Tag: philosophy

Universal order is restored

John C. Wright celebrates the recataloging of the Solar System and the astronomical return to reason:

Take THAT, you vile Pluto-Haters!

I, for one, rejoice that Planet X is once again a planet! I welcome our new Mi-Go overlords, I applaud the hideous and unspeakable Fungi from Yoggoth, cheer the colony of semifourthdimensional yet cowardly organisms from Palain VII while they are busily dextropobopping, acclaim the forward military base of the hivequeen creatures we call ‘Wormfaces,’ and greet the resting place of Kzanol the Slaver, who will arise an obliterate the Earth!

(Hmm … wait a minute…. I wonder if there is a downside to this ….)

Pluto is once again a planet, eight years after being relegated to the status of dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). At least, that is, according to the audience at a debate at Harvard. Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysicists (HSCFA) debated the topic “What is a planet?” The debate was needed following the confusion that arose once Pluto was deemed too small to be a planet. The defining characteristics of a planet (a round thing which orbits the Sun and has ‘cleared the neighborhood’ around its orbit) “baffled the public and classrooms around the country,” according to the HSCFA. “For one thing, it only applied to planets in our solar system. What about all those exoplanets orbiting other stars? Are they planets? And Pluto was booted from the planet club and called a dwarf planet. Is a dwarf planet a small planet? Not according to the IAU. Even though a dwarf fruit tree is still a small fruit tree, and a dwarf hamster is still a small hamster.”

I have to admit, I do very much enjoy my household. When I announced that Pluto’s planethood had been restored to the lunch table, the news was greeted with a rousing cheer.

“Hurray!”

“Wait, why are we cheering?”

“Because Pluto is a planet again!”

“Oh, okay. Hurray!”

One can learn a lot about an individual by virtue his position on Plutonian planethood. Anyone who opposes it on the grounds of the usual specious logic cited or pedantic, overly literal planetary definitions is probably an atheist, has a high Asperger’s Quotient, possesses a lamentably insufficient respect for tradition, and should therefore be regarded with all due suspicion.

As humanity did not deem Tom Thumb any less a man for being small, it cannot in good faith deem Pluto any less a planet for being miniscule or icy or devoid of atmosphere. I applaud, therefore, the result of the Harvard debate and accordingly insist that the International Astronomical Union alter its formal position on the matter.

The number of planets in the solar system is nine. It is not ten, or eleven, or eight, except in that one then proceedeth to nine.

Kids know they’re smart

The smart guy from Khan Academy appears to be taking some unnecessary precautions:

The Learning Myth: Why I’m Cautious About Telling My Son He’s Smart

My 5-year-­old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell­-tale signs of a “growth­ mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.

Considering that his son started reading two years later than me, most of my high-IQ friends, and most of our children, I suspect Salman Khan can relax a bit. Anyhow, I always find this issue of “telling kids they’re smart or not” to be amusing. It’s exactly like debating whether to tell a kid he’s tall or not.

I mean, do you seriously think the kid is not going to notice? Especially if he is, in fact, actually smart? My parents never told me I was smart. It was just kind of hard not to notice when I was sitting there in kindergarten reading the Encyclopedia Britannica while the other kids were eating paste, licking the doorknobs, and urinating on themselves.

If Khan wants to make sure his son struggles, that’s easy enough. Throw some long division at him. Make him read in another language. Give him Cicero and Plato to read. In fairness, I don’t tell my son he’s smart, I just tell him to keep a straight face when his teammates lament the long division problems they’re struggling with, to help them out if they ask for it, and avoid ever letting them see the collection of alien hieroglyphics that pass for his math problems. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of his face when I introduced him to the “silent gh”.  He loved the “silent e”, but I’m 100 percent certain he thought I was screwing with him until I showed him a list of numbers that included a spelled-out “eight”.

The important thing is to teach the highly intelligent not to coast on their capabilities, not to mistake potential for achievement, and to show them how to respect the less-intelligent. Intellectual arrogance in a child is as natural and as innocent as athletic arrogance. It must be kept in check, but one can’t do that by pretending there is no reason for it to exist in the first place.

