Tag: philosophy

Theology Adjacent

As you probably know, I am highly allergic to theology and regard most of it as varying degrees of human philosophy dressed up as Divine revelation. The obvious holes in most dogma are the result of the same sort of amphiboly and ambiguity that render Enlightenment philosophy intrinsically flawed, and assuming one possible interpretation is the only one in obvious contravention of the observable facts. So, in the interest of maintaining the peace with other Christians, I keep my critiques to myself, particularly because I have no answers to replace those flawed dogmas.

If I had to summarize my Christian dogma, I would say that I am of the Glass Darkly School.

That being said, it is not possible to construct a metaphysics, as I am presently doing for the Veriphysics philosophical system, without addressing things like Truth, God, and Logos. So, if these matters are of interest to you, you may wish to peruse the outline that is being assembled at Veriphysics.

I would, however, caution the midwits that in this context, citing historical authorities and dogmas accomplishes nothing. If you wish to offer criticism, it has to be within the system itself; what Tertullian or Aquinas or Voltaire or the Pope said is of zero import for the purposes of this exercise.

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Never Assume Stupidity

A foolish aphorism known as Hanlon’s razor says “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

This is foolish and short-sighted. All adopting it accomplishes is to offer cover to the malicious and allow them to hide behind their multiple levels of deception. Consider the following comments made in response to a wicked fake philosopher seeking to convince others to submit to evil.

  • Sounds like the guy posted his shroom trip.
  • I became more retarded reading that retards nonsense.
  • Stones can’t dance; why do they spout such idiocy? Recycled Taoist mysticism.
  • Sounds VERY Hindu/Indian, or wearing those trappings at least
  • Sounds like some Psilocybin based philosophy from a 90’s art student.

It’s vital to not fall for the primary deception. But it’s also important to not fall for the secondary deception that allows the wicked to retreat while continuing to move and operate freely under the cover of harmless stupidity.

Always attribute to malice that which gives off even the faintest hint of sulfur, no matter how stupid it is. Neither demons nor the wicked are particularly known for their intelligence.

KTFS

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Two Perspectives on The Absurd

As I mentioned the other day, I’d been on a bit of a creative tear of late. And if I’ve learned one thing from GRR Martin, it’s that you’d better strike while the iron is at least warm, because you have absolutely no idea when life, the universe, and everything is going to pull the plug on your inspirational spark.

So, I wrote and recorded seven new songs, and added three remixes, in a style that can be reasonably termed Neo-Gothwave and characterized as if The Cure had actually read Albert Camus and hired a female singer. There are a lot of things going on behind the scenes, which includes the possibility that an actual band will record everything organically, but for now, suffice it to say that for those who are interested in the musical side, there is a new music video available for viewing at AI Central as well as a philosophical critique of the underlying Absurdist philosophy available for reading at Veriphysics.

I wouldn’t think there would be much in the way of crossover, but at least there is a little something for everyone.

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Give Them What They Voted For

The new Labour Prime Minister is going to provide refugees for those who welcomed them most enthusiastically:

There are 17 local authorities with no taxpayer-supported asylum seekers, an analysis by the Daily Mail reveals – as Andy Burnham vows to send more to middle-class areas. The Prime Minister yesterday promised to ensure arrivals are not only placed in the ‘poorest communities’ when he was pressed about proposals for a migrant camp near the tiny Oxfordshire village of Piddington.

‘All parts of the country need to play their part,’ he said – prompting the Tories to accuse him of wanting to ‘dish out another vindictive punishment beating to the UK’s middle classes’.

Asylum seekers who are waiting for a decision on their asylum claim are often eligible for accommodation and money to cover their living expenses. This is provided by the Home Office, and the migrants themselves are dispersed across the country.

Home Office figures showing the number of supported asylum seekers per local authority at the end of March reveal the areas that currently house no migrants are overwhelmingly rural beauty spots. These include the Cotswolds, Derbyshire Dales, Malvern Hills, the New Forest and the Scottish Highlands.

Others include Mid Devon, East Hertfordshire, Ceredigion (a scenic county in west Wales) and Hart, a 118-square-mile local authority taking in major towns, rural parishes and villages in Hampshire.

I think refugees and immigrants should only be permitted in states and cities where the population specifically voted to support asylum and immigration. Democracy, even in its limited form, has comprehensively failed due to its natural tendency to separate those who support the policies from the consequences of those policies. And in doing so, it becomes a potentially even more unjust system than monarchy.

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The Next Step

The first two Veriphysics works have been very well received and reviewed. However, a comprehensive philosophical system for the 21st Century requires more than a critique of the flaws of the dominant current philosophy, it requires a Metaphysics, an Ethics, and perhaps even a Politics if it is to provide a coherent system by which men can live their lives. After all, now that we have the key to the door that Kant locked, we still need to know what to do with that access to the Real.

I’ve been working on a structure of the metaphysics of Veriphysics for a few months, and have reached the point that I’m now beginning to lay out the skeleton. So if this sort of thing is of interest to you – and I am entirely aware that it will not be to most readers – you might want to start following the Veriphysics site that has lain fallow since June.

