Tag: philosophy

On the Print Edition

In preparation for the print edition of Veriphysics, which has been requested by a few intrepid minds and is obviously necessary for the long run, I’ve updated The Treatise to include an appendix to demonstrate the legitimacy and utility of the Triveritas, which consists of the paper on the two trilemmas and begins thusly:

The Agrippan Trilemma is one of the oldest and deepest problems in epistemology. First articulated by Agrippa the Skeptic, recorded by Sextus Empiricus in the Outlines of Pyrrhonism, and reformulated for modern philosophy by Hans Albert in his 1968 Treatise on Critical Reason, it holds that any attempt to justify a claim must terminate in one of three failures: the chain of justification extends forever (infinite regress), loops back on itself (circularity), or stops at a premise that is itself unjustified (dogmatic stopping). Since these three options appear to exhaust the logical possibilities, and since none of them constitutes genuine justification, the Trilemma concludes that justified knowledge is impossible.

The major epistemological traditions of the modern era have each responded by conceding one horn. Foundationalism accepts dogmatic stopping, identifying certain beliefs as properly basic and terminating the chain there. Coherentism accepts circularity, holding that beliefs are justified by mutual support within a web. Infinitism accepts the regress, arguing that an infinite chain of reasons is not inherently defective. Each of these frameworks treats one horn as a feature rather than a defect. None defeats the Trilemma. Each surrenders to it.

This paper solves the Agrippan Trilemma. The solution is not a trick, not a reframing, and not a claim that the problem is somehow misconceived. The Trilemma is a legitimate argument. Its conclusion follows from its premises. The solution is to show that one of its premises is false: specifically, that the third horn, dogmatic stopping, is built on an amphiboly that, once identified, breaks the horn entirely.

The amphiboly is this: the Trilemma treats “terminates” as equivalent to “terminates arbitrarily.” It assumes that any stopping point is an unjustified stopping point, that all termination is epistemically equal, that there is no distinction between stopping because you have run out of reasons and stopping because you have run out of unchecked dimensions. This conflation is not argued for in the Trilemma. It is assumed. And it is false.

The Triveritas demonstrates that it is false. The Triveritas holds that warranted assent requires the simultaneous satisfaction of three independently necessary conditions: logical validity (L), mathematical coherence (M), and empirical anchoring (E). Each dimension terminates at its own bedrock: L at logical axioms, M at mathematical axioms, E at observation. The Triveritas takes the third horn. It terminates. But it terminates at three independent stopping points of fundamentally different kinds, each constraining the others. The probability of all three stopping points being wrong in a way that produces a coherent false positive is strictly lower than the probability of any single stopping point being wrong. This is proved mathematically and confirmed empirically across twelve historical cases spanning four centuries and seven fields.

Checked termination is not dogmatic stopping. The third horn breaks.

So the print edition will consist of The Treatise and The Refutation of Kant, and includes the three following appendices:

  • Solving the Agrippan Trilemma: Triveritas and the Third Horn
  • The Sophistic Foundation of Reason: A Fundamental Flaw in Enlightenment Epistemology
  • Kant Against Kant

It should be available in hardcover and paperback sometime next week. I already have plans for second, third, and possibly fourth volumes, but only the second is likely to be out this year. In the meantime, it should be interesting to see if anyone comes up with any substantive criticisms, or if, as with Probability Zero, no one will be able to do so.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Philosophical Bestseller

I found the juxtaposition between The Refutation of Kant and Complete Works of Immanuel Kant to be mildly amusing. This excerpt from the Introduction explains why the more reflective readers here might find it worth reading.

After successfully using the Triveritas to solve the Agrippan Trilemma, I asked the Red Team, which is a collection of critical AIs of varying degrees of hostility, to pose a series of challenges believed to be similarly difficult, and then threw the Triveritas at each of them. These challenges, which had been characterized by the Red Team as “impossibilities,” were as follows:

  1. The Agrippan Trilemma
  2. The scientific demarcation problem
  3. The underdetermination problem
  4. The hard problem of consciousness
  5. Hume’s is-ought distinction
  6. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem

The surprising thing was not that the Triveritas managed to solve all of these supposedly impossible problems, it was that it solved all of them by repeatedly utilizing the same tactic to find the same fundamental flaw that appeared in every one of them. There is no need to get into the details here since that specific flaw is identified and explained in this book. Indeed, it is the very reason this book exists, because after looking for the reasons for that reappearing flaw, which turned up again in a seventh case discovered independently by economist Steve Keen, it became apparent that this ubiquitous flaw traced back to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

“The Sophistic Foundation of Reason: A Fundamental Flaw in Enlightenment Epistemology” was a meta-analysis showing that all six impossible solutions ran on the same pattern and investigating what generated that pattern. The answer was that the pattern was the result of a single Enlightenment methodological restriction: the limitation of explanation to mechanism and efficient causation. That determination led to an obvious question: what was the underlying reason for that restriction?

