--Mencius Moldbug
Modern Business: Monarchic Management, Communist Pay
Democracy for the Brain-Dead
Those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them.
--Michael Malice
George Smith: The Knowable Characteristics Argument Against the Concept of God
If a supernatural being is to be exempt from natural law, then it cannot have specific characteristics. Those characteristics would impose limits and those limits would restrict the capacities of that supernatural being. A supernatural being would be subject to the causal relationships that mark natural existence, which would disqualify it as God.
So we must somehow conceive of a nonspecific being without a specific nature, a being that is nothing individual, specifiable, particular, or definite. But that lack of characteristics is incompatible with the notion of existence itself. To be, is to be something as opposed to nothing. And to be something is to be something specific.
If God is to have any characteristics, which God must have to exist, those characteristics must be specific. But to assign definite characteristics, to say that a being is this as opposed to that, is to limit the capacities of that being and to subject it to the uniformity imposed by those capacities.
If a supernatural being is to differ in kind from natural existence, it must exist without a limited nature, which amounts to existing without any nature.
To talk intelligibly about God, we must assume that God has characteristics by which that being can be identified. But once the idea of supernatural existence apart from the limitations of natural law is introduced, we thereby exclude the possibility of assigning any definite characteristics to that being, because by doing that we bring our God within the realm of limitations and so within the realm of natural law.
The believer says that God transcends human understanding and is unknowable. But if one believes in God, but does not know what God is or what it is that one believes in, then that belief that God exists is a completely worthless claim and does not differ from no belief at all.
One cannot know that something exists without some knowledge of what it is that exists. To deny all the qualities of a being is equivalent to denying that being itself. A being without any qualities is one which cannot become an object to the mind, and that kind of being is virtually a non-existing thing.
If God is completely unknowable, then the concept of God is completely without content and the word God is a meaningless sound. To say that God exists, where the word God represents an unknown, a blank, is to say nothing. It's on a par with the statement that unies exist or a blark exists.
By refusing to state the content of one's belief, one exempts oneself from reason and so from serious consideration. To claim the existence of something which by nature cannot be known is to submerge oneself in hopeless contradiction.
If God cannot be known, then God cannot be known to exist. To claim that a thing is unknowable, one must first know that it exists. But in that case, one already has knowledge of it to that extent. To assert the existence of the unknowable is to claim knowledge of the unknowable, in which case it's not really unknowable after all.
When one claims that something is unknowable, if one cannot produce knowledge in support of that claim, then one's assertion is arbitrary and without merit. If one can support that claim, then one has accomplished the impossible, by having knowledge of the unknowable.
--Redacted from Atheism: The Case Against God, by George Hamilton Smith, pages 43-44.
Illusionism: Intellectual Protection Racket #37
Welcome to yet another way to tell people to just shut up about philosophical issues beyond the predictable formulaic Loser Dude remarks in social situations.
What is a person doing when they assert the truth or reality of illusion?
This is similar to the idiotic rhetoric thrown around about everything being a simulation, and is equally bogus for the exact same reason: fatal self-reference error.
Again, the Magic Question is:
How does that universal claim impact its own truth?
Building My Own Ideal Worst Enemy
--Gray Mirror
Deborah Lipstadt, 1993
The press may not determine what the public thinks, but it does influence what it thinks about.
If the media pay particular attention to an issue, its importance is enhanced in the public’s eyes, and if the media ignore something, public reaction will be nil, for as Gay Talese has observed, news unreported has no impact.
The way the press told the story of Nazi antisemitism—the space allocated, the location of the news in the paper, and the editorial opinions—shaped the American reaction.
My analysis of the press is an attempt to shed light on that reaction. The press was not a neutral or passive observer—it almost never is. When we study the press, it may appear that we are studying the narrator, but we are really studying an actor. The press became part of the historical process by virtue of the role it played as conduit of information. Just by fulfilling its task, it became a catalyst.
--Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 1993
Ivan Throne Redacted
Clown world is festered with weak and complacent churl dirt. Cattle ready for slaughter.
See the valleys of grave incompetence all around you. People, organizations, politics. They're all decaying. Lunacy has taken over. A high enough number of the incompetent in your area and the odds are quickly stacked against you.
You might not be interested in the incompetent.
But they're interested in you. They want to keep you weak and complacent and bring you down to their pit of utter decay.
The errors of the incompetent lead to fatal consequences. Staying in the ordinary world will lead to delusion, decay, and the death of your heart, mind, and body.
Live among weakness and stay weak. Nature doesn’t do pity. It calls for competence: the Engine of Survival.
Step Out of Clown World immediately, and go through the door into the dark world.
Equip yourself with the most dangerous tools of truth an individual can operate with.
Life is binary. Death is always one error away.
Stop sinking in the quicksand of weakness. To ensure survival, even in the darkest of times, you must drive crushing reality into the delusion bubbles that clown world has created.
Unlock previously undiscovered and unused power within you. Unleash that power to advance your existence and climb the mountains of infinite possibility.
Through an intense study curriculum, unlock the doors of truth in the dark world and the odds of your survival will be in your favor.
--Ivan Throne, author of The Nine Laws
Postmodern Snapshot
Postmodernists appear to claim that their own assertions about the modern era, about how language and consciousness work and so on are true and rational. They write literary texts and protest when people misinterpret the author’s intent in their own writings, they purport to give us the real essence of what language is and how language works, and claim superiority for postmodernism compared to other views.
Everything is relative to ways of talking about things, except what the postmodernist has to say about ways of talking about things.
Postmodern analysis of knowledge is as much a single grand universal metanarrative account as any that it criticizes.
Is the truth of postmodernism objectively out there?
Postmodernists at least mimic assuming that their own assertions are true and rational.
And postmodernists have no alternatives to truth, rationality and so on that could possibly make sense of or clarify their own claims or attempted refutations of modernism and other perspectives.
And if postmodernism is not offering itself as true, rational and capable of being understood by careful interpretation of postmodernist writings, it’s not self-refuting. But there’s still no reason to accept it, since it would not be claiming to be true, rational or understandable, something that anyone ought to believe. A postmodernist could not recommend their views to others and there would be no point in communicating those views, like they constantly do.
So is postmodernism itself merely rhetoric motivated by power or merely, as Nietzsche termed it, the lust to scold other people in some moral-like way?
While passion or commitment to a specific view may induce some people to exaggerate, is that any more likely than the same things motivating people to be all the more meticulous and accurate so as not to compromise the credibility of the message they’re trying to communicate? And what about those accusations of bias themselves?
And if postmodern notions of practical rationality are radically relative to the community, if there's no basis for criticising history, then there's no basis on which you can advocate any specific purpose for dialogue or practical rationality itself, including the believing, advocating or even communicating the theories of subjectivism or relativism or reductionism or anti-realism.
Travel Precautions of the Corporate Golf Drunks
"It’s a modern dilemma for the ultra-wealthy: a yacht awaits, but how to safely reach it without exposure to the germ-ridden masses?"
Routledge's Curse of the Trendy Staffers
At least a dozen errors (of 1000+ total(!)) in the Routledge History of Philosophy are substantial & prevent me from understanding the text.
That level of mediocrity makes me wonder about corruption, not just collectivism's predictable hate-generation and incompetence over time.
WWE Will Save the World
Nothing's changed. People engage like professional wrestling fans in this struggle over Trump, as though it's actually real. They almost literally think that they're electing Trump to be dictator.
--Curtis Yarvin
Postmodernists Turn Randian
If you want to see postmodernists ape Ayn Rand, just attack one of their crony-privileged postmodernist writers.
And if you're planning a terrible crime, you and your defense attorney should start reading postmodern writers asap.
Juries will swear you're just a saintly victim of modernism.
.