However, for love of all that is Good and Beautiful and True, do resist the temptation to try to demonstrate what a Smart Boy you are by proving that you’ve read a little Plato, or Spinoza, or Augustine and are familiar with their various definitions of seemingly relevant concepts. That sort of triviality doesn’t even get you past the bar for entry to the discussion here.

Just to be perfectly clear, I think anyone who is retarded enough to opine without having first read the relevant books and papers in their entirety, and preferably at least twice, should be sterilized on sight.

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A Passing Thought

The ideal role of woman is the cheerleader. The satanic inversion of the cheerleader is the critic.

It’s fascinating to observe the way in which women not only fail to understand their power over men, but how they sabotage their own well-being by not only giving in to the inversive role, but doing it without even realizing they are doing so.

The key, I think, is to understand that every man who isn’t an optimist with a gambling problem is perfectly aware of the fact that he could fail. It’s very, very easy to not do anything, to not try to succeed. Which is why it is imperative for the women in a man’s life to grasp that not only does a man have no need for a negative voice to balance his moments of optimism and inspiration, but that piling more negativity on top of his natural concerns, fears, and worries all but ensures that he will never take the risks required to level up.

There are men who don’t need cheerleaders and who are basically impervious to criticism. I’m one obvious example of that, as my habit of devoting myself to things that literally no one wants or is asking for tends to demonstrate. But even I respond well to cheerleading and bristle at negativity and unhelpful, insubstantial criticism.

And since so many people can’t seem to grasp what “unhelpful, insubstantial criticism” is, allow me to explain it to you. Before your criticize anything, ask yourself one question:

  1. Is there anything that can be done about it now?

If the answer is no, then keep your mouth shut and say something vaguely polite and positive. Because nothing you say can change what is already done.

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Taleb, Anti-Fragility, and Evolution

A reader writes in about anti-fragility and evolution:

I’m reading “Anti-Fragile” and, like Taleb’s other books, appreciate his insight. I do find it interesting how much he argues for anti-fragility using evolutionary and enlightenment examples. I agree with Taleb’s main point on anti-fragility. However, having read “Probability Zero” and your recent posts on Kant, I’m thinking you’ve refuted all his arguments to illustrate anti-fragility via evolution and enlightenment thinking. Taleb spends quite a bit of time writing about how evolution “directs” certain outcomes or how enlightenment thinking supports his humanism position.

Do you know if Taleb has read your recent works? His math background would hopefully allow him to fully engage in the math you’ve revealed.

My limited understanding is you’ve shown evolution can’t direct anything or even happen. The changes we see are either random or directed by some intelligence. Secondly, by refuting Kant and enlightenment thinking, would that impact Taleb’s thinking on how he approaches so many things being “unknowable”?

Taleb was familiar with SJWs Always Lie. I doubt he is familiar with any of my newer work. While we had some contact on Twitter beating up on Mary Beard and her ahistorical nonsense together, I have had no contact with him since getting banned from there in 2017 or whenever it was.

This is where I think it’s always vital to distinguish between the What and the Why. Anti-fragility is a sound concept and an important strategy that does not rely in any way, shape, or form on Taleb’s attempt to explain it in terms of evolution by natural selection or Enlightenment illogic.

One minor correction: the changes we see are not random. Kimura-style neutral drift has also been disproven in Probability Zero and The Frozen Gene, although the disproof was totally unnecessary because anyone who actually understood the math would never have pretended it could even begin to fill in the gaps produced by the insufficient rate of evolution natural selection; the drift equation is 40x slower to fixate than the already-too-slow rates examined in my books.

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Mailvox: The Significance of the Refutation

Can you explain how the refutation of Kant affects our life today in simplified terms that anyone can understand?

Most people have never heard of Immanuel Kant, but almost everyone lives inside a concept he created. The idea sounds humble enough. Human reason can’t truly know reality as it is, only how it appears to us through our limited human senses. That sounds modest and even wise. But once you accept the idea as a real limitation, a strange thing follows. If nobody can actually know how things really are, then every statement about reality becomes just one more opinion, one more “perspective,” and none of those opinions or perspectives can ever be proven true. Refuting Kant’s idea and showing that it isn’t a rule or a real limitation is extremely significant because it puts the possibility of actual knowledge back on the table.

Here are five ways the refutation of Kant’s idea about unknowability changes your world.

First, expertise and “the science.” For decades, people were told to accept various statements because experts agreed or studies showed, and to treat the matter as settled and beyond any possibility of question. Kant’s rule props this up: if reason can’t reach reality directly, then truth becomes whatever the credentialed authorities say it is, because there’s no independent reality you can check them against. Refuting the rule restores the obvious: there is a real world, then those expert scientific predictions either come true or they don’t, and an expert who keeps being wrong is wrong no matter how many credentials he holds. You’re not dependent upon either the experts or the scientists; you’re allowed to check reality yourself.