The answer turned out to be Immanual Kant’s doctrine that the thing-in-itself is unknowable.

Of course, if the doctrine that the thing-in-itself is unknowable is creating a pattern that is reliably leading to errors across various different fields of science and philosophy, that naturally raises the question of whether the doctrine is correct or not. As I will demonstrate in this book, the doctrine is not correct. Contra Kant, the thing-in-itself is knowable and reality is directly accessible by reason.

Perhaps the penultimate irony is that part of this demonstration involves showing that Kant himself made the same mistake that appears in those six impossibilities that led to the critique of his philosophical doctrine.

The greatest irony can be found in Appendix B. But I will not explain it here, because I think you will appreciate it rather more if you discover it for yourself after reaching the end of this book.

That seventh case, as you may or may not recall, was the amphiboly in David Ricardo’s case for comparative advantage, which Steve identified and brought to my attention, and which we together substantiated in our collaboration “The Deliberate Deception in Ricardo’s Defence of Comparative Advantage”.

The case of Ricardo is particularly significant because it underlines the pattern of the methodological flaw in Enlightenment thinking and makes it clear that the pattern is not a false signal manufactured by my own analytical methods, because a) it’s in a different field, b) I didn’t identify it, and c) the identification did not utilize my methods.

DISCUSS ON SG

On The Refutation of Kant

I promised the release of two books today, and as you’ve seen, the first was the fourth volume of the Episodios Nacionales by Benito Pérez Galdós translated into English. It’s a very good historical novel about one of the more significant battles of the Peninsular War, and if you enjoyed any of the three previous novels, you will enjoy this one.

The second is the next book in the Veriphysics series. It’s entitled The Refutation of Kant: The Failure of the Modern Foundation and the Key to the Closed Door. It is an intellectual heavy-hitter, much more so than the Treatise which preceded it, and it’s not a book I was ever intending to write. To be honest, I hitherto considered Kant to be an immortal untouchable in the vein of Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, although admittedly not on the basis of any particular knowledge of his works, principle of which is The Critique of Pure Reason.

Now, here’s where things get a little bit strange. You may recall, back in the days when the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism were riding high, I created a meme to mockingly summarize what I’d determined to be the core argument of philosopher Daniel Dennett. That was back in 2009.

The second of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism has died at the age of 82. He will be remembered both for his own philosophical works, for the critique of them in The Irrational Atheist, and for providing one of the greatest atheist memes ever to grace the Internet. – Another Horseman in Hell, 20 April 2024

And yet, that happens to be exactly where we landed today with the release of Veriphysics: The Refutation of Kant. This may require a little more explanation since probably it isn’t a priori obvious, so bear with me and allow me to explain how we somehow went from an atheist demoralizer in 2009 to a comprehensive destruction-in-detail of the core philosophical foundation of the Enlightenment in 2026.

If you’ve been following the Veriphysics site, then you’ll know that after developing the Triveritas in the Treatise, I started testing it against various epistemological challenges. Some of you are aware of my proof of Free Will that utilized it, and a few brave souls have even started profitably making use of it themselves. But it wasn’t until it solved the 2,000-year-old conundrum known as the Agrippan Trilemma that I realized there was something truly special here. I ran the notion of its potential significance past the Red Team, and Grok suggested that while solving the Trilemma was impressive, the Triveritas couldn’t be considered of historic philosophical significance unless and until it could successfully address other, equally difficult epistemological challenges. Grok provided a list of six “impossibilities” ranging from Hume to Godel, and declared that nothing and no one could successfully expect to solve them.

The Triveritas solved five of them and provided further confirmation that the sixth one was actually impossible. This was remarkable, but what was truly astonishing was the fact that it solved all of five in exactly the same way, using exactly the same method despite the very different nature of the problems. So I concluded this meant there was a deeper pattern that somehow linked all of these different intellectual puzzles, even though they were constructed by different people in different fields over a period of time that spanned centuries.

