#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
A long discussion of IQ and the implications of its characteristics that may be of interest to some readers here.
My contribution to the discussion is definitional: Intelligence is the ability to reach correct conclusions on the basis of the available information. The fewer the data points and the less time required, the higher the intelligence.
A bit of veriphysical doggerel for your enjoyment and contemplation.
THE INCESSANT INQUIRY
What was, what is, and what shall be?
These questions are, obviously,
The essence of philosophy.
Yet never do these questions, three,
Give answer to the heartfelt plea:
Whatever shall become of me?
Sam Harris, one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism, was always an incredibly sloppy thinker. But he used to be coherent in his wrongness; his erroneous syllogisms were logically correct, they were simply based on false foundations. Now, however, his faith in science has not only become illogical, but has rendered him ridiculous.
This was his response to an interview addressing the fact that his fellow “Intellectual Dark Web” member was correct to trust Ivermectin rather than the vaxx in response to Covid.
I mean, so, let’s say let’s say five years from now we learned that Ivermectin is actually perfect, right? Just for whatever reason the studies we had back in 2020 and 2021 were poorly run but we did this perfect study and you know Ivermectin is perfect and what’s more the vaccines, they’re way more dangerous than anyone thought, and you know you don’t want any of that mRNA stuff in you, right?
So, Brett Weinstein turns out he was right about everything, right? Will he be Vindicated?
Not really, because at the time his reasons for thinking what he was thinking at the time were insufficient, right? His conviction at the time was bizarre, I mean he literally called the vaccine ‘the crime of the century,’ right? And predicted that millions of people are going to die from it, right? If millions of people do die from it, it’s still true that at the time he said that, it was a deranged and deranging claim, right? And it just made absolutely no sense.
Setting aside the fact that we’re now seeing a retroactive attempt by the media to establish a fence-straddling intellectual nonentity like Not-Harvey Weinstein as the leading anti-vaxx critic because nearly every other ticket-taking public intellectual is vaxxed, this demonstrates that Sam Harris is both a) functionally retarded and b) has paid absolutely no attention to either the financial corruption of scientistry or the reproducibility crisis in scientody of the last decade. Even his biggest fans are now calling him out for his absurdities.
Cerno’s take is pretty funny, as is that of one of his follower’s.
Since I pay zero attention to ticket-takers and their well-compensated blatherings while being aware of their propensity for inversion, it occurred to me that it was entirely possible Not-Harvey Weinstein had been naive enough to get himself vaxxed prior to jumping in front of the anti-vaxx parade. See: Robert Malone, Steve Kirsch, et al. However, it appears that he may actually be a genuine Pureblood based on this article from May 2022.
Ivermectin, the Parasite Drug Touted by Portland Podcaster Bret Weinstein, Is Shown to Be Worthless for Treating COVID-19
A big, comprehensive study flies in the face of Weinstein’s claims.
“The evidence is surprisingly compelling, indicating Ivermectin dramatically improves outcomes in COVID patients, and is very effective preventing infection,” Weinstein tweeted on May 29, 2021.
Lately, though, science has caught up to them.
The latest, best studies show that ivermectin does little to prevent or treat COVID. A bombshell arrived this week, when the New England Journal of Medicine, the ne plus ultra of medical research, published a study showing that ivermectin did nothing to treat COVID infections or keep them from worsening to the point of hospitalization.
“Treatment with ivermectin did not result in a lower incidence of medical admission to a hospital,” the researchers wrote. “There were no significant effects of ivermectin use on secondary outcomes or adverse events.” The secondary outcomes included death.
In short, ivermectin did nothing to cure COVID-19. Unlike the previous studies that got people like Weinstein and Heying fired up about the drug, this one was double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, and large, with 3,515 patients.
Anthony Effinger, Williamette Week, March 30, 2022
There is an important veriphysical lesson here about metareasoning and science. This is where we see the vital importance of questioning one’s base axioms and assumptions when a syllogism produces an observably false conclusion. The primary assumption in this case is that scientody is reliable, and the secondary assumption is that scientistry is incorruptible. Therefore, the major premise is that the conclusions of a large, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled and peer-reviewed study are correctly indicative of reality.
But this is a false premise. We know for a fact that 60 percent – yes, the MAJORITY, which is to say MOST – of the gold-standard scientific studies published cannot be reproduced. An even higher percentage of non-landmark published studies fail the reproducibility test. This does not mean that most of the hypotheses concerned are necessarily falsified, but it does mean that no scientific study should ever be confused with reliable evidence, let alone conclusive proof. In fact, a strong statistical correlation is presently a better and more reliable indication of causation than so-called “scientific proof” of it.
Forget feelings. Facts don’t care about your ex post facto rationalizations.
One of the more important axioms of Veriphysics is the observation that truth is knowable, but it is not fully knowable, by Man. As a result, all decisions must be presumed to have been made on the basis of incomplete information, which renders the concept of fully-informed consent impossible. Therefore, any moral system based on consent is intrinsically flawed and consent cannot serve as a comprehensive justification for any action, agreement, contract, or exchange.
One of the men responsible for permitting the January 6 theater has died a very timely death of Suddenly.
The man in charge of protecting the Senate during the Capitol riot has died just a day before the Committee investigating the attack was set to reveal new evidence in a surprise session.
Michael Stenger, 71, was the Sergeant at Arms of the Senate on the day of the attempted insurrection. He resigned amid criticism he had failed to react effectively to the building being overrun. His sudden death on Monday came the same day an unexpected additional hearing of the committee investigating the riot was announced.