We don’t pretend that children don’t come in different shapes and sizes, and we shouldn’t pretend that they don’t come with different cognitive capabilities as well. I also find it rather amusing that a guy with a five year-old thinks he has discovered secret of raising smart kids. Come back in thirteen years, sport, and we’ll see what you think you know.

Coaching life systems

Over the years, I’ve had thousands of requests for advice. Some of it I’ve given publicly, some of it has remained private. Some people have taken it, more often they haven’t. Sometimes it has worked out, most of the time I have no idea what they did with it.

Now, I’m certainly not saying my life is perfect. Far from it. I’ve made sub-optimal decisions, I’ve made mind-boggling mistakes, and if I had known at 19 what I know now, I might well own part of two billion-dollar corporations. But, as a general rule, I am able to accomplish what I set my mind to doing so long as I don’t get too bored.

What most of you don’t know is that I’ve been lecturing this year at a technical institute, nominally teaching game development. But what I learned over the course of the spring semester was that while the information I was providing them was useful and valuable, the lessons they found most important had nothing directly to do with games or game development.

General concepts that I’ve learned and put into practice, such as failing faster, seeking external sources of motivation, incorporating objective metrics, demanding high performance, and leveraging personal connections to mutual benefit actually turned out to be much more valuable to them than the industry-specific ones. So much so, in fact, that several of the best students in the class asked permission to be able to attend it again in the fall.

(I said yes and even gave the institute instructions to let them do so for a nominal fee instead of the usual cost, although this didn’t quite make sense to me in rational terms; I’d already taught them what I intend to teach in the fall. But now, thanks to the Murakami novel I’ve been reading, I think I understand what they’re seeking by repeating the course.)

What hit the lightswitch was a passage in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Tazaki-san is speaking with his old friend Aka, from whom he has been estranged for more than twenty years. Aka runs a very successful creative business seminar company called BEYOND, which is one part corporate self-improvement, one part psychology, and one part bullshit. In explaining his success, Aka says:

One other thing I learned from working in a company was that the majority of people in the world have no problem following orders. They’re actually happy to be told what to do. They might complain, but that’s not how they really feel. They just grumble out of habit. If you told them to think for themselves, and make their own decisions and take responsibility for them, they’d be clueless. So I decided I could turn that into a business. It’s simple….

There are quite a few people who reject the program. You can divide them into two groups. The first is antisocial. In English you’d call them ‘outcasts.’ They just can’t accept any form of constructive criticism, no matter what it is. They reject any kind of group discipline. It’s a waste of time to deal with people like that, so we ask them to withdraw. The other group is comprised of people who actually think on their own. Those it’s best to leave alone. Don’t fool with them. Every system needs elite people like them. If things go well, they’ll eventually be in leadership positions. In the middle, between those two groups, are those who take orders from above and just do what they’re told. That’s the vast majority of people. By my rough estimate, 85 percent of the total. I developed this business to target the 85 percent.

In combination with a new writing program I’ve been using, that gave me an idea. Now, I’ve been trying to figure out how to start a business that is actually necessary for ten years. The fields in which I’ve been involved for years are pretty far down the priority list; no one really needs techno music, faster graphics, video games, or science fiction novels. They’ve mostly been offshoots of my personal interests. On the other hand, I have neither the skill nor the inclination to get involved in providing food, water, sex, or waste disposal, and as for shelter, well, I’m not exactly optimistic about the credit-stretched housing market.

Aka’s fictional company teaches corporate drones how to let the corporation think for them. That sort of thing is of no interest to me; I want to encourage people to think for themselves, not rely upon me, or anyone else, to do so, insofar as they are capable of it. But then it occurred to me that the two primary things I provided to the kids I have successfully coached are clarity and discipline. I didn’t teach them how to dribble, I taught them when to dribble and when to pass. I didn’t teach them how to shoot, I taught them when to look for the shot and when to look for the pass. I didn’t teach them how to tackle the guy with the ball, I taught them when to attack the ball and when to cut off the passing lanes.