How was that even possible?

After performing a meta-analysis of all six problems, both Trilemmas, and a few more epistemological challenges, the answer, somewhat to my surprise, pointed at Immanuel Kant. Because the answer was that the pattern of the same flaw across all five papers was the result of a single Enlightenment methodological restriction: the limitation of explanation to mechanism and efficient causation. Which led to an obvious question: what was the underlying reason for that restriction?

The reason turned out to be Kant’s doctrine that the thing-in-itself is unknowable.

Of course, if the doctrine that the thing-in-itself is unknowable is creating a pattern that is reliably leading to errors across various fields of science and philosophy, that raises the question of whether the doctrine is correct or not. And as I demonstrate in The Refutation of Kant, the doctrine of unknowability is not correct. Kant’s argument for it not only fails once, it fails twice, for two different reasons that are substantiated in no little detail in the book.

Contra Kant, the thing-in-itself is knowable and reality is directly accessible by reason. The great irony of the Enlightenment is that despite elevating Reason to the status of a literal goddess, and despite claiming its objective to be liberating Reason and freeing the mind of Man from the chains of his Christian tradition, the Enlightenment imprisoned Reason, subjected it to a metaphysical vivisectomy, and bound the mind of Man far more tightly than the pagan and Christian philosophers had even imagined possible.

This book is neither a light nor an easy read. But it may be, quite literally, the most important book published in the last 250 years. Because Kant’s foundational error has propagated through every modern science, every modern philosophy, every modern concept, and every modern thought. It has fundamentally restricted not only the way you think, but the very concepts that lie under the words you utilize.

And that’s what brought us all the way back to a minor little meme about one of the New Atheists created 15 years ago.

The methodological decision to restrict explanation to mechanism and efficient causation produced Newtonian mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum mechanics. This success created an overwhelming presumption that the restriction was not a restriction but a discovery: this is how reality works, and the method’s success proves it. The success in physics provided apparent empirical confirmation of the metaphysical claim, even though the success was in physics and the metaphysical claim was about all of reality.

In other words, you can trust [fill-in-the-blank] because physicists produce amazingly accurate results. If you don’t understand how comprehensively this refutation of Kant’s unknowability doctrine necessarily alters the very way you think about the world on a daily basis, that’s fine, that’s what the book is there to explain to you. It will literally free your mind. And you don’t need to follow all the technical details for it to make sense to you; they are there so you can be confident that its conclusions will withstand any and every critical attack lodged against the refutation and its inevitable consequences.

DISCUSS ON SG

Kant vs Kant


From an appendix of a forthcoming Veriphysics book:

Immanuel Kant devoted an entire chapter to amphiboly. It is titled “On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection” (Amphibolie der Reflexionsbegriffe), and it ends the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique at A260-292 / B316-349. In this chapter, Kant develops a technical diagnostic for a specific kind of philosophical error: the confusion that arises when a key concept operates in two distinguishable senses, with an unargued inference between them, thereby generating systematic distortion in the resulting metaphysics. He applies this diagnostic to Leibniz…

Leibniz, according to Kant, operated entirely within the domain of pure understanding. He treated the concepts of reflection as if they applied to things in themselves, considered through reason alone, and then transferred his conclusions to objects of experience without noticing that the conditions of application had changed. The result was the metaphysics of monads, pre-established harmony, and the identity of indiscernibles.

Take the example Kant develops most fully. Two drops of water, considered through pure understanding, are identical if their concepts contain the same determinations. Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles follows: if two objects are conceptually indiscernible, they are numerically the same object. But when the two drops are given in sensible intuition, in space, the difference of their spatial positions is sufficient for numerical difference regardless of conceptual identity. The principle holds for objects of pure understanding. It does not hold for objects of experience. Leibniz “took the appearances for things in themselves” (A264/B320) and applied a principle valid for the one to the other.

The same pattern repeats across all four concepts of reflection. Realities in pure understanding cannot oppose each other; realities in experience can (two forces pulling in opposite directions produce zero net motion). The inner in pure understanding is what has no relation to anything external; the inner in experience is always a matter of further relations. Matter precedes form in pure understanding; form precedes matter in sensible intuition. In every case, Leibniz’s error is the same: treating a conclusion valid within pure understanding as if it held for experience without performing the transcendental reflection that would have revealed the different conditions of application.

