Tag: philosophy

Binary thinkers

Even Daniel Dennett, whose grasp of basic logic can best be described as “questionable”, finds himself struggling with binary thinkers:

Dennett waited until the group talked itself into a muddle, then broke in. He speaks slowly, melodiously, in the confident tones of a man with answers. When he uses philosophical lingo, his voice goes deeper, as if he were distancing himself from it. “The big mistake we’re making,” he said, “is taking our congenial, shared understanding of what it’s like to be us, which we learn from novels and plays and talking to each other, and then applying it back down the animal kingdom. Wittgenstein”—he deepened his voice—“famously wrote, ‘If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand him.’ But no! If a lion could talk, we’d understand him just fine. He just wouldn’t help us understand anything about lions.”

“Because he wouldn’t be a lion,” another researcher said.

“Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” He concluded, “The notorious zombie problem is just a philosopher’s fantasy. It’s not anything that we have to take seriously.”

“Dan, I honestly get stuck on this,” a primate psychologist said. “If you say, well, rocks don’t have consciousness, I want to agree with you”—but he found it difficult to get an imaginative grip on the idea of a monkey with a “sort of” mind.

If philosophy were a sport, its ball would be human intuition. Philosophers compete to shift our intuitions from one end of the field to the other. Some intuitions, however, resist being shifted. Among these is our conviction that there are only two states of being: awake or asleep, conscious or unconscious, alive or dead, soulful or material. Dennett believes that there is a spectrum, and that we can train ourselves to find the idea of that spectrum intuitive.

“If you think there’s a fixed meaning of the word ‘consciousness,’ and we’re searching for that, then you’re already making a mistake,” Dennett said.

I think Dennett is essentially correct; his spectrum approach is not dissimilar to my own probability perspective. The fact that we don’t have enough information to correctly calculate those probabilities and identify them doesn’t mean that it is not a more useful heuristic than reducing everything to Abelardian binary.

The exchange with the primate psychologist reminds me a little of my mostly failed attempt to explain the IQ delta between very high intelligence and ultra high intelligence to people who are essentially limited to the smart-normal-dumb spectrum. The talking lion can’t speak meaningfully about the experience of dumb lions. The UHIQ can’t speak any more meaningfully about the experience of midwits than the midwit can describe what it is like to have an IQ of 50.

It shouldn’t be hard to grasp the concept that different minds process information differently, and yet, the guy who firmly believes he’s wicked smart because he had a 105 IQ in a classroom full of sub-95 IQs quite often assumes the guy with a 140 IQ must be stupid because he can’t understand him.

To quote my old sensei, mind the gap.

Also, I’m with Chalmers. I suspect if Dennett spent more time with technology in general, and AI in particular, he’d better grasp the fundamental weakness of his position.

On vulgarity

I am getting more than a little tired of the unending stream of vulgarity pouring out of a) some of the newer commenters and b) the usual suspects. First, my occasional use of the same does not constitute permission for you. Second, it is particularly unacceptable when directed at fellow commenters. Third, it makes me want to stop paying attention to the blog, so I can only imagine how it affects the casual readers. There is a reason I and many of the long-time commenters have increasingly disengaged from the comments; I have no interest in attempting to communicate with people who emote rather than think before they speak.

Seriously, get a grip. “TRUMP HAS CUCKED AND BETRAYED US ALL, THE END IS NIGH AND REICHSFUHRER KRISTOL REIGSN UBER ALLES!” doesn’t make you look clever, or smart, or even sane. There is not only no need for you to announce your opinion of every zig and zag of foreign policy, but the unpredictability of the God-Emperor all but guarantees that you’re going to look like a complete buffooon within days, if not hours, regardless of what you say.

On a tangential note, I note that, as I anticipated, virtually no one has acknowledged that I correctly observed, from the very start, the way in which the Syrian cruise missile attack was primarily about China and North Korea. So, next time, don’t ask me to make my predictions on this sort of thing public if I have chosen to withhold them for one reason or another. There is literally no reason for me to do so. When I get it wrong like everyone else, I hear about it for years. And when I am very nearly the only one to get it more or less right, everyone either ignores it or simply pretends it was obvious in retrospect.  Now, I’m not annoyed, I expected this, and I’m simply taking the opportunity to remind those of you who asked me to share my interpretation on the day of the missile attacks that I will not pay any heed to such requests in the future.

