Category Archives: General Philosophy

Birth and Death: Paradoxical Bookends of the Absolute Self (Part Three)

April 17, 2020General Philosophy, Identity, individualism vs collectivism, Man's Ability, Metaphysics, Physics and Metaphysics, reasonbirth, birth and consciousness, consciousness, consciousness and illusion, consciousness and objective reality, death, death and consciousness, illusion, Metaphysics, physicsArgo

“…how can one be born if one does not exist in the first place? How can you experience birth if birth is the fundamental beginning? There is no YOU to be born prior to your birth, and so the consequence is birth but there is no action which involves you at all. The action which is entirely mutually exclusive of you somehow concludes with you.”

I understand how abstruse and arcane this quote is, taken from part two of this series, so I decided to dedicated part three to clarifying the point made, and also insofar as this point necessarily relates to death. Also, in reading back this quote I was able to anticipate possible objections and concerns as a function of the overt complexity of the argument; those will likewise be addressed.

To begin with, let’s look at this analogy. The car you drive (if you have a car, that is…if not, well, you’ll still follow) did not always exist as the car, per se. Prior to being your car it was merely a collection of parts, and before that, piles of metal and glass and plastic and paint; and before that, raw minerals which were mined from the ground, or chemicals mixed and refined in some industrial laboratory. After a few years, the car is disposed of, and will then decompose and break down, back into its multiple parts. But these parts, prior to and after the existence of the car, per se, continue to exist. They do not return to oblivion in the same way that they do not spring from it. After all, we know that according to the law of conservation of mass that matter cannot be created and destroyed; and philosophically this is form of the logic of non-contradiction. Meaning that the reason matter cannot be fundamentally created or destroyed is because a thing which exists cannot spring from non-existence, and it cannot become non-existent. Its existence IS; it is axiomatic, it is a-priori; it is de facto.

Likewise, one might say that while a human being did not exist as such prior to birth, there did exist a collection of parts—hormones and fertilizer and eggs and sperm cells and enzymes and proteins, DNA…you get the idea—which eventually came together to form the human being—let’s say you, in the interest of casualness—that we recognize as a specific individual person. Following death, you shall desololve and decompose back into the many parts which formed you. All of these parts existed prior to you, and they all will exist after you. You are the parts, and the parts are you, and the parts remain in some for as a-priori existing; they are absolute; eternal.

Here is the problem with this explanation, and I’m sure you’ve probably already discerned it. The car, coming from a collection of parts, does not have a sense of Self. It possesses no singular consciousness…it does not recognized, or rather, it does not observe and interpret its environment, and all of reality itself, from a singular, specific, constant frame of reference. The car, in other words, does not know it’s a car. The collection of parts which make up the car do not suddenly, once in “true” car form, begin to associate as a single entity, able to conceptualize itself as a single object, and likewise its environment and all things in it. The parts of the car do not suddenly reject instinctually and naturally their distinct existence and begin to call themselves “I”, “Myself”, “Me”.

Do you see what I am getting at here? The difference between a car and a human being is that human beings DO possess a singular consciousness; a single observational and conceptulaizing frame of reference which demands and necessitates that the parts are not in fact fundamental, but merely form one’s body. Yet one’s SELF—that by which those parts paradoxically utter the words “I”, “Myself”, “Me”, and “Mine”—is the true nature and essence of human existence. To deny this is to relegate consciousness to some inexplicable epiphenomenon, or infinite mystery, or an illusion, or some random blip of mathematical uncertainty…and yet none of these claims can possibly be true because Truth itself necessitates that they be entirely false.

And it is this Self—this singularity—which I mean when I say that the human being is said to begin at birth and end at death. Of course the parts of “you” live on…and of course “you” were born of parts. I am not obtuse or blind to this obvious and pedestrian fact. But the real YOU, your SELF…your agency, awareness, will, consciousness…is NOT of parts, because there is no One from many parts; no I from Not I; no Self Awareness from infinite unconsciousness. And absolute consciousness does not “return” or dissolve into absolute unconsciousness; what IS does not become object oblivion. The law of the conservation of matter must also infer a law of conservation of consciousness (Self Awareness; which is the ability to conceptualize Self and Other) unless we are prepared to claim that consciousness is a lie or an illusion…a claim is very easily debunked and dismissed as the very mysticism and irrationality that those who peddle it claim to oppose.