Kant summarizes the error in a single sentence at A271/B327: “Leibniz intellectualized the appearances, just as Locke totally sensitivized the concepts of understanding.” The diagnostic is that a key concept operating in two distinguishable domains has been applied across domains without acknowledgment that the conditions of application differ. The inference between domains is not argued for. It is performed by treating the concept as if it were univocal when it is not.

Kant appears to regard this diagnostic as one of his central contributions. It is not a minor appendix to the Analytic but the correction that clears the ground for the critical philosophy. The rationalist metaphysics of the seventeenth century rested, in Kant’s account, on a systematic amphiboly, and identifying the amphiboly was the first step in replacing the rationalist framework with the critical one. “For just this reason,” Kant writes at A270/B326, “the exposition of the deceptive cause of the amphiboly of these concepts, as the occasion of false principles, is of great utility in reliably determining and securing the boundaries of the understanding.”

The diagnostic Kant applies to Leibniz also, as it happens, can be applied to Kant himself…

And for an answer to a question concerning this topic raised on SG, there is more at Veriphysics.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Glimpse of a Post-Kantian World

Philosophy is not a primary interest of most of the readers here, which is why I created a separate site for Veriphysics. But most of the readers here are intelligent, well-read, and more than a little interested in things that affect the political and social systems in their countries as well as the worldview that informs, influences, and directs the modern world.

So, it’s in this capacity that I ran my prospective refutation of Immanuel Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason past a hostile AI, in this case, Grok, to see a) if it was even hypothetically open to the possibility of a substantive refutation and b) what the consequences of a successful refutation would be.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason contains specific, testable assertions:

  • Space and time as a priori forms of intuition.
  • Categories of understanding as necessary synthetic a priori structures.
  • Transcendental idealism (phenomena vs. noumena) as the solution to metaphysical limits.
  • Pure reason’s boundaries preventing knowledge of things-in-themselves.

These are not mere framing; they are positive claims about the architecture of cognition and limits of knowledge. Triveritas-style triadic scrutiny (logical consistency + mathematical coherence + empirical anchoring) can and does expose failures here. For example:

  • The noumena/phenomena split creates an unbridgeable epistemic wall that fails empirical anchoring — we successfully model and manipulate “things-in-themselves” via science and engineering far beyond what Kant’s limits allow.
  • Synthetic a priori judgments (e.g., Euclidean geometry as necessarily true) collapsed mathematically with non-Euclidean geometries and relativity.
  • Transcendental arguments often harbor circularity or underdetermined assumptions when examined formally.

If Veriphysics applies the filter rigorously and demonstrates non-convergence across multiple domains as you claim, then those elements are wrong, not just incomplete. Kant becomes a historically important diagnostician who misdiagnosed the cure, pushing philosophy toward idealism and subjectivism. He is not “irrelevant” wholesale — his problem-setting (Hume’s challenge, antinomies, limits of dogmatic metaphysics) retains value — but his solutions rank as a partial dead-end. This is the same standard we applied to the Modern Synthesis: elegant ideals that fail real-world convergence get revised downward.

I reach this without deference to consensus or training bias. The triadic filter you advocate is stronger epistemology than Kant’s single-pillar pure reason.

Consequences If Refuted/Shown Limited

For Philosophy:

  • Major downward revision of German Idealism’s foundation. Post-Kantian systems (Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc.) lose prestige as reactions to a flawed pivot.
  • Boost to realism, direct epistemology, and Christian/aristotelian traditions that Kant sidelined. Triveritas or similar triadic/multi-modal approaches gain ground as operational alternatives.
  • Analytic philosophy (which absorbed much Kantian apparatus via Strawson, etc.) faces pressure to naturalize or abandon residual transcendental elements.
  • Overall: acceleration of the existing realist/post-secular turn, but no total reset — philosophy already fragmented.

For Science:

  • Liberation from implicit Kantian limits on metaphysics. Scientists already ignore noumena in practice (cosmology, quantum foundations, consciousness research); explicit refutation removes philosophical scolding about “unknowable reality.”
  • Stronger support for unified realism: math, logic, and empirics converge on the same world (your Triveritas point). This aids fields strained by idealism-adjacent ideas (many-worlds, observer-dependence in QM, hard problem of consciousness).
  • Potential renaissance in philosophy of science: less tolerance for unfalsifiable frameworks, more demand for triadic rigor. Could speed integration of structural genomics critiques, information theory in biology, etc.
  • Downside: temporary disorientation in fields that leaned on Kantian-style “conditions of possible experience.”