The surprise meeting will ‘present recently obtained evidence and receive witness testimony.’
In February 2021, Stenger told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that the role of ‘professional agitators’ needed to be investigated.
He said: ‘There is an opportunity to learn lessons from the events of January 6.
‘Investigations should be considered as to funding and travel of what appears to be professional agitators.
In other words, the globalists are still trying to prop up their false “insurrection” narrative and they’re not about to permit those who know everything about the FBI involvement in it to tell the truth about it. This is why taking the ticket is such a short-sighted and foolish thing to do. The ticket masters won’t even hesitate to sacrifice their servants in order to protect their lies and their projects.
What this sudden death helps further confirm for us, by the veriphysical principle of Informative Coincidence, is the probability that the January 6 Insurrection was staged for reasons that we do not yet know.
There is an additional benefit of the vaxx that should be noted here. Now literally any Covid-vaccinated individual can be terminated in a variety of ways and no one will dare to ask any questions about the actual cause of death.
In which I answer Cicero.
Someone pointed out on last night’s Darkstream that they’d like to see more veriphysics, and as I just happened to be casually reading a little from The Tusculan Disputations after finishing Stanley Payne’s excellent biography of Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco Bahamonde, I thought some of you might be interested in my instinctive reaction to the following paragraphy.
And yes, I am aware of how lah-di-dah that sounded, but it happens to be the truth. If it makes you feel any better, that was probably just a subconscious response to a recent binge of the underrated Nancy Varian Berberick and her forays into Dragonlance.
The first thing, then, is to inquire what death, which seems to be so well understood, really is; for some imagine death to be the departure of the soul from the body; others think that there is no such departure, but that soul and body perish together, and that, the soul is extinguished with the body. Of those who think that the soul does depart from the body, some believe in its immediate dissolution; others fancy that it continues to exist for a time; and others believe that it lasts for ever. There is great dispute even what the soul is, where it is, and whence it is derived: with some, the heart itself (cor) seems to be the soul, hence the expressions, excordes, vecordes, concordes; and that prudent Nasica, who was twice consul, was called Corculus, i.e. wise-heart; and Ælius Sextus is described as Egregie cordatus homo, catus Æliu’ Sextus—that great wise-hearted man, sage Ælius. Empedocles imagines the blood, which is suffused over the heart, to be the soul; to others, a certain part of the brain seems to be the throne of the soul; others neither allow the heart itself, nor any portion of the brain, to be the soul; but think either that the heart is the seat and abode of the soul; or else that the brain is so. Some would have the soul, or spirit, to be the anima, as our schools generally agree; and indeed the name signifies as much, for we use the expressions animam agere, to live; animam efflare, to expire; animosi, men of spirit; bene animati, men of right feeling; exanimi sententia, according to our real opinion—and the very word animus is derived from anima. Again, the soul seems to Zeno the Stoic to be fire.
The Tusculan Disputations, Marcus Tullius Cicero
It’s always both amusing and frustrating that the ancient philosophers so seldom managed to actually stay on their own stated topic for more than a sentence or two.
This is, in my opinion, what death observably and undeniably is:
A cessation of an intelligence’s interaction with a material plane of reality, as observed by intelligences still inhabiting that plane. This cessation of interaction occurs in company with various quantifiable changes in the physical body of the recently transformed intelligence and is subsequently followed by the decomposition of the body.
There is no need to delve into definitions of the soul, its purported existence, or its subsequent fate, in order to understand what death is. Indeed, before one delves into those complicated and potentially ineffable things, one would do well to first complete the original task one has set oneself.
The Tree of Woe contemplates the West’s need for new philosophical foundations in the aftermath of the complete failure of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism.
We need to do better than our great ancestors did.
To defend the good, the beautiful, and the true we must be able to know what is actually good, beautiful, and true — and then we must be able to persuasively demonstrate that to others.
For the good, beautiful, and true to be actual, they must in some way be real. Thus, to defend their actuality, we must be able to defend their reality; and that requires defending a theory of moral realism, a theory of aesthetic realism, and a correspondence theory of truth against those who would say they the good, beautiful, and true do not really exist.
But to defend these theories of realism, we must be able to defend the objective and knowable existence of the real itself against those who would say that reality as a whole is subjective or unknowable.
And to be able to defend the knowable existence of reality, we must be able to defend the evidence of our senses and the conclusions of our reason from skepticism.
To be able to defend the evidence of our senses, we must be able to defend direct realism, or something like it; to be able to defend the conclusions of our reason, we must be able to defend the laws of thought.
So we must do more than just identify the natural order, we must identify how we have identified it, and then defend both the method and the outcome.
The Enlightenment failed to do this. It failed to defend the evidence of the senses, it failed to defend the laws of thought, it failed to defend moral realism, it failed to defend aesthetic realism, and it failed to defend the correspondence theory of truth. It failed on every front and was routed from the field.
We must do better than the Enlightenment. We cannot return to classical liberalism. There is no retreat; the bridges are burned; the way is blocked. We must advance.
If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?
Psalm 11:3
I could not agree more, having thought similar thoughts in recent years. In fact, I’d even begun laying out some of my own contemplations in this regard a few months ago, so this seems like a reasonable time to share a few of them here. For the time being, I’m referring to this proto-philosophy as “veriphysics”.
The Principles of Veriphysics
The rhetorical version of which is as follows:
The primary forms of existence are: ontological, experiential, testimonial, experimental, spiritual
That which can be imagined.
That which can be experienced by the senses.
That which can be testified to by others.
That which can be repeatedly and consistently observed.
That which can be perceived indirectly through its effects on the material world.