And this is why I utterly reject the notions of birth and death. Not because they serve as anthropological and biological concepts to describe the cosmically and mathematically prescribed evolution of a human bing, but because they are a deception, and their fundamental meanings are completely spurious at best. Birth and death can only apply to he who is conscious, and yet they utterly contradict consciousness because they render it transitory, coming from oblivion and returning to oblivion, and thus render consciousness a moot and worthless concept. Which renders birth and death themselves moot and worthless. And yet if consciousness IS, and is ACTUAL, it must be absolute and constant, and thus likewise birth and death are rendered moot and worthless. In either and all cases, birth and death are fundamentally meaningless. They may serve as convenient contextual and subjective descriptions of a person’s existence, but they are not absolute, and are not objective, and have no actual bearing on the root nature of human existence. Birth and death are irrelevant with respect to parts. The parts, being absolute and perpetual, according to the law of conservation of matter, are not ultimately born, and do not die, and thus if man is like a car, made up of perpetually existing parts in some form or another, then he does not die and he is not born any more than a car is born or dies, except in the purely figurative sense.

But man is said to be born and then to die; and any way you try to rationalize this claim, it fails. And it fails for one simple reason. Man, unlike his car, knows himself.

END

Birth and Death: Paradoxical Bookends of the Absolute Self (Part Two)

April 16, 2020Determinism, General Philosophy, individualism vs collectivism, Metaphysics, Objective Relativity, Physics and Metaphysics, reason, scientific determinismbirth and consciousness, birth vs death, death and consciousness, is consciousness real, what is death?Argo

Death is an action without a consequence; birth is a consequence without an action. What I mean by this is that in both cases, birth and death, the relationship between cause and effect is irrationally severed. It is said that you are born, but if we define the birth of you as your “coming into being”, then the question is how can one be born if one does not exist in the first place? How can you experience birth if birth is the fundamental beginning? There is no YOU to be born prior to your birth, and so the consequence is birth but there is no action which involves you at all. The action which is entirely mutually exclusive of you somehow concludes with you. Frankly, this makes no sense at all. I don’t care how you twist it or what mathematical, evolutionary, determinist magic you try to invoke to square the infinite circle.

And death is like birth except that in this case, the action is of you but the conclusion is entirely absent you. You die, but since death represents the oblivion of you—the complete absence of you—then the consequence of dying has absolutely nothing to do with you at all. You could not have experienced your death, since to experience something you must exist—existence is a prerequisite to experience. This is axiomatic. Further, how do we make any claims about you once you have died? If we define death as the categorical absence of you, or the non-existence of you, then who exactly are we talking about when we speak the life one lived prior to death? If death represents the utter non-existence of one who once lived, then there is no longer any ONE upon which to hang the life which is said to have been lived. We cannot speak of so and so doing this, or so and so doing that if, so and so is entirely non–existent. But if we insist that so and so did actually do this or that even though so and so doesn’t exist, then we concede implicitly that existence itself is transitory. Existence is not fundamental, but is itself, merely a mist which fades. Existence then cannot be trusted to be objective, and thus any arguments to the objective and empirical nature of reality and truth collapse.

There are a few ways that reconciliation of these contradictions is attempted, and all of them fail the test of rational consistency. One is to deny the existence of YOU qua YOU entirely…to insist that the Conscious Self is purely illusory; a hiccup of the otherwise perfect and perfectly determined mathematical, perpetual cosmic evolution. This rank nonsense was debunked in part one of this article series.