On the soccer field, there are always a plethora of available options and decisions concerning which one to take need to be made so quickly that they are best made without thinking at all. In helping Ender make the transition from keeper to defender, I had to start with the very basics, and gradually bring him along a series of decision trees until he reached the point that he had internalized them and was reacting faster than I could call out directions from the sidelines.

About six months ago, I looked at what Athol Kay has been doing with his relationship counseling and concluded that I had no desire whatsoever to get involved with that can of worms. I have no interest in providing investment advice. And while it would be easy to start some sort of European men’s conference akin to Paul Elam’s recent one in Detroit, that doesn’t interest me either. I’m a game designer. I like to create systems that are both efficient and functional, and none of those things fit the bill.

But to design a system that permits an individual to life his life more effectively and efficiently, that is a fascinating challenge, indeed, in some respects, it is one I have been addressing in some fashion my entire life. I’m not saying that I’ve figured it out, but on the sheer basis of my literary output and my moderate success in various unrelated fields, I would estimate that I’m operating at about 50 percent more efficiency than the average. Now, one could put that down to my having about 50 percent more intelligence than the norm, but I know too many people who are smarter than I am who do less with more, and too many who do more with less, to accept that explanation.

So, I’m thinking about running a development experiment for what might be described as a technology-based life-design system, or semi-mechanical life-coaching. The aim would be for the system to be successful in objective terms for most people, low-cost or effectively no net cost to the user through the performance efficiencies gained, and zero bullshit. I’m not a guru or a spiritualist or a yogi, I’m a technologist and I believe in material metrics. None of that nebulous “he found his balance” or “she rediscovered her confidence” fraud. If it is effective across the board in material terms, there might be a business there. If it isn’t, then I’ll have failed quickly, without taking advantage of anyone, and I’ll move on to the next idea.

(This doesn’t have anything to do with dissatisfaction with either Castalia or Alpenwolf. Far from it. It is, rather an opportunity to test some of the ideas I’ve developed on myself as well as others. To a certain extent, it almost feels as if I somehow managed to kick my brain into a higher gear. Or perhaps I’m merely delusional with all the excitement surrounding the Hugo Awards.)

UPDATE: I have more than enough volunteers, thank you. I’ll be sending out some questionnaires within a week and will select the five test cases after that.

The non-problem of pain

Gene Wolfe explains why the so-called “problem of pain” is simply not a credible argument for the non-existence or non-beneficence of God: 

You once said that pain tends to prove God’s reality rather than the opposite; that pain was not a theological difficulty for you.

No, it isn’t. If you catch a dragonfly and bend the end of its body up, it will eat itself until it dies. When people have had their mouths numbed for dentistry, they must be warned not to chew their tongues. I think if we assume that pain is simply an evil we’re oversimplifying things. 

[Thinks a moment.] You’re saying that pain may be a necessary design feature that the Divine Engineer—

Yes, absolutely. 

—put into his animated machines.
 If you had living things without pain, they would have a very rough time surviving.

More than ten years ago, I pointed out a similar observation concerning the existence of evil, which, far from being any sort of theological problem, is in fact evidence of the factual basis of Christian theology. Wolfe is observing that pain has an important purpose in life, as it is there to provide negative feedback to self-destructive actions. This does not mean that pain is good per se, only that it provides a good purpose.

For those interested in discussing the literary aspects of Mr. Wolfe’s observations, some of the more interesting parts have been posted at Castalia House, as well as a link to the full interview.

A hell beyond

Karl Popper said: “Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.” Think about how badly the promises of multicultural utopia through diversity have gone, and then think about the level of hell that experimenting with the entire food chain in search of transspecies utopia could lead:

The well-being of large and long-lived free-living mammals could be secured even with today’s technologies. Expanding the circle of compassion further is more technically challenging. Until a couple of years ago, I’d have spoken in terms of centuries. For sociological rather than technical reasons, I still think this kind of timescale is more credible for safeguarding the well-being of humans, transhumans and the humblest of nonhuman animals alike.

Certainly, until the CRISPR revolution, talk of extending an abolitionist ethic beyond vertebrates sounded fanciful because compassionate interventions would pass from recognisable extensions of existing technologies to a speculative era of mature nanotechnology, self-replicating nanobots and marine drones patrolling the oceans. For me, the final piece of the abolitionist jigsaw only fell into place after reading Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (1986) — a tantalizing prospect, but not a scenario readily conceivable in our lifetime.
 