Anyhow, the moderators and I are going to start deleting comments containing vulgarity on sight and spamming those who refuse to moderate their language. Nor am I interested in any discussion of what words are acceptable and what are not. If you’re going to play the childish game of “let’s see how close to the line I can dance”, I’m just going to delete your comment for being tedious and immature. If your comment is nothing but an insult directed at me or someone else, it’s instant spam. And remember, these are Google comments and any spamming will affect your account across all Google products.

I don’t blog for the comments. I don’t get a rush out of seeing lots of comments. I’d much rather have five intelligent comments than 400 comments when most of them consist of idiots escalating rhetorical hostilities and talking past each other. While it’s fine to criticize, disagree, and utilize rhetoric, you’re going to have to learn how to do so without resorting to the insults and vulgarities that many of you have been using in the recent past.

There is no point in asking for clarification or trying to argue for the benefits of free speech here. The comments exist as a courtesy I extended in response to requests from my readers. If they annoy me sufficiently, I will simply turn them off and continue to blog as before. So, if you happen to want to have this particular microphone available to you, please treat it with more care and respect.

And for God’s sake, stop touching the poop! It’s not that hard. You’re not the poop police. And you’re not helping. Unless you have deletion powers, you are not part of the cleanup process, you’re part of the problem.

UPDATE: From a longtime reader:

I appreciate the vulgarity crackdown.  I had indeed been spending less
time on your site, and, especially, less time reading the comments,
because of the language used.

I had sensed as much. I probably should have done it right after the election, but better late than never.

Mailvox: but what about [fill-in-the-blank]s

Huggums asks about the likely fate of US Africans in the coming period of ethnic strife:

VD, in your ideal world, what would become of American black people in the coming years? I think you already told me what you think will happen: black people will be forcibly moved or killed at some point in the future based on the “diversity + proximity = war” principle. I’m asking because I want to continue offering my support to your cause because I believe it is actually based in truth, but I no longer see how I can. Where could a black person possibly fit in to this?

My cause is a) the truth, b) Christianity, and c) Western civilization. If anyone can’t support those things, well, I can’t honestly say that have any more concern for their opinion or support than I do for anyone else who is devoted to a) falsehood, b) Satan, or c) barbarism. I don’t have an “ideal world”. I have never constructed my version of utopia. I don’t even believe in the concept of an “ideal world”, and as my novels tend to demonstrate I do not spend any time whatsoever dreaming up a flawless version of the real world. I have certainly never once given any thought to where American black people might fit in such a Panglossian conception.

In fairness, I have likewise never given any thought to the ideal fate of Venezuelans, Esquimaux, kangaroos, dandelions, or praying mantises either. I simply don’t think about such things. I never have. They are not of interest to me.

Huggums is, in my opinion, making two very common mistakes. First is to view everything from the “what about me?” perspective. This is a literal category error; one cannot meaningfully consider macrosocietal trends and issues from an individual perspective. It is ridiculous to say “X would be wrong because it would have negative consequences for me” and it is even worse to say “X is impossible because I wouldn’t want that to happen.”

History doesn’t care about you or your kind. The great waves of social mood don’t care about you or your nation. Even the great men of history, the Gaius Juliuses and the Wellingtons, were caught up and tossed about by the uncaring tides of events. The arrogance of the globalists who think they control the direction of history is entirely misplaced; they are no less utopian dreamers than the communists with their inevitable worker’s paradise or the Christian rapturists who recalculate the date of Christ’s return every other decade.

His second mistake is to confuse what I expect to happen on the basis of past historical patterns with what I want. I cannot stress this enough: what I want is totally irrelevant. What all of us want is irrelevant. What is going to happen is going to happen according to the usual patterns of history.  Yes, blacks will be forcibly moved and killed. As will whites, Koreans, Chinese, Mexicans, mixed-race people, and pretty much everyone else. How does anyone imagine homogeneous nations are created in the first place? They don’t spring ex nihilo out of the rocks.


That being said, my preference is for all association to be voluntary, since it is one of the basic Rights of Englishmen secured for the Posterity of the Founders by the U.S. Constitution. If white people don’t want to live around black people, they should not be forced to do so. Each community should have the right to decide who is, and who is not, permitted to reside in it.