Another explanation is that death is in fact an illusion; that you transition to an after life, as the Christians or Jews or Muslims claim. The problem here is that Christianity makes no such claim about birth, and as far as I know neither does Judaism or Islam. Yet we cannot claim that death is merely a transition but birth is absolute, for both are the exact same relationship between being and non-being. You see, if death is merely a transition into an alternate state of existence, then so must be birth. For going from nothing to something is no more rational than going from something to nothing. In other words, if man does not go from absolute being (life) to absolute non-being (death) then he likewise does not go from absolute non-being to absolute being. If there is a life after death then there must concordantly be a life before birth.

The reality is that only when we accept that the Conscious Self is a constant—that the position of the Observer is to be the reference for an otherwise infinitely relative reality—does one’s existence as a conscious being begin to make sense. It is a hard truth to swallow, for it runs contrary to all popular religion and philosophy, which accept either death, or both death and life, as infinite and absolute bookends to a purely transitory existence as One who is utterly aware of himself, his environment, and possesses the capacity to conceptualize both, as well as the relationship between them, and from that prescribe definitions, and from these meaning, and from meaning, truth, and from truth, morality. But One who is so absolute as this cannot also be rendered subjective and finite via birth and death as they are commonly understood.

END Part TWO

The Lie of the Smallest Particle: Greater implications for existence and consciousness (Part One)

March 9, 2020Determinism, General Philosophy, Objective Relativity, Physics and Metaphysics, reason, scientific determinism, Time and Spacehypocrisy of science, mathematics divine, no such thing as smallest particle, Reason and scientific determinism, science as religionArgo

The broader point I am trying to make with the last two articles on the lie of the “smallest particle”—a particle with no dimensions and no sub parts, which physics acknowledges as existing—is that at some point, no matter how hard we ignore it, or do not acknowledge it, or lack the wisdom or critical thinking skills to see it, empiricism runs out. At some point the ability of the observer (man) to sense reality (that is, using the sensory transmitters of taste, touch, vision, hearing, smelling) breaks down and can only be accessed consciously. Now, by “consciously” please understand that I am not talking sollipsism or mysticism or faith, I am talking reason…the rational (non-contradictory) integration of concepts, which is a process that is wholly cognitive. That is, is a product of man’s mind, and not a product of his senses. Indeed, I submit that the ability to conceptualize precedes the senses in the rational metaphysical chain…or perhaps better said, the senses are a function of man’s ability to conceptualize his existential context (‘enviroment’) and not the other way around. But an expansion on that topic is best left to another article.

At any rate, speaking of mysticism, I submit that the objectivists, empiricists, scientific determinists, scientific rationalists are the real mystics, for they are the ones who ignore where reason takes them, insisting that only that which can be sensed is objective; and when the senses break down, as in quantum physics, conflate the part of physical reality which can literally only exist as mathematical equations, which are catagorical functions of man’s (the obeserver’s) ability to conceptualize, which is the foundation of consciousness…yes, they conflate the mathematical equations with empirical proof; that is, the wholly conceptual (math) is the empirical nature of the quanta.

Impossible.

No, my friends, the objectivists, rationalists, and determinists are the true hypocrites…are the true peddlers of determinist, mystic forces which act as the tyrannical overlords of creation and reality, with the minds of men—those very minds which create the formulas which describe the quantum universe in the first place—relegated to rank illusion, with only those “enlightened” souls able to know the truth. Men, you see, do not create the mathematics which describe the unobservable-yet-still-empirical reality of the quantum universe, they merely “discover” them. And only those given the “grace to perceive”—the particular intellectual proclivities necessary to grasp their hyper-complex design—can really understand. The rest of us are to simply accept their scientific wisdom on faith, as though a divine command, and to punt the explicit-yet-conveniently-ignored rational contradictions (e.g. waves of spacetime) into the abyss of “unknowable mystery”.

But here’s the truth: Objectivists, determinists, empricists openly (though they may not know it themselves, for they are much blinded by hubris and religious zeal) deny the right of anyone else to hold mystic ideas. Everyone else is a fool. Everyone else is deceived and a deceiver. Oh, they can demand fealty to their gods and goddesses—the quanta revealed through quantum theory and the cosmic noise generated by the Church of Billion-Dollar-Atom-Smashers—but the rest of humanity…well, god forbid that they should ever give any mind or deference to other divine ideas. Only the pernicious, mendacious, indolent, and simple would deny the supremacy of the gods of science. Only the irredeemably immoral, the unwashed barbarian, would reject the enlightened sight of the Preisthood of the White Lab Coats.