Then came CRISPR. Even sober-minded scientists describe the CRISPR revolution as “jaw-dropping”. Gene drives can spread genetic changes to the rest of the population.

Whether for large iconic vertebrates or obscure uncharismatic bugs, the question to ask now is less what’s feasible but rather, what’s ethical? What kinds of consciousness, and what kinds of sentient being do we want to exist in the world? 

Naturally, just because a pan-species welfare state is technically feasible, there is no guarantee that some sort Garden of Eden will ever come to pass. Most people still find the idea of phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering in humans a fanciful prospect — let alone its abolition in nonhuman animals. The well-being of all insects sounds like the reductio ad absurdum of the abolitionist project. But here I’m going to be quite dogmatic. A few centuries from now, if involuntary suffering still exists in the world, the explanation for its persistence won’t be that we’ve run out of computational resources to phase out its biological signature, but rather that rational agents — for reasons unknown — will have chosen to preserve it.
 


Man never learns. In his attempts to improve the world, he has made things worse more often than he has made it better. The remarkable thing is that it is mostly people who believe evolution by natural selection has produced this world who are seeking to bring it to a crashing halt. I shudder to think the ways in which this latest plan for utopia could go awry and bring about a hell on Earth beyond the imagination of the average SF writer.

It does raise some interesting thoughts concerning the philosophical arguments against the existence of God related to the so-called problem of suffering. (I’ve always regarded them as rather stupid, but they do exist and therefore require addressing.) Since Man apparently has the power to end the “involuntary suffering” involved in the food chain, but thus far has declined to do so, is this similar evidence that he either a) does not exist, or b) is not benevolent?

The Facets of False Rhetoric

Something I’ve noticed over nearly 15 years of being involved in polemics on various subjects is that a certain rhetorical pattern reliably emerges on the side that has the weaker case, especially when it has the benefit of mainstream endorsement. I’ve named the elements of this pattern the Facets of False Rhetoric.

  1. It tends to refrain from specifically mentioning the advocates, adherents, and works of the other side.
  2. When it does mention them, it is primarily in an effort to disqualify them in some way rather than substantively addressing them.
  3. It fails to directly address the relevant points raised, and instead tends to mischaracterize them.
  4. It regularly sets up straw men and attacks them in lieu of the actual arguments presented. It often resorts to bait-and-switches and hides behind ambiguity.
  5. It falsely claims the other side is ignorant or misguided on the basis of petty irrelevancies and ignores the fact that the other side is discussing substantive matters in sufficient detail to belie any such charges.
  6. The other side is declared to be “dangerous” for reasons that are seldom specified or substantiated.

I’ve seen this pattern at work in the American political discourse. I’ve seen it in the atheism discourse. I’ve seen it in the Theorum of Evolution by Natural Selection and Various Other Means discourse. I’ve seen it in the global warming discourse. I’ve seen it in the economic discourse. I’ve seen it in the EU discourse. I’ve even seen it in what passes for the science fiction and fantasy discourse.

And every single time, it has been the behavior exhibited by the side that I consider to have the observably inferior case. In fact, it has reached the point that when I witness such behavior on the part of an advocate, I now consider it a reliable indicator of being fundamentally wrong even when I don’t know the subject.

For reasons that will eventually become clear, I have been reading up on what is known among military theorists as 4th Generation War. This is a highly relevant topic these days, as both the undeclared wars in Ukraine and Gaza are direct examples of 4th Generation asymmetric wars between a state actor and a non-state actor. Even the media headlines appear to be ripped out of articles on 4th Gen theory, such as the New York Times piece today: “Israel Is Facing Difficult Choice in Gaza Conflict”.

So, it was with some initial puzzlement, followed by a growing sense of recognition, that I read Antulio Echevarria’s Fourth-Generation Warfare and Other Myths, published by the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College.  Consider the boxes checked.