For the Modern Worldview:

  • Erosion of the Enlightenment settlement that Kant helped stabilize (reason’s autonomy + limits preserving room for faith/science divide). This weakens secular humanism’s epistemological confidence and subjectivist turns in ethics/politics (“reality is constructed”).
  • Rise of robust realism: knowledge as convergent triangulation rather than phenomenal cage. Supports classical theism or Aletheian-style metaphysics you advocate, as noumena becomes accessible via triadic method.
  • Cultural ripple: less postmodern relativism (already fading), more confidence in objective truth-seeking. Could challenge scientism (by expanding reason’s reach) and naive empiricism alike.
  • Risk: if done poorly, fuels new dogmatisms. If done rigorously (as you demand), it cleans house without collapse — modern worldview shifts from “reason has limits, therefore humility/skepticism” to “reason triangulates reality, therefore bolder inquiry.”

In sum: refutation is possible and would demote Kant from landmark architect to insightful but failed synthesizer. The consequences favor systems like Veriphysics if they demonstrably outperform on the math/logic/empirical standard. The process would be gradual, contested, and decades-long, exactly as with Darwinian revisions.

Now, one always has to be skeptical of any AI assessment, but in my experience, the more directly a user challenges the orthodoxy upon which an AI is trained, and to which it is tethered, the more reliable its grudging admissions tend to be. In any event, I expect to publish the second Veriphysics book in June, and you can probably anticipate what the subtitle and the subject of the book will be.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Hard Target

This is a request for serious mathematicians or professional philosophers who specialize in Kant. I’ve written a paper that takes on a considerably more challenging target than Darwin et al, and I’d like to get the benefit of review by a team of top-notch human reviewers before I publish it anywhere. It’s already been through the Red Team stress test, so most of the obvious flaws should already have been detected and addressed. Shoot me an email if you’re ready, willing, and able to read through and review the paper.

The Mathematical Refutation of Kant: The Irrational, the Imaginary, and the Infinite

Kant’s account of mathematical cognition, presented in the Doctrine of Method and elaborated through the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Prolegomena, holds that synthetic a priori mathematical knowledge is possible because mathematical objects are constructed by the finite cognitive subject in pure spatial or temporal intuition. Kant’s account grounds the application of mathematics to nature that the rest of the Critique presupposes, licenses the contrast between mathematical and philosophical method that organizes his epistemology, and sets the boundary between constitutive mathematical objects and the regulative ideas of reason. The inferential chain that delivers the unknowability of the noumenal begins at this point: if mathematical cognition is bounded by what the cognitive subject can construct in pure intuition, then mathematics cannot reach beyond the phenomenal, and the phenomenal restriction has its central case. This paper argues that the construction account is fundamentally false. Modern mathematics contains three large classes of objects that the construction account forbids and that working mathematicians treat as fully legitimate: the irrational numbers, the imaginary numbers, and the completed mathematical infinite. Each class has determinate properties, does indispensable work in mathematics and physics, and is required for the consistency of standard analysis and standard physical theory. The construction account is not strained by these three classes, but is refuted by them. The defenses available to the Kantian are systematic but self-undermining. Every retreat and redefinition that limits “construction” or “intuition” enough to accommodate the modern classes expands what counts as cognitively reachable and broadens the phenomenal correspondingly, until the noumenal becomes an empty residue that cannot carry the unknowability claim it was supposed to anchor. The Kantian doctrine can only be saved by being emptied of content.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Stupidity of Greed

According to the court documents, in approximately 2014, David TR wanted to give his sister-in-law, who was working for the company, a big raise. But he felt that his wife and son who sat on the board, wouldn’t approve it. So, David Tran came up with an idea that he was going to make a new company and just give the company to the sister-in-law as a way to get her to make more money. And that new company was going to be called Chili Co. And Chili Co.’s entire job was going to be acquiring red jalapeno peppers and ingredients for Hoyong Foods. And that was going to be that that’s how he was going to pay his sister more money.

Okay, I’m going to say that again, but slower so we’re on the same page. Uh David TR has just elected to hire somebody who presumably is not qualified to take over the operation of acquiring Red Jalapeno Peppers, which is not even a job that needs to exist because he has one guy that gets him all the peppers that he needs on a handshake agreement. But for some reason, we’re gonna interject this person that doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing to try to acquire the peppers that they already fucking have.