Yet what is the difference between “Empirical Church” and other churches? We are told that the difference is that there is no actual faith involved in believing the “scientific evidence”, and this is because it is observable; tangible; physical; actual; sense-able; that science believes is observably distinct from this or that, or him or her. That what they believe can be seen and measured. It requires no more faith to believe in the truth of the quanta than it does a bowl of oatmeal.

But does it?

Can you observe that which is dimensionless, possessing no sub parts, and thus existing at no place, and in no time? In other words, can you empirically observe that which isn’t actually there?

I think you know the answer to that one.

And the answer is—faith.

END part one

Science Confirms the Existence of Gravitational Waves; Reason does Not (Part 2)

February 28, 2020General Philosophy, Man's Ability, Metaphysics, Objective Relativity, Physics and Metaphysics, reason, scientific determinism, Space, Time and Spacecritique of the metaphysics of existence, gravitational waves and contradiction, gravitational waves and philosophy, gravitational waves impossible, Gravitational waves vs reasonArgo

“Gravitational Waves are ‘ripples’ in space–time…”

“‘Waves’ of changing space–time would propagate in all directions away from the source like waves in water caused by a stone…”

-Caltech LIGO page on gravitational waves

Space cannot both be a vacuum and occupy a vacuum…e.g. “waves of spacetime”, where space, the vacuum, is displaced into the vacuum of itself. And time cannot both be temporality and occupy a temporal location. In other words, time cannot have or possess specific temporal value—e.g. “the end of time; the beginning of time”. It cannot fluctuate with space in waves or ripples because these fluctuations imply shifting temporal changes within time itself—that time, can move with space to shift its own temporal location. This is simply impossible, because it contradicts time itself. Time cannot itself posses a specific temporal value which can then shift with space in the presence of gravitational changes. This is a redundancy which nullifies the very root essence of time.

Let’s look at some other examples of science, and material philosophy, which contradict themselves by presumptuously reducing their own irreducibles:

-Energy cannot both be the measure of action potential (the ability to do work) and the instantiation of action (work) and possess energy, itself. That is, energy cannot both be the manifestation of work and a thing which works.

-Gravity cannot both be that which pulls and a thing which possesses the capacity to pull. That is, gravity cannot both be the manifestation of gravitational pull and be a thing which pulls on other things.

-Existence, which is considered the irreducible context for Realtiy in empirical and objectivist philosophies, cannot itself be a thing which exists. That is, the context in which material realtiy exists cannot be objectified as a distinct object which distinctly exists. Existence cannot exist in its own existential context. This is a redundancy which contradicts and nullifies Existence. This of course is the inherent self-defeating fallacy in the metaphysical claim “existence exists”. It is a futile proposition which attempts to correlate the metaphysical to the physical, which is of course a very noble endeavor, but here the endeavor fails. To claim that existence exists is to state the redundancy that existence possesses existence; that it does what it is. Which is a rational error. Existence, being fundamental, somehow yet acts in order to verify itself to itself. In other words, to state that existence exists is to objectify existence as not a metaphysical context for the interaction of the physical, but as a distinct object which is specific from that which exists “in it”, or “in its context”, and thus is not a basis for object existence, but an object which is merely relative to other objects. “Existence exists” undermines existence as being fundamental and primary.