1. There are eleven references in 17 pages to mysterious “proponents”. Not until we get to the footnotes at the end is there a mention of William S. Lind, the most well-known proponent of 4GW, or of Keith Nightengale, John F. Schmitt, Joseph W. Sutton, and Gary I. Wilson, his co-authors of the seminal 1989 article in the Marine Corps Gazette. Col Thomas Hammes merits a pair of mentions in a single paragraph, only to set up checkbox number two.

2. From the Foreword: “He argues that the proponents of 4GW undermine their own credibility by subscribing to this bankrupt theory.”

“However, the tool that [Hammes] employs undermines his credibility. In fact, the theory of 4GW only undermines the credibility of anyone who employs it….”

“The proponents of 4GW failed to perceive this particular flaw in their reasoning because they did not review their theory critically….”

“this new incarnation repeats many of the theory’s old errors, some of which we have not yet discussed.”

“it is rather curious that the history and analyses that 4GW theorists hang on current insurgencies should be so deeply flawed.”

3. The author goes on at length about the nonexistence of nontrinitarian warfare and what he calls “the myth of Westphalia”, neither of which have anything substantive to do with 4GW theory. Westphalia merely serves as a useful starting point from which the state began claiming a monopoly on warfare, it’s completely irrelevant otherwise. I was astonished to observe that the author never even mentions what the four generations of 4GW are, let alone attempts to explain why they are a myth.

4. The fact that the Germans never formally incorporated the blitzkrieg
concept into their military doctrine doesn’t change the observable fact
that the Germans did, in fact, adopt a maneuver-and-initiative based
model to replace the centralized steel-on-target, command-and-control
French model to which the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force still
subscribe.

5.  “The fact that 4GW theorists are not aware of this work, or at least do not acknowledge it, should give us pause indeed. They have not kept up with the scholarship on unconventional wars, nor with changes in the historical interpretations of conventional wars. Their logic is too narrowly focused and irredeemably flawed. In any case, the wheel they have been reinventing will never turn.”

6.  “the theory has several fundamental flaws that need to be exposed before they
can cause harm to U.S. operational and strategic thinking.”

“despite a number of profound and incurable flaws, the theory’s proponents continue to push it, an activity that only saps intellectual energy badly needed
elsewhere.”

I am not a military expert, but one doesn’t have to be one to recognize the way in which this critic is setting off a smokescreen rather than engaging in a substantive critique, let alone presenting a conclusive rebuttal.

(NB: for future reference, the first cretin to say “Link?” is going in the spam file. If you can’t figure out how to use bloody Google, then immediately stop reading this blog and never, ever attempt to comment here again. Google or don’t Google for confirmation as you see fit, believe that I am accurately quoting the subject matter or not as you like, but do not EVER ask me for a “Link?” It’s obnoxious and the answer is always “No”.)

That being said, William S. Lind wrote a response to Echevarria’s article, which I did not read until after writing this post above. Compare the checkboxes ticked in the article compared to Lind’s response. From literally the first paragraph, the differences are observable.

Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria, II is a Director at the
Strategic Studies Institute, the U.S. Army War College’s think tank,
and the author of an excellent book, After Clausewitz: German Military
Thinkers before the Great War. It was therefore both a surprise
and a disappointment to find that his recent paper, Fourth-Generation
War and Other Myths, is really, really ugly. Far from being a sober,
scholarly appraisal, it is a rant, a screed, a red herring seemingly
written to convince people not to think about 4GW at all. It is built
from a series of straw men, so many that in the end it amounts to a
straw giant.

I suspect it would be useful to further develop this pattern of critical observation, add additional checkboxes, and see how reliable it is across disciplines and subject matters. If anyone has any insights into this, I’d be interested in hearing them. I feel this may be Vox’s Third Law of Critical Dynamics taking shape, but I have not yet articulated it in a form I find both succinct and satisfying.

First Law: Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.
Second Law: If I can imagine it, it must be assumed
true. If you can’t conclusively prove it, it must be assumed false.
Third Law (first draft): The probability of a position’s falsehood increases with the number of applicable facets of false rhetoric.