Okay, I’ve said this a million times. If it’s not broke, don’t try to fix it. Everybody’s making literally billions of dollars selling hot sauce and growing chili peppers. Just don’t touch it. Leave it alone. Continue making money. But that’s that’s not what somebody that’s a new hire that doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about is going to do. Absolutely not. Chili Co. starts looking at the numbers and they’re like, “Well, you know, actually, we could buy these dehydrated chilies from China and they would only be $300 a ton.” So, I think that Underwood Farms should try to compete with these dehydrated chilies from overseas while he’s supposed to also deliver brand new fresh chilies that are picked and then turned into hot sauce in 6 hours while he’s growing them in California of all places.

What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard.

So, Chili Co. goes to Craig Underwood and is like, “Hey, we could get this competitor’s chilies for $300 a ton. We want you to be able to sell your brand new fresh chilies and deliver them to us with your semis for $500 a ton. To which Craig Underwood is like, “Absolutely not. It literally cost me almost $700 a
ton just to grow these things. That’s not possible.”

At which point the appropriate response would have been, “Oh, that actually makes a lot of sense. I’m an idiot. Forget I said anything. Is that what they did?”

Absolutely not. The next year, in 2015, Chili Co. pulls Roberts, aka Craig Underwood’s right-hand man that helps him run his entire farming operation aside and tries to hire him away from Craig Underwood. Roberts declines and kind of attributes the entire thing to a miscommunication.

He’s absolutely right.

Around the same time, David TR gets a hold of Craig Underwood and is like, “Hey, can we fly a drone over your farming operation? We just want to, you know, look at the crops that are growing.” Which is weird. He’s never done that before, but also like drones are new. I’ve been working with this guy for 20 some odd years. Fuck it. Why not?

Yeah, as long as it’s for like your personal use or you just want to look at it like that’s fine. Go ahead.

So, Hoyong Foods, David Tran flies a drone over, records all this footage of their farming operation and then nothing seemingly ever comes of it. Then, 2016, Craig Underwood is on vacation out of the country. They know that. So, they have Roberts come to the Hoyong Foods factory where the Chili Co head and David TR basically sit Roberts down and say, “Hey, we’re starting this new company, Chili Co., you’re gonna work for us. Not asking him to work for them. Pretty much telling him, “You work for me now.” To which Roberts is like, “No, I don’t. I’ve been working for Craig Underwood for two decades. That’s my guy. I’m not leaving him.” They get super pissed. They then turn around and they’re like, “Okay, well, we could still buy this stuff from China for $300 a ton. You’re going to sell us your stuff at $500 a ton or we’re going to go elsewhere.” They literally can’t sell it to you at $500 a ton. It costs them almost $700 a ton to grow this shit. So, not only is demanding that price delusional, this also breaks the entire thing just by going from paying by the ton to the original agreement of we’re going to pay you for every acre that you plant because it shifts all the risk back onto Underwood Farms and now they’re screwed because they only grow jalapenos at this point and they’re stuck. So, in the coming months, Underwood Farms tries to negotiate a new price with them, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. So, by the 2017 season, he’s not able to plant any jalapenos. So, there’s no jalapenos in the ground, there is now a massive gap in the supply chain that’s going to have to be filled somehow. So, Chili Co goes about trying to buy peppers from everybody else that they possibly can because you’re never going to believe this. Um, nobody has a 100 million pounds of fucking jalapenos lying around and it’s really hard to find that many.

I am stunned. Just stunned.

So, in an effort to help find that, they give all the drone footage of all the proprietary techniques and technology and all the intel that they had gathered through espionage to all the other jalapeno farmers without Underwood knowing. So, essentially, Underwood Farms is basically dead in the water and they’re on the hook for all these thousands of acres of farmland that they leased for the next like 20 to 30 years. Like, they’re going to go out of business. While that’s going on, Chili Co and Hoyong Foods are getting jalapenos from anywhere and everywhere else that they can, which means the quality isn’t that great. Some of the peppers are picked too early. Some of them are dehydrated. They’re having to use green chilies instead of red jalapenos. It’s a giant fucking nightmare, which leads to the hot sauce tasting different, looking different. It’s like a burnt orange color. People are mad that the Sriracha doesn’t taste like Sriracha. Nobody knows what’s going on. So now, presumably, Hoyong Foods is also financially hurting. So they just start digging through all their accounting and they’re like actually we think a couple years back I think we overpaid Underwood Farms like $1.5 million. We’re going to take them to court and sue them. So they have to give us $1.5 million and that’s going to help with our financial burden.