And more to the point of the redundancy of “existence exits”…let’s use “tree” as an example of the rational error committed when material objects are correlated and conflated with their value upon the greater environment (e.g. other objects). It makes no sense to claim that a tree, for example, itself, possesses “treeness”. That the tree does tree. Treeness is entirely irrelevant to the tree, itself; just like existing, or “existence-ness” is entirely irrelevant to existence, itself. “Treeness” is the role the tree plays relative to other objects in order that the observer may conceptualize “tree” as distinct from say “bird” or “dog”. Treeness, or “doing tree”, is a relative action that is a consequence of the tree’s existence relative to its environment. “Treeness” is a concept that results from the tree plus its environment plus the observer. In other words, the tree cannot be a tree to itself. The tree does not act relative to itself. In the same way existence does not act relative to itself. Existence does not exist any more than the tree does treeness. Existence, once objectified as a thing which exists, only exists because it acts relatively to other objects in a greater environment. And this means that existence is not in fact primary, which means it is not irreducible, which means empirical and objectivist metaphysics are incomplete. I propose that the reason objects act relatively to other objects, and why the observer observes and conceptualizes these relative distinctions to create epistemology and ethics, is because they are able. Ability is the singular commonality which binds all material realtiy, then. Ability is the metaphysical primary. And you would not say that “ability is able”, because ability doesn’t need to be able. Ability implies action, and action implies that which acts. And that which acts is what is able. We could even say that “that which exists is able to exist” if we still feel the need to inject existence into metaphysics. This makes existence a rational metaphysical concept because it recognizes that existence is in fact reducible. If we remove ability then we are left with “that which exists, exists”, which is merely another way of stating the tautology “existence exists” (“existence does existence”) which is meaningless. We could say that “existence implies that which exists” if we are going to force the issue of existence as metaphysical primary. But this begs the question “how does that which exists exist?”. And the answer of course is “because it is able to exist’.

END part two

Why an Opposite is Not a Corollary, and Vice Versa: Seek truth in proper definitions

October 18, 2019Epistemology, General Philosophy, reasonconfusing corollary with opposite, corollary vs oppositeArgo

Though I have touched upon this topic previously on this blog, it never hurts to revisit it. It never ceases to surprise me how even the most intelligent thinkers among us tragically confuse and conflate the concepts of “opposite” and “corollary”. To me, it is the intellectual equivalent of the common conflation of “literally” and “figuratively”. Understand that in this article I am speaking of the philosophical use of these terms…that is, how they conceptually relate to general and overall Truth, as it were. I understand that in common parlance, we read the nuances of people and language…we can easily discern that “literally” really means “figuratively” when our neighbor declares that they “literally died” when they heard the news that the new bathroom would cost twenty thousand dollars; likewise we understand that “corollary” really means “opposite” when we hear someone explain that the corollary to things going up is that they must come down…we understand what is being said here is merely an iteration of the common maxim that “what goes up must come down”, which we accept as such and go on with our day.

But when grand truths about existence and humanity and nature are couched in a false assumption about what is corollary, the confusion becomes very dangerous, and obviously misleading. If we believe that the “corollary” to life is death, when in fact “death” and “life” are diametrically opposed, then we have utterly misinterpreted reality and formed an idea about our existence which is about as wrong as it could possibly be. And it is the smuggling in of the false synonymic relationship of “corollary” and “opposite” with respect to greater and profound meaning that I take issue with, and wish to set straight in order that we may stop leading ourselves astray by committing one of the most obvious and avoidable mistakes of all time: ignorance of the basic linguistic—conceptual definitions we have set for ourselves.

I offer this article as a primer on the subject…in my customary discursive fashion.

The conflation of “opposite” and “corollary” is not unlike the falsely presumed interchangeability of, say, “ironic” and “coincidental”, or “ironic” and “misfortune”, in addition to the aforementioned “literally’ and “figuratively”. One can’t help but wonder how long it will take the English language to contradict itself altogether and lose all practical utility entirely.

A summary of the following article can be stated this way: Opposites do not imply each other as equally existing or occurring simultaneously, and possessing equal and shared relevance and importance in all contexts at all times. Corollaries do.