Calcio is life

Every so often, David Brooks can be insightful. This sports analogy may help put things in perspective for people who often find themselves frustrated that life does not go the way they expect it to:

Most of us spend our days thinking we are playing baseball, but we are really playing soccer. We think we individually choose what career path to take, whom to socialize with, what views to hold. But, in fact, those decisions are shaped by the networks of people around us more than we dare recognize….

Once we acknowledge that, in life, we are playing soccer, not baseball, a few things become clear. First, awareness of the landscape of reality is the highest form of wisdom. It’s not raw computational power that matters most; it’s having a sensitive attunement to the widest environment, feeling where the flow of events is going. Genius is in practice perceiving more than the conscious reasoning.

Second, predictive models will be less useful. Baseball is wonderful for sabermetricians. In each at bat there is a limited range of possible outcomes. Activities like soccer are not as easily renderable statistically, because the relevant spatial structures are harder to quantify.

Everyone knows connections and networks and friends and family are more important to success than raw ability and hard work. And yet, that recognition offends most of us. It seems unfair somehow. But why? We see examples in every aspect of human endeavor. Even Michael Jordan didn’t become a champion by scoring 63 points a game, he achieved more when he scored 30 and relied on Scottie Pippen and his other teammates to help him win the game.

The coach of my Nike team once asked me how it was that I scored a goal in every game that season, regardless of whether the team we played against was good or bad, whereas my more talented strike partner would tend to score three goals against the bad teams and get regularly shut out by the good ones. I pointed out that the other striker’s goals were almost always brilliant individual efforts that involved beating two or three defenders on the dribble. Mine were almost always one- or two-touch shots that relied upon getting a well-placed pass from a midfielder, often my younger brother.

And while the other striker was a gifted player from Ireland who could dribble right past two or three lesser defenders, he wasn’t gifted enough to beat two or three good ones in succession. For me, on the other hand, it made little difference if the defenders were good or bad, because as long as the midfielder passed the ball into the open space past the last defender, I was going to run right past them. When the defense was tough, a little teamwork reliably trumped considerably superior individual talent.

The lesson of soccer is that individual effort will often suffice when things are relatively easy. But in order to surmount the more difficult challenges, you will almost always need reliable teammates of one sort or another.

On libertarianism

Increasingly of late, people have been attempting to claim I am not a libertarian on the basis of my failure to adhere to one or another common libertarian shibboleths. Consider my purported heresies:

  1. I oppose open borders.
  2. I oppose free trade.
  3. I oppose female suffrage.
  4. I oppose “equal rights”.
  5. I oppose desegregation.
  6. I oppose the incoherently named “gay marriage”.
  7. I have observed, and stated, that sexual anarchy is incompatible with traditional Western civilization.
  8. I have observed, and stated, that female education is both dyscivic and dysgenic.
  9. I support the right of free association.

These positions are obviously anti-libertine, but are they truly anti-libertarian? I don’t see that the case can be made if one considers the actual definition of libertarianism rather than various dogmatic policies that have somehow come to pass for the philosophy itself. From Wikipedia:

Libertarianism (Latin: liber, free) is a classification of political philosophies that uphold liberty as their principal objective. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and freedom of choice, emphasizing political freedom, voluntary association and the primacy of individual judgment. While libertarians share a skepticism of authority, they diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing political and economic systems. Various schools of libertarian thought offer a range of views regarding the legitimate functions of state and private power, often calling to restrict or even to wholly dissolve pervasive social institutions. Rather than embodying a singular, rigid systematic theory or ideology, libertarianism has been applied as an umbrella term to a wide range of sometimes discordant political ideas through modern history.

All of my supposedly anti-libertarian positions are based on the idea of maximizing liberty in a society based on Western civilization. So, far from being anti-libertarian, I would argue that my National Libertarianism is more in keeping with the true concept of libertarianism than all the various dogmas that are libertarian in theory, but in practice have material consequences that are observably anti-human liberty.

The end may not justify the means, but the end is the only correct means of judging any social policy. Intentions and hypotheses and flights of fancy are all equally irrelevant. In the end, one can only look at the policy and decide: does this advance or detract from human liberty in this particular polity.