Second, the idea that everyone has their own truth” This phrase is everywhere now, and it descends directly from Kant’s idea. If reality is locked away and we only ever see our own version of it, then your truth and my truth are just two filtered views and neither can be more correct than the other. Refuting the doctrine eliminates this. There is one reality. People can be honestly mistaken about it, and perspectives can be particually correct, but “true for me” stops being a relevant position. Some claims match reality and some don’t, and which is which is not up to how you feel about it.

Third, morality. If we can’t know how things really are, then we also can’t know how things really should be, and right and wrong collapse automatically into preference, culture, or power, with the strongest, loudest voice defining it. This is why so many moral arguments today end in “who are you to judge.” Refuting unknowability reopens the possibility that good and evil are real features of the world, discoverable like other truths, not just labels we stick on things we happen to like or dislike. That changes how seriously you can take a moral claim, your own included.

Fourth, science and discovery itself. Kant’s rule says human reason can’t identify anything about reality that isn’t already handed to us through experience. But that’s not how the greatest discoveries actually worked. The planet Neptune was found by pure calculation first: a mathematician worked out that something unseen had to be tugging on Uranus, predicted exactly where to point the telescope, and there it was. The same thing happened with antimatter, predicted on paper before anyone detected it. Reason reached out and grabbed a piece of reality nobody had experienced yet. If Kant’s rule were true, those triumphs couldn’t have happened. Refuting it explains why the human mind really can discover the world, not just sort the impressions it’s given.

Fifth, your ability to have confidence in your own thinking. The quiet cost of Kant’s rule is humility turned into paralysis: who am I to claim I know anything, when the smart position is that real knowledge is impossible? That mindset trains people to defer, to hedge, to assume the truth is forever out of reach and someone else’s call. Refuting the doctrine gives that back. Your reasoning is a real instrument that makes real contact with the real world. You can investigate, conclude, and stand on what you find. You will not be right about everything, and partial knowledge is still the human condition. But the door to truth was never locked and reality was never off limits. Kant just declared that it was, and a lot of people placed false trust in his assertions for two hundred and fifty years.

The refutation of Kant is therefore akin to a creature that thought it was a fish discovering that it’s simply been swimming in water this whole time, and realizing that not only can it breathe in the air and walk on the land too, but also that it has wings and can fly.

In related news, VERIPHYSICS: THE RETURN OF THE REAL is now available for preorder in hardcover and paperback editions from NDM Express. They should be available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other bookstores next week. It contains both The Treatise, The Refutation, and the Agrippan Trilemma challenge.

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A Refutation, Reviewed

The first review of THE REFUTATION OF KANT has been posted.

A refutation of Kant has to do one of two things: produce a counterexample the system cannot deal with, or locate the move inside the system that doesn’t actually argue for what it concludes. The second part of Day’s Veriphysics does both, and the interlocking of the two halves is what makes the book hard to answer because every defense of one wing concedes ground on the other.

The argument worth focusing on is the Master Amphiboly, and Vox is right about it. The “Thing-in-itself” runs two readings across a single word: that every cognizer is shaped by its apparatus, and that no feature of reality is in principle accessible to human cognition. The first is trivially true and Kant argues for it. The second is the load-bearing claim of the whole edifice and Kant never argues for it once, and instead moves to it under cover of the first. Once you see the slide, you can’t unsee it. Neptune is the cleanest empirical counterexample, though not the only one: Le Verrier worked an inverse problem through pure formalism and Galle confirmed the prediction within a degree, and the positron case is structurally identical: Dirac’s equation required it before anyone looked. If formal cognition cannot in principle identify features of reality not already given in experience, these events did not happen.

The mathematical half is harder to evade and simpler to state. Construction in Kant’s sense was tied to constructibility, which was already a problem with the irrationals in 1781 and decisively broken by Cantor a century later. The available retreat is to recast synthetic a priori as analytic, which costs the system the work it was built to do. The pincer is real and no version of Kant survives both jaws. One place worth pressing further is that the amphiboly used is portable. The slide from an apparatus-relative epistemic limit to an ontological claim about reality runs through Hume on causation, through Wittgenstein on private language, and through most of the strong-program science studies literature. Naming it generalizes the refutation.

Worth reading. Excellent work by Day

That is an intriguing observation about the potential portability of the Master Amphiboly. I shall have to examine the situation and see just how far the intellectual rot goes.

UPDATE: A second review has been posted.

I would like to thank Vox for writing this excellent book. Since Kant is the foundational philosophical thinker of the “Enlightenment”, its easy to see why many people cannot think straight these days. I enjoy reading St. Thomas Aquinas. Vox mentions that he may have called Kant a heretic and that sounds spot on.

Now if we could just convince the world to abandon Kant, things might improve. His notion of “…the thing-in-itself is unknowable by theoretical reason..” amazed me. Really??? Kant never did applied physics, medicine, or skilled trades, did he? That said, the world is heavily invested in Kant, just like Darwin, and seems to like to double down, not change its thinking. Indeed I enjoyed Vox pointing out that the current defenders of both have moved WAY beyond the original works in their defenses thereof.

Hegel’s thought confuses me too, perhaps he’s in the queue as well for a refutation? I highly recommend this book to anyone who seeks an understanding of why we need a 21st Century philosophy that is actually workable.

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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.

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