Collectivism's Self-Exempting Barbarism
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
[Editor's note: except the documents he wrote.]
--Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 1973
Everything Changes and Remains the Same
Much of the popular cultural product which goes under the name of the postmodern in our time is actually simply a continuation of the modern.
--Thomas Docherty
"Postmodernist theory: Lyotard, Baudrillard and others"
--Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume 8, p412
Lush As Logician
It's funny how someone can read something on my blog, and assume I believe it. I believe a lot of it, some I don't. If you don't want to read it, don't read it.
If you want to assume I believe X because X was on my blog, that's your business. What can we infer about you from the same kind of fallacious reasoning? Take that and run with it.
Microsoft collectivism would say:
What conclusions would you like to jump to today?
There Is No Zeno Traversal Paradox
Zeno's Paradox already assumes it's own falsification in its antecendent, whereby the paradox is asserted, because some fraction of the A-to-B distance must already be traversed, a prior non-paradoxical necessity which begs the question of the whole paradox's viability in the first place, all in the attempt to help the conditional successfully infer a self-eliminated consequent. "must" makes it a strict implication of necessity, "If and only if..."
In other words, Zeno's Paradox assumes there is a contradiction to the "no traversals of x to y" consequent in order for it to be possible for the paradox to be stated at all.
That prior necessity to go through partial segments is impossible because it depends on the already-known success of partial segment traversing, each of which is open to the same impossibility because of further sub-segment necessities, and so on without end.
The prior smaller-segment-traversal requirement gets a free ride of non-paradoxicality in order to complete the conditional statement that expresses the paradox.
Theoretic Bigotry on Parade
"Response to Frege's work was met by indifference or hostility . . . Response to his Concept Writing book was typified by a rather caustic review by Cantor, who had not even bothered to read the book."
--Routledge History of Philosophy, Vol 9, p14.
Foucault's Power Play
All discourse gains acceptance by expressing, fortifying and concealing the power of those who maintain it.
Except for my own discourse, which you lazy stupidass American students will accept if you don't want problems in your sociology courses.
--Michel Foucault
Multiple-relation Theory of Judgment
Mind-Like Inference Engine Discovered Running In All Minds
Analysis of the issue of whether there is some kind of infinite, ultimate being that is a person or sentient object has not really progressed in its radically basic core issues concerning the nature, status, authority, and justification of the system of standards for that analysis itself, as well as all other self-referring universal statements, except among a few thomistic scholars.
Any being, entity, or object using these control statements as a single, universal, unquestionable integrated cognitive system, is necessarily an ultimate mind or person.
No being can be recognized as a person in the first place, without using that system of statements to dictate the mind's behavior in that process of analysis itself. Recognition means to re-cognize.
Even quantum theorizing already assumes logical authority over the quantum domain.
Once again, as always, self-reference and criteria win the day.
Ah, the pleasures of logically God-level standards of analysis.
Weaponized Entertainment Puzzle in Reverse
The entertainment world is as much under the influence of science as anything else, in its shaping of our tastes and opinions and values and in its stupendous media technology.
But even as sedate entertainment it's almost entirely confined to the juvenile.
--Joseph Agassi
Science as Cover Girl
The Criteria of Starting Points
Reasons are provided by the information we begin with, along with the rules that establish the connection between that information and the statement that is believed.
But on what basis do we select the information we begin with?
And how do we decide on the rules?
There wouldn't be any point in claiming some conclusion was rationally inferred if we got there on the basis of a perfect algorithm using randomly-chosen premises, or on the basis of appropriate premises in strict accordance with a ridiculous algorithm or set of rules.
As Kuhn said, The practicing scientist within normal science is someone who mindlessly, endlessly, and almost feverishly twists a Rubik's Cube to try and solve the puzzle without ever asking why one is trying to solve that puzzle instead of some other puzzle.
--Redacted from James F. Harris, Against Relativism, pages 81-82.