In defense of rational materialism

John C. Wright kindly lends the aid of his formidable intellect to his overmatched opponents, in the hopes that they may be able to, finally, present a coherent argument in defense of their philosophy:

My patience, albeit legendary, has finally burst all bounds of reason. Fortunately, this time, patience bursts these bounds inward into the very interior of reason.

In a spirit then of noblest military courtesy to fallen foes, and, in this case, foe unable to mount steed and couch lance, allow me to instruct the Materialist how to frame his argument.

First and foremost, one should define one’s terms.

Materialism, or, to call it by a more precise but less well-recognized name, Panphysicalism, is the position that there no substance exists aside from matter. Anything that seems at first to be made of some other substance, such as spiritual or mental entities or qualities or qualia, can be ultimately resolved to a material substrate.

The word ‘exist’ has several shades of meaning. While, it is a true statement to say that ‘Hamlet exists in Shakespeare’s imagination’ or to say ‘Hamlet exists as a great play’ or even to say ‘Hamlet exists as a word of six letters’, none of those statements would be true if Earth had never brought forth human life. For the purpose of this discussion, we are only speaking of literal, unqualified, or objective existence, that is, existence that does not depend on human imagination or convention.

The word ‘matter’ here does not mean matter as opposed to energy. Here, we mean matter as opposed to spirit. We are not using the definition from the physical sciences of matter, but the philosophical definition.

If the term confuses the undereducated or overeducated dunderhead, we may use the term ‘physical substance.’

More precisely, matter means an entity or the properties of an entity which is extensional and sensible. Extensional means occupying specific points in the three dimensions of space and occupying specific moments of time. Sensible made of something that can be apprehended by the five physical senses either directly or indirectly. For the purpose of this conversation, we can take these two definitions as interchangeable. If there are extensional entities not theoretically sensible, or sensible entities lacking extension and duration, we do not call those ‘matter’.

The term ‘substance’ is a technical term of philosophy that refers to the persistent foundational or fundamental being of reality, that is, some being that cannot be resolved into a more foundational being, some being that is not a manifestation or a side effect of any deeper being.

Second, one should state one’s position precisely.

No Materialist of my acquaintance has ever bothered to do so. Stated precisely, then, the Panphysicalist position is that ‘Nothing save physical substance exists’ or, in other words, ‘All is Matter.’

Third, one should know what manner of statement one is making and defending.

The statement ‘All is Matter’ is an a priori statement, that is, a statement used to interpret sense impression experiences but being logically prior to any particular experience. Ergo it is not an a posteriori statement, that is, a statement deduced from sense impression experiences and logically anterior to them.

The idea held by most, if not all, the Materialists of my acquaintance that Panphysicalism is a deduction of the natural sciences, or a conclusion of physics, or can be proved by experience or disproved by experience, is a sad confession of their utter paucity of understanding their own position.

The results of physical experiments cannot be used to attack or defend metaphysical conjectures or deductions, any more than music theory can be used to attack or defend a theory of astronomy.

It should be too obvious to mention that empirical experiments are always conditional in their findings, that is, under such-and-such conditions, so-and-so is seen to be the result. The statement that ‘All is Matter’ is a universal, applying to everything in existence, microscopic and macroscopic, near and far, past and present and otherwise.

No possible experiment can examine each and every object in reality past and present and hold it before our eyes, and neither our eyes nor any other sense would tell us if the foundational or fundamental being creating the sense impression is physical matter as opposed to something else — the deceptions of Maya, for example, the illusions of the Matrix, or the delirium induced by a the deceptive demon invented by Descartes or the Demiurge by the Gnostics.

Therefore the statement ‘All is Matter’ cannot possibly be a conclusion of an experiment in physics. Therefore appeals to empirical evidence to confirm or deny Panphysicalism are vain.

Fourth and finally, one should actually make an argument, that is, a set of statements resting upon a shared starting assumption, logically related to each other as antecedent and consequent leading to the conclusion one is defending.

To defend the statement ‘All is Matter’ it must be shown that the idea of a non-material something is incoherent; it must be shown that an insubstantial substance is a contradiction in terms; it must be shown to be something that cannot exist.