Corollaries are a single conceptual essence, broken into purely semantic distinctions, mostly for linguistic efficiency. Opposites are utterly antipodal, mutually exclusive concepts. The presence of one does not demand the simultaneous equal representation of the other; in fact, by definition, and apropos, quite the opposite is true. The presence of one implies the utter absence of the other in a given context. If X is going up, for example, X is not going down. Now, I understand that it is the inexorable inverse linguistic-semantic relationship between opposites which gives them a veneer of corollary relationship…of symbiosis. But in any practical application, this relationship is simply not so. If X goes up, X is not also going down; if X goes left, X is not also going right. To imply otherwise gives us neither opposite nor corollary, but a contradiction.

The other day a friend of mine on Facebook posted a quote attributed to Carl Jung…though I’d never stake my life on the claim that facebook memes are entirely beyond suspicion when it comes to correctly assigning quotes to speakers or authors. For all I know the quote actually came from Daffy Duck…I’m just not that familiar with Jung. But we will give my friend the benefit of the doubt and assume that she knows that these words are in fact his words:

”Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

With all due respect, that assertion is at best misleading, and at worst the utterance of a man who has but a tenuous grasp of important conceptual distinctions, and thus has little business making aphorisms of any kind dialoging on existential truth. Because what is being committed here is the rational crime of confusing and conflating corollaries with opposites. Happiness is not “balanced by” sadness/darkness; happiness doesn’t demand that sadness have anything to do with it at all. In fact, by definition, the complete opposite is true.

While it is not necessarily irrational to claim that a concept implies its direct opposite, as I mentioned earlier when noting the inexorable inverse relationship of opposites, the nature of a corollary is not actually that a thing implies another thing, but that a thing is simultaneously and equally that other thing. In this context, I am not of course speaking of contradictions as being actual…I am simply explaining what is being stated when one speaks in corollaries. Corollaries are wholes which are commonly parsed—wholes considered in parts (as opposed to parts which are commonly considered in wholes (e.g. any concrete noun, and even some abstract or pseudo-abstract nouns like “collection”, “bunch”, “chaos”, “government”.)

Let’s take for example the corollary love/value. It could properly be rendered as:

It is love, therefore it is value.

There is a corollary relationship between “love” and “value”, but the corollary—the whole which is considered in parts—is love/value. Love and value are, philosophically, when speaking of corollaries, an “it” not a “them”. The corollary is properly described as “it is”, not “there is”. It is improper to render the corollary as “There is love, therefore there is value”, because the phrase “there is” implies a distinction between love and value; yet when considering the actual corollary relationship between love and value there is no distinction. Fundamentally, love is value and vice versa. Always. In all contexts and at all times. That’s why love/value is a corollary. And having said that, we can see why opposites cannot be corollaries. It is rank nonsense to claim that “it is left, therefore it is right”, or “it is up, therefore it is down”. Clearly that cannot possibly be the case, in any context, at any time. And again it’s not about implication. A corollary does not mean X implies Y. Love doesn’t imply value, it is value at the same time. Left may imply right, up may imply down, but this does not make these concepts corollary. At least not when we are speaking of root, philosophical principles. The concept of “corollary” in such a context needs to be carefully understood and properly utilized in order to avoid utterly careening offcourse and crashing disasterously into conclusions which are entirely opposite of truth.