Some communities would prefer to be entirely homogenous. Others would value diversity. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with either preference. I suggest that Huggums try considering the question from the other perspective: how can blacks NOT support the Alt-Right cause when Mexicans are displacing them from historically black communities in the United States and the Chinese are beginning to move into Africa in increasing numbers?

It’s one thing to worry that white people might not want you around. It’s another to realize that your people are liable to be entirely deprived of anywhere they can call home. But if white people don’t have a basic right to their own inviolate homelands, neither does anyone else. In this age of genetic testing, I cannot be certain that I would be welcome in a white community, but that does not lead me to conclude that, therefore, the people of that community should be deprived of their right of free association.

Because neither I, nor Huggums, nor anyone else, possess the intrinsic right to impose ourselves, wanted or not, on literally the entire human race as we happen to see fit at the moment.

The Alt-Lite’s fatal flaw

The Z-man explains the fundamental weakness of the Alt-Lite: their firewall is to the Right:

The defect with the Alt-Lite is the same problem the Buckley Conservatives had a generation ago. They have no antibodies to resist entryism, because they lack a timeless definition of what it means to be Alt-Lite. Western Civilization, after all, includes Karl Marx and Hitler. Nazism is just as much a part of the West as John Locke. In fact, Hitler currently casts a longer shadow than any of the men of the Enlightenment. On what grounds can the Alt-Lite reject Hitler, but embrace the slave owning Jefferson?

The same is true of anti-racism and egalitarianism. How can these be rejected when they are inventions of the West? Of course, the Alt-Lite makes no attempt to reject these as that would get them in trouble with the Left. That’s what opens the door to, and requires them to accept, the defining feature of the dominant orthodoxy. That feature is the blank slate. As McInness goes to pains to point out, if a hotep brotha is on the Trump Train, he has a place at the table of the Alt-Lite, a cherished place.

That’s the fatal flaw that was the undoing of the Buckley Right. The Alt-Lite has no affirmative argument. Instead, it is a list of things it is not and most of those things are to their Right. That firewall they are building to their Right, just as Buckley did with Kirk and with the paleocons, comes at the expense of any defensible line of demarcation between themselves and the Left. That leaves them open to entryism, corruption and subversion, which is why the leading opponents of Trump are all Buckley Conservatives.

That brings us back to the beginning. O’Sullivan was mostly correct, but he left out the most important part of the rule. That’s the definition of Right Wing. What is it that forever separates the Right from the Left? What is the thing about which there can be no meeting in the middle, between Left and Right? The great divide that can never be crossed, is biology.The Left embraces the blank slate and rejects biological reality. The Right accepts biology, human diversity and all the truths about the human animal that arise from it.

And biology is precisely where the Alt-Lite flirts with the delusional approach to reality of the Left, because it finds reality too painful and too dismissive of their egalitarianism as well as their various utopian notions.

Spacebunny helpfully sums up the intrinsic incoherency of the Left:

  1. Celebrate Diversity!
  2. We are all the same!
  3. Cultural appropriation is wrong!
It doesn’t bode well for the Alt-Lite that they attempt to cling to so many of the same equalitarian myths that have rendered the Left an incoherent intellectual joke. I’ve yet to see the civic nationalist who can even begin to defend himself against the growing quantity of conclusive nationalist arguments, and yet, many of them cling to their civic nationalism all the same. For now.

That being said, I wholly support the Alt-Lite. Because it is from them that the Alt-Right will grow, as experience and observation gradually clarifies their thinking.

Camping with refugees

Fun for the whole family. Thanks, Mutti Merkel!

A refugee from Ghana has been arrested for dragging a young woman from her tent and raping her while she was on a camping holiday with her boyfriend. The young couple were on a camping trip in the Siegaue Nature Reserve, north of the former German capital of Bonn, when they were approached by a machete-wielding man at about 12.30am on Sunday last week. The boyfriend was forced to watch as the attacker violated his 23-year-old lover.

Was this act evil? Or was it morally neutral, as Peter Singer would argue given the balance of interests involved? And if it is evil, then what level of force is permissible to stop it? Which then leads to the question, at precisely what point can that force be utilized?