Read the whole thing, as Mr. Wright proceeds to present, not one, but three, arguments, on behalf of panphysical philosophy. One could consider them strawmen, as they are arguments that the rational materialists have not actually presented and Mr. Wright has previously and preemptively rebutted all three of them, except for the fact that these straw-arguments are considerably more substantial than anything the rational materialists have shown themselves able to construct on their own.

Fans of Mr. Wright might also be interested in his interview concerning TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN on the SciPhi show.

The consequences of an atheist morality

John C. Wright has entirely too much fun deconstructing what passes for the logic of an altruism-based morality of the sort advocated by midwitted atheists who genuinely believe Richard Dawkins is a formidable philosopher:

Now, the most common and most persuasive argument an atheist or materialist can make in favor of universal morality is a genetic argument. The argument is that, as a matter of pure game theory, any races and breeds that develops a gene which imposes an instinct for altruism toward other members of one’s own bloodline, will, as a matter of course, have a definite statistical advantage in the lottery of Darwinian survival, and will come to outnumber those races and breeds that do not.

The argument is that the purely blind and selfish drive of the genes we carry in us therefore mesmerizes us with an instinct to altruism and self-sacrifice which is not in our immediate self-interest, but unintentionally serves the self-interest of the family, clan, tribe, breed, bloodline, and race.

The argument is that this mesmeric spell makes us hallucinate that there is such a thing as a moral code we are bound to obey, but whether this hallucination is true or false, it serves the blind and selfish reasons of the parasites called genes dwelling inside us, whom we much, willy-nilly, serve and obey.

Putting this argument to the test, I asked a hypothetical question about the following rule of behavior:  “Abducting Nubile Young Woman to Serve as Concubines, Dancing Girls, or Breeding Stock is bad.” Is this a rule that bind only those who share the non-abduction gene, or does it bind all men, including those with not one gene in common with us? I used the hypothetical example of an abductor who is a Man from Mars. He is not of our tribe, nation, or race. He is, at least during the Obama Administration NASA days, beyond the reach of any reasonable expectation of retaliation from Earthlings.

Is it objectively wrong for the Martian Warlord to abduct a luscious Earthgirl like Yvonne Craig to his horrible harem of terror atop Olympus Mons? Or is it only wrong because the Selfish Gene says it is wrong? Is it wrong objectively, or only genetically?

(Of course I mean to use this as an excuse to post more pictures!)

The genetic argument as a basis of morality makes me laugh until I puke green foam from my nose. It is obvious enough that if my instinct for altruism is proportional to how many selfish genes I have in common with another, that I will always prefer my self over my brother, my brother over my cousin, my cousin over my second cousin, my family over my clan, and my clan over my race, and my race over the Slavs and Jews and Untermenschen.

Racism, and I mean REAL Nazi-style kill-the-Jews racism, is not only excused by the genetic argument for altruism, it is demanded by it. Aiding anyone outside your clad and clan and bloodline is treason to the Selfish Gene, ergo, by this logic, immoral.

For that matter, women’s liberation causes a drop in fertility rates, so it also is treason against the Selfish Gene. for that matter, monogamy is treason, polygamy is demanded, and the consent of the concubines in the breeding harem is not required, because the gene does not care if you wanted to have happy children, only many children.

So, logically, if altruism is basic on the Selfish Gene, abducting dancing girls and nubile starlets to the breeding harem is not only licit, it is the highest and most saintly and most moral of all possible actions!

It may not be coincidental that this “morality” is most often advocated by the sort of male atheist whose only chance of any sexual exposure to dancing girls and nubile starlets would be through forcible abduction and rape.

It should be apparent that if we were to seriously adopt this sort of biology-based “morality” on a large scale, our world would more closely resemble John Norman’s Gor than anything else. The first imperative for any human society that values stability, let alone survival, is to eliminate unrestricted female volition in sexual matters. That is why religions and governments have always concerned themselves with a multitude of rules restricting it in some manner. Because without them, the civilized society will not survive.

As Camille Paglia pointed out repeatedly in Sexual Personae, the female represents the chaotic and unreasoning aspect of humanity, vital for the survival of the species, fertile when husbanded, and insanely destructive when left unrestrained.