the tasks in building was to give the machine over 6 million rules, water is wet, once something is dead it stays dead—all of the little things we pick up unconsciously. It still wasn’t enough. The other difficulty was that Watson has no movable eyes, so the question had to be transmitted to Watson when the humans could read the question—which means that they had to teach Watson to read.

Not so simple. Because to read the letter ‘A’, in different fonts, there is no principle, humans can just do it. So they had to add more data, thousands of ‘A’s, different fonts, and they had to teach Watson to correlate, to do so much correlation that the computer was able to figure out the principle, so to speak, of what constitutes the letter A.

To me, learning Torah is much the same—here are some laws, now what is being referred to? So there are about 25 relationships that are forbidden—why? Answering this matters. And why describe this principle with 25 laws and volumes of discussion? And how can the actions of two people greatly effect an entire society? These are all valid questions, which are not discussed. Instead, many simply read the law and that’s that.

But law and that’s that, is just not implied by everything else within the culture. We’re trying to expand our scope of perception, not reduce it to one line. We put things in greater and greater context, not less. How many pages of argument are devoted to simply figuring out the context of a Baraisa? It’s almost constant.

So what is the Torah talking about when discussing the group of forbidden relationships? They are never read individually, always as a group. And then, what is the Torah talking about by saying that these relationships matter a great deal, to people who are even unaware that these things are happening? Have you ever had a discussion that has taken this path, with these questions?