Quine's 37th Unrevisable Revisability Relation
Quine: The logical laws or rules, according to which the re-evaluation of statements takes place, have the same value as all the other statements in one's network of beliefs.
Revisability Principle (Q): If some recalcitrant experience occurs which causes one to regard as true, or hold on to, some statement, and if that statement and some second statement are incompatible, then that second statement must be given up, revised, or considered false.
Me: But that exempts incompatibility itself from revision as an ongoing network rule along with that revisability principle itself, both of which contradict the claim that the belief network is universally revisable.
And revisability itself requires non-revisable relations and objects of the analysis itself.
So Quine can't even call it a network---as well as a theory.
Collectivism's Heartbreak Hotel
Live in a commune for a month, then tell me how much you love Communism.
Harpie's Heartbreak Hotel & Seething Resentment Center
I'm So Objective About How You're So Subjective
Everything's subjective except my claim that everything's subjective.
If you deny that, then you're a bigot.
--Derrida, Wikipedia editors, Charles Manson, et. al.
Logical Relations in Principia Mathematica
It's astonishing to find the multiple-relation theory of judgement in Principia Mathematica whose very programme assumes that logical relations are not psychological and that their explanation requires no reference to the judging mind.
--James Bogen
Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume 9, page 171.
Hanfling on Philosophy
"Probably most of the philosophy studied in our universities is dead, for most of it is open to more-or-less fatal criticisms."
--Oswald Hanfling, "Logical Positivism"
Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume 9, page 193
Drop That Shallow Boozer
The entertainment world is as much under the influence of science as anything else, in its shaping of our tastes and opinions and values and in its stupendous media technology.
But even as sedate entertainment it's almost entirely confined to the juvenile.
--Joseph Agassi
Agassi on Philosophy of Science
The official philosophy of science boosted by the scientific establishment, is more intolerable than commercials selling soap and cosmetics.
They're as remote from the search for the secret of the universe as eroticism is from the intellectual love of God.
--Joseph Agassi
Drone Zone
Listening to and monitoring good old-fashioned drone zone for transcendent mind optics and focus.
Music for navigating the dark world.
Curtis Yarvin: Nothing's Changed
Nothing's changed. People engage like professional wrestling fans in this struggle over Trump, as though it's actually real. They almost literally think that they're electing Trump to be dictator.
--Curtis Yarvin
International Atheists Of Earth Admit Reason is Logos of Gospel of John
Detractors themselves admitted they would have to consult with Reason to tell them whether or not this is true.
Stove On Inclusive Fitness
People easily think that claiming a cause explains something is denying it exists. Talk to someone in the street, or an
average physicist for that matter, about some secondary quality such as color. Are they saying that some cause explains why things have the colors they have, or denying that things have any color?
Perhaps the inclusive fitness theory is not about what causes kin altruism, and maybe it's not a denial of kin altruism. Perhaps sometimes it's claiming a cause of kin altruism and sometimes it's a denial that kin altruism exists. Shared genes cause kin altruism and are the reality underlying the illusory appearance that there is such a thing as kin altruism. Some scientists believe this about color.
But the inclusive fitness theory explains why the literature of inclusive fitness contains contradictory estimates of how much altruism there is in the world.
It might be claimed that this is a misunderstanding of the inclusive fitness theory, and that kin altruism is real at the level of individual organisms. Think of parental altruism in humans, of sibling
altruism in hymenopteran workers, and so on. Hamilton said the selfishness of genes causes kin altruism.
No suggestion of universal selfishness here. And, taking the inclusive fitness theorist at their word,
we adopted his causal explanation of kin altruism in section iii above. It led us to a
number of surprising results. For example, that there is twice as much sibling
altruism between bacterial as between human sisters; that sibling altruism in our
species is as common and strong as parental altruism; that every parent bird will
sacrifice its own life in order to save three of its nestlings; and so on. And the
combined result of all these discoveries was, that there is in fact far more kin
altruism in the world than anyone had ever supposed before the inclusive fitness
theory came along. In fact it turned out that animal life is saturated with kin
altruism: drips the stuff at every pore.