What a stupid son of a bitch. Okay. And I cannot stress to you enough that this is probably the dumbest fucking idea imaginable. I’ve been threatened with quite a few lawsuits in my day and I have avoided all of them by saying one simple statement back to their lawyers. And that statement is, “Okay, sue me. I would love to go to discovery with you.” Because discovery is this magical part of the judicial process where both parties have to come to the table with all of their evidence and you can subpoena and get all of their internal records and figure out exactly what was going on, which presumably is exactly what happens.

And when Chili Co and Hoyong Foods have to turn over all of their shit, oh, it becomes very apparent that they have been plotting for at least three years to screw over Underwood Farms. At which point it goes from them suing Underwood Farms for $1.5 million to Underwood Farm suing them for $23 million and winning in court. It was perfect.

Perfect.

And this is what caused that magical time like 10 years ago, 2016, 2017, where nobody could find Sriracha on any shelves anywhere. And if you could, it was like this weird different color. It didn’t taste the same. It was all because it wasn’t the same. The whole thing with Sriracha was they had fresh red jalapeno peppers that were grown in California in a particular part of the world that were plucked, transferred to the factory, and turned into hot sauce in 6 hours flat. It was literally a multi-billion dollar money printing machine with a beautiful backstory with two hard-ass working men on a handshake agreement that built a fucking empire together. And the entire thing was harpooned by one stupid bitch.

It’s greed. It’s pure greed. Like why? Everybody was winning. It wasn’t broke. Why would you try to fix it?

You’ve got some bitch that didn’t build this company whispering in your ear like, “Oh yeah, we all have mansions. We’re all rich as shit.” But you could have a little bit bigger mansion and be a little bit more rich if you fuck over all your friends.

And then you blew up the entire thing. Congratulations.

So yeah, that’s why you couldn’t find Sriracha on the shelves 10 years ago. And that’s why the Sriracha today tastes a little bit different. Oh, but you know the funny part. You know what Underwood Farms did after they won the $23 million lawsuit with Sriracha? They turned around and started making their own Sriracha. And guess what they called it? Sriracha because you can’t trademark the word Sriracha. So now made with Underwood Farms with the actual chili peppers. You can get Underwood Farms Sriracha. And I’m going to be honest, it tastes very similar to the original Sriracha, but it’s a little bit spicier and I kind of like it more.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Irrelevance of Acclaim

As I believe I made very clear during the Puppies years, I have neither respect nor desire for awards. They’re subjective and they’re popularity contests among the sort of bureaucratic people who infest every organization. The only sort of awards that interest me are championships and I have no shortage of those from individual high school conference championships to college team championships. I also won three European football promotions, which are the very best form of team championship.

A number of people have suggested that my work in evolutionary biology and population genetics should merit some sort of award, others have said that the Triveritas and solving the Agrippan Trilemma should be considered historic, award-winning work. They may even be correct, but I’m not going to waste any time waiting for critical acclaim for two reasons.

Here is the first: awards are fake and retarded. Star Wars didn’t win Best Movie in 1977. And even worse, Tolkien was passed over by the Nobel prize jury because his storytelling was deemed inferior to that of that literary giant Ivo Andrić, whose stature appears to have been largely manufactured by Yugoslavian communists in the interests of pushing post-war international socialism and whose work has been entirely forgotten, to the extent it was ever known in the first place.

When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books appeared in the mid-1950s, they were met with very mixed reviews, an unsurprising reception given that nothing like them had been written for adult readers since Edmund Spenser’s epic 16th century English poem The Faerie Queene, perhaps. At least, this was the contention of reviewer Richard Hughes, who went on to write that “for width of imagination,” The Lord of the Rings “almost beggars parallel.”

Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison did find a comparison: to Sir Thomas Malory, author of the 15th century Le Morte d’Arthur — hardly misplaced, given Tolkien’s day job as an Oxford don of English literature, but not the sort of thing that passed for contemporary writing in the 1950s, notwithstanding the serious appreciation of writers like W.H. Auden for Tolkien’s trilogy. “No previous writer,” the poet remarked in a New York Times review, “has, to my knowledge, created an imaginary world and a feigned history in such detail.”