Is anyone actually surprised

The individual behind a series of “anti-Semitic bomb threats” turns out to be an Israeli-American Jew:

Israeli police have arrested a 19-year-old Jewish Israeli American from Ashkelon for his suspected role behind a slew of bomb threats made against Jewish community centers across the globe.

The arrest comes after bomb threats were made against dozens of community centers in Australia, the U.S., Europe and New Zealand over the last six months. Israeli investigators found that many of the threats led back to Israel, though the suspect is not believed to be responsible for all of the threats, according to The Jerusalem Post.

Israeli officials withheld the suspect’s name and offered few details on their background. Here’s what we do know: The person is a dual Israeli-American citizen, he is not a member of the Israeli Defense Forces, he is not ultra-Orthodox and at some point he made aliya (immigration to Israel by Jews in the diaspora) to Israel.

This Marxian dialectical summary was amusing, particularly in light of the philosemitic rhetoric one sees from Christian Zionist Americans from time to time.

thesis: The Jews did it!
antithesis: The Jooos did it!
synthesis: Seriously, though, the Jews did it.

Of course, it’s not just Jews. It’s all minorities. Any time there is a “hate crime” against any minority, particularly the sort of crime in which the perpetrator is able to remain hidden, one can be relatively confident that the perpetrator is a member of that minority group and that the crime is a hoax. I assumed these threats were being made by an American Jew; the SPLC has constructed a $300 million business on hoax crimes and Muslims tend to be more inclined to simply bomb things than idly threaten to do so.

It’s the same reason that you can be certain that a noose or a spray-painted KKK on a college campus will spark outrage up until the inevitable moment it is discovered that a black student is responsible.

The reason minorities do this, and not majorities, is that minorities are ultimately dependent upon maintaining the good will of the majority populations, and one way to achieve that is through instilling guilt in the majority population through obtaining and maintaining victim status. That’s why it is significant that the perpetrator here was an Israeli-American; American Jews consider themselves to be a minority, whereas Israeli Jews do not. Homeland matters.

The importance of morale

And why I don’t tolerate defeatism or defeatists. Last night’s Darkstream was well-received. As I mention, morale is the primary difference in the fighting effectiveness between the Waffen SS and the Regio Esercito, between the US Marines and the French Army circa 1940.

Those who reliably work to lower the morale of our side rather than the morale of the enemy should not be tolerated, even if their pessimism and despair happen to be honest. Everyone is prone to moments of doubt, and sometimes doubt is merited, but it is both foolish and counterproductive to tolerate those who pride themselves in wallowing in the expectation of failure and defeat.

Group-thinking is not smarter

Researchers debunk the idea that diversity makes groups more intelligent or more effective:

What allows groups to behave intelligently? One suggestion is that groups exhibit a collective intelligence accounted for by number of women in the group, turn-taking and emotional empathizing, with group-IQ being only weakly-linked to individual IQ (Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010). Here we report tests of this model across three studies with 312 people. Contrary to prediction, individual IQ accounted for around 80% of group-IQ differences. Hypotheses that group-IQ increases with number of women in the group and with turn-taking were not supported. Reading the mind in the eyes (RME) performance was associated with individual IQ, and, in one study, with group-IQ factor scores. However, a well-fitting structural model combining data from studies 2 and 3 indicated that RME exerted no influence on the group-IQ latent factor (instead having a modest impact on a single group test). The experiments instead showed that higher individual IQ enhances group performance such that individual IQ determined 100% of latent group-IQ. Implications for future work on group-based achievement are examined.

This falls into the category of science confirming common sense. Women and gamma males, both of whom tend to be obsessed with rules and process, almost invariably get in the way of the smart individuals who drive accomplishment. Sounding boards are useful, but they are vastly overrated, particularly by the kind of people who are incapable of fulfilling a proactive role themselves.

Anyone can critique an idea or offer a nonsensical spin on it. In most cases, it is not “helping” to do so, but distracting, if not demoralizing. That is one reason why I crack down hard on those whose immediate reaction to any announcement is to try to come up with an alternative or an improvement.

My rule of thumb is this: if someone doesn’t explicitly ask me what I think about something, I try to avoid telling them what I think about it. “Congratulations” or “I hope it goes well” is by far the most useful thing you can tell anyone who tells you about a new idea or a new product.