And yet, in the literature of the inclusive fitness theory, what do we actually find?
166
Why, more often than not, the universality of 'dog eat dog', of 'dirty tricks', of the
self-interested manipulation of offspring by their parents, of parents by their
offspring, of siblings by each other, of strangers by everyone; of apparent altruism
revealed as hypocrisy, (even, no doubt, in those luckless hymenopteran workers
who had previously been portrayed as paragons of kin altruism). There is no
pretence, in this part of the literature, of admitting the reality of kin altruism and
confining selfishness to the gene level. On the contrary, it is the Hobbesian war of
all against all, openly installed (not for the first time) as the last word in Darwinian
biology. There is not, it turns out, one atom of kin altruism in the world: it is an
illusion.
In any discussion of the inclusive fitness theory with an adherent of it, the same
extraordinary phenomenon of 'Janus faces' will be met with. On one face of thc
theory, arising out of the idea that kin altruism is caused by shared genes, there is
an extravagant exaggeration of the amount of kin altruism that exists; on the other,
there is the idea that kin altruism is an illusion, the underlying reality of which is
shared selfish genes. Any discussion of altruism with an inclusive fitness theorist
is, in fact, exactly like dealing with a pair of air balloons connected by a tube, one
balloon being the belief that kin altruism is an illusion, the other being the belief
that kin altruism is cansed by shared genes. If a critic puts pressure on the illusion
balloon - perhaps by ridiculing the selfish theory of human nature - air is forced
into the causal balloon. There is then an increased production of earnest causal
explanations, of why we love our children, wfty hymenopteran workers look after
their sisters, etc., etc. Then, if the critic puts pressure on the causal balloon -
perhaps about the weakness of sibling altruism compared with parental, or the
absence of sibling altruism in bacteria - then the illusion balloon is forced to
expand. There will now be an increased production of cynical scurrilities about
parents manipulating their babies for their own advantage, and vice versa, and in
general, about the Hobbesian bad times that are had by all.
In this way critical pressure, applied to the theory of inclusive fitness at one
point, can always be easily absorbed at another point, and the theory as a whole is
never endangered. A defender of the theory does need, it is true, a certain mental
agility: an ability to make sudden and extreme'gestalt switches', (as the best
authors in the philosophy of science now say), from a pichre in which animal life
is swimming in kin altruism, to one in which there is no kin altruism at all. But
this ability, it has turned out, is by no means uncommon; and it is the only one
which a defender of the inclusive fitness theory needs. Given that, his theory is
stable rmder any criticism whatever.
My hypothesis - that inclusive fitness theorists are just confused about kin
altruism, and oscillate between denying it and trying to explain it - has at least the
merit, therefore, of explaining something otherwise improbable: the Janus faced
character of their theory. But it also has in its favour a historical fact which I point
out in Essay VI: rhat selfish theorists have always oscillated between a version of
their theory which is shocking but not true, and a version which is perhaps true,
but certainly not shocking, or even interesting.
[page 168] When an inclusive fitness theorist tells us that kin altruism does not exist, then
that is shocking all right; but it is not true. when, on the other hand, he only tells us that kin altruism is caused by shared genes, then that happens not io be true, (as
we saw in section iii), but even if it were true, it would not be shocking, or eyen
interesting. If kin altruism ls caused by shared genes, that is well - it exists,
anyway; if it is caused by something entirely different, well again. who doubts that
it is caused by something? Nor can its cause be of a very rare or elevated character,
in view of the extreme conmonness of kin altruism which, (at least in its parental
form), extends even to such low spirituality types as alligators. The fact that kin
altruism has a cause does not prevent it from being sometimes an admirable thing,
cither. By that overly severe rule, there would be nothing to admire anywhere; not
cven in, say, The Selfish Gene [book], which presumably has its causes like everything
else in nature.
--David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales, pages 166-168.