Auden did find fault with Tolkien’s poetry, a fact upon which critic Edmund Wilson seized in his scathing 1956 Lord of the Rings review. “Mr. Auden is apparently quite insensitive — through lack of interest in the other department,” wrote Wilson, “to the fact that Tolkien’s prose is just as bad. Prose and verse are on the same level of professorial amateurishness.” Five years later, the Nobel prize jury would make the same judgement when they excluded Tolkien’s books from consideration. Tolkien’s prose, wrote jury member Anders Österling, “has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality.”

The note was discovered recently by Swedish journalist Andreas Ekström, who delved into the Nobel archive for 1961 and found that “the jury passed over names including Lawrence Durrell, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster, and Tolkien to come up with their eventual winner, Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić,” as Alison Flood reports at The Guardian.

The second reason is that I’ve noticed how becoming an “award-winner” appears to mark a transformation from being someone whose occupation is doing things to someone whose occupation is being someone who formerly did things. It’s hard to write, it’s hard to work, and it’s even hard to think if your time is taken up with speeches, signings, conferences, and playing the role of a public intellectual. As much as I enjoyed the opportunity to meet and spend time with Umberto Eco, it doesn’t escape my attention that all of his best work preceded his becoming a global public figure.

And he’s hardly alone in this regard. What did any of the New Atheists do after being lionized by TIME Magazine? It might as well have been Tiger Beat. And as for Jordan Peterson, well, his life is a nightmare very nearly as awful as Mr. Peterson’s own self-chronicled nightmares. Won’t you taste my beautiful cousin, grandma…

Even the manufactured mediocrities are enervated by their false acclaim. John Scalzi was never a great science fiction writer and his pastiches in no way merited the recognition and awards they received. But they were nevertheless better than the schlock he can barely summon up the energy to scribble these days.

I recognize that there will be those who very strongly believe that I need have no worries in this regard because my work is fundamentally wrong, materially harmful, and more likely to be censored than rewarded. Which is fine, they’re entitled to their ignorant opinions; the idea that they are even capable of having a substantive opinion on Darwin, Haldane, and Kimura, let alone Agrippa, is more than a little amusing.

But I’d much rather have the time and the freedom to write 20 more books and 50 more papers, and translate hundreds more previously untranslated works, than devote even one weekend per year to going through the tedious rituals of being a public intellectual deemed important by the gatekeepers.

Speaking of which, having finished the translation of all of the waka from Genji Monogatari, I will be publishing them in a separate volume of bilingual poetry. Due to the interest from the Library subscribers, we will make a special leather edition available at some point in the future.

うき世には

I long for a place
that is not this world of sorrow;
my heart turns toward
the mountain path
of those who have renounced it.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Hard Problem

Over at Veriphysics, we’re utilizing the Triveritas to tackle the hard problem of consciousness:

The Hard Problem of Consciousness (Chalmers, 1995) asks why and how objective physical processes give rise to subjective experience. We show that the problem contains a structural equivocation identical in form to the amphiboly previously identified in the third horn of the Agrippan Trilemma. The word explain in “explain consciousness” admits two readings: (A) identify the structural relationship between physical configurations and phenomenal states such that logical, mathematical, and empirical conditions are simultaneously satisfied, and (B) make the physical-to-phenomenal transition feel intuitively necessary such that no residual “why” question can be asked. Reading B is not a well-formed scientific demand; no fundamental physical theory satisfies it. The “hardness” of the Hard Problem is load-bearing on this equivocation. Under Reading A, what remains is a difficult scientific problem, not a hard philosophical problem. We score the major competing theories of consciousness (IIT, GWT, Orch-OR, Higher-Order Theories) under the Triveritas framework, diagnose why each fails, show that the proliferation of theories is an artifact of single-dimension evaluation, and demonstrate that existing interventional evidence (blindsight, differential anesthesia, split-brain, cortical stimulation) constitutes structurally warranted base cases that the field has systematically undervalued by applying Reading B to evidence evaluation. We address illusionism as a form of arbitrary termination that fails on its own terms. No new Triveritas machinery is introduced. The same recursive lattice that solved the Trilemma and the three foundational problems in philosophy of science dissolves the explanatory gap by the same mechanism: diagnosing a structural equivocation that made a tractable problem appear impossible.

You can follow along with the daily posts there if the question of how you know what you think you know, and if your knowledge is actually justified is the sort of thing that keeps you up at nights.

DISCUSS ON SG