A libertarian take on the Alt-Right

The Anarchist Notebook reviews the 16 Points of the Alt-Right:

Aside from free trade and perhaps some elements of nationalism, much of what comprises the Alt. Right ideology is outside of libertarianism; it neither contradicts it nor agrees with it. The goals of the Alt. Right are not mutually exclusive of those in libertarianism.

Whatever the case, I see many similar values between the two movements. The areas of disagreement, in my opinion, are secondary and not fundamental components. There is room for friendly dispute.

It is my sincere hope that both sides can engage in thoughtful conversations and work together when mutually beneficial against common enemies. Whether anyone cares to admit it or not, it has become self-evident that the Alt. Right, whatever its flaws, is trying to preserve the only kind of civilization in which libertarianism can exist at all.

While I tend to consider the Alt-Right political philosophy to be more post-libertarian than alibertarian, I do agree that libertarianism would require an Alt-Right-compatible foundation to even begin to be a practical possibility.

I found it interesting to observe that while he didn’t find my anti-free trade arguments in the Tom Woods-hosted debate with Bob Murphy to be convincing, he did pick up that Murphy – and other libertarians and free traders – have come up with no answers whatsoever to the problems I, and others, particularly Ian Fletcher, have raised.

I was frankly a little mystified to see that a number of people actually concluded that Bob Murphy won that debate, when all he produced was the same free trade boilerplate that we’ve all known for decades. He didn’t even begin to address the substantive differences between theory and practice cited. But I suppose it is difficult for people to relinquish their grasp on defining elements of their intellectual identity, which is why it’s necessary for libertarians to cautiously examine the Alt-Right philosophy before they can seriously consider accepting it.

The core conflict between libertarianism and the Alt-Right is that the Alt-Right is perfectly willing to crush individual liberties if that is necessary to preserve Western civilization and the European nations. And that is something that libertarians are going to have to accept if they are going to remain intellectually relevant in any way, because for all that the nation-state is a necessary evil, it is to be vastly preferred to the multinational state or the global state.

And those are the three options on offer at present.

I expect most libertarians to eventually gravitate to the Alt-Right, simply because the latter is both viable and coherent, while the former is not. I hope you will note that I don’t say that with contempt, but rather, with regret.

The path of truth

An observation on Gab

voxday is fiercely loyal to people. But there is something else. He has an almost uncanny ability to sense who is seeking the path of righteousness, even if it is not superficially apparent from their behavior. Roosh has taken a far more spiritual path of late. Milo clearly wants to change.
Samuel Nock

There is really nothing uncanny about it. Most people tend to look at others where they were, and judge them by things they have done in the past, even in the distant past. That is why the Left constantly digs through long-forgotten personal histories in seeking to discredit people; to them, you will forever be whatever the worst interpretation of the worst thing you have ever done or said is. That this is patently absurd, of course, is irrelevant to them. They care nothing for the truth, they only seek to destroy. They are little satans, accusers in service to the Great Accuser.

But they are not alone. Petty people always insist on trying to force people into the box of their past. They cannot conceive of change, of personal growth, or personal improvement, and they hate it when others make them feel as if their understanding of the world is incorrect. They will never stop trying to remind even the most successful, most transformed individual of his less impressive past.

Fewer people look at others where they are. And fewer still look at the trend line formed by what a man was to who he is now, thereby providing a glimpse of what he may one day become. The man I am today is very different than the arrogant young man with a record contract whose primary interests were girls, music, and video games. The writer I am today is very different than the author of Rebel Moon and the generic, obvious-twist-at-the-end short story that was rejected by Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

The individuals I appreciate most are those who seek after the truth, even when they find it uncomfortable or personally distasteful. I am far more comfortable with the seekers than with those who are convinced that they have arrived at the final one true understanding of God, Man, the universe, and everything, whether it is the Catholic Church, the Bible, or Science that provides them with the basis for their baseless confidence.

I prefer those who know they see as though through a glass, darkly, probably because they are the only people who are not hopelessly self-deluded who also possess the courage to reject the despair of the nihilist.

Not everyone who walks the hard and narrow path of truth is, or will become, a Christian, but it is a path that eventually leads to Jesus Christ all the same.