Now, from this we can approach the distinction between opposites and corollaries from another important angle. Opposites like “happiness” and “sadness” are not corollary because, unlike true corollaries, they are always contextual, and thus always subjective. In other words, opposite concepts are not axiomatic, they are merely practical. They are always subject to a particular frame of reference. They do not apply equally to all people at all times, even given that opposites share an inverse relationship when taken purely abstractly. “Happiness” in a given individual context does not necessarily imply “sadness” at all, like “up” does not necessarily imply “down”, or “left” imply “right”. If I point to the top shelf in the pantry and say to someone “the cereal is up there”, I am not giving any value, and certainly not an equal, corollary amount, to “down there”. To assume otherwise simply confuses the issue and muddies the context of the statement. Certainly, we might make the basic, obvious semantic claim that “up there”, generally speaking, implies a “down there” generally speaking; but with opposites, unless we are in a grammar or linguistics class we are never speaking generally when using concepts like “up”, “down”, “left, “right”, etcetera. In other words, the notions of “up there” and “down there” never really come up nonspecifically. There is always a particular “who” or a “what” to provide context. There is nothing fundamentally meaningful about “down” relative to “up” when I am speaking of the cereal being “up there [on the top pantry shelf]”. Likewise, with respect to Jung’s quote, to say that a given individual’s life is happy does not necessarily imply that it is or has ever been to any degree sad. It is simply irrational and incorrect to claim that if one is happy he must also be or have been sad, as though it is through sadness that an individual’s happiness is manifest (and vice versa) rather than through the specific experience of whatever happy things he may have done and been a part of in his life (e,g. Having children, getting married, earning a college degree). To claim that for one to be happy he must have the personal frame of reference of sadness is an arrant contradiction. For even if one who is happy had in the past been sad doesn’t mean that his happiness is known to actually be happiness because he has also been sad…as if sadness is the frame of reference for happiness. This is to imply that one actually means the other, which of course contradicts their very definitions, which nullifies the concept of “opposites” at root. “Happiness is sadness; sadness is happiness” is a tautological form of rational folderol. Happiness cannot also mean sadness, like up cannot also mean down. The assertion that one cannot experience happiness unless they’ve experienced sadness is, for one, not true or logical, but more egregiously, subjugates man’s existence to rational error.

True corollaries are not contextual, they are objective, universal, symbiotic, and utterly equivalent and inclusive of one another, at all times, absolutely and infinitely so. One means the other; one is the other. A corollary which is true for me is also true for you; unlike oppoites, which are subjective and contextual—what is happiness for me may be sadness for you and vice versa. But things like love and value, labor and property, ruling authority and force, truth and morality, action and ability…these are true corollaries. As they apply to me they also apply to you. If I am loving then I am valuing; likewise if you are loving then you are valuing. If I am acting then I am able to act; likewise you. If I make a truth claim then I make a morality claim; likewise you. If I am laboring then I am owning (that which with I labor—my body); likewise you. If I am a ruling authority over others then I am forcing others; likewise you.

END

How Christians and Secularists Both Define You as Nothing (Part TWO)

May 14, 2019Christian fallacy, collectivism, collectivist metaphysics, Determinism, General Philosophy, individualism vs collectivism, Metaphysics, Physics and Metaphysics, scientific determinismchristian metaphysics, do we own our talents, do you own yourself, science metaphysics, scientific determinismArgo

The question of “you” (or me or anyone) is an all or nothing proposition. The question of “what are you?” can only be answered in terms of Absoluteness or Absolute Nothingness. That is, you are, at the most fundamental root, either you, absolutely (Absolute You), or you are utterly NOT you (Absolute Absence of You). You either are or you are not. Period. No matter how science, religion, or philosophy, of all and any kind, attempt to equivocate, or make allowances for “mystery”, or the “unknowable” (a conceptual contradiction if there ever was one), or “epiphenomenon”, or even “magic”, there is no way to get around this simple bifurcation of the root existential question: To be or not to be.

Are you, or are you not?

So which is it? Only one answer is correct. And that correct answer is the only possible answer. Thus, we must choose wisely. The answer may seem obvious, or at least intuitive, of course…at least it should. But after thousands of years of the mass acceptance and integration of reasonless and impossible ideologies on the matter, underwriting and permeating every human endeavor and institution from here to the Great Wall of China on both sides, from the State to Society, Religion, Science, Arts and Entertainment and on and on, it seems that rational blindness is solidly ensconced as the undisputed conveyance of human philosophical wisdom to the point where ascertaining the existentially obvious, at least as the foundation for epistemology and ethics, is as improbable for the average man as winning a gold medal in the Olympics.

From part one in this article series we already know how Christians fundamentally define you—as null. A zero. A cegorical non-entity. A non-agent…despite their unwillingness to plainly admit as much. “You” are merely a placeholder…or rather, a character in a play, having no substance until God fleshes out your role with his all-determining will. In other words, you are an arrant projection of God’s infinite foreknowledge; an agency-less character in his cosmic production. His “gospel narrative” drops you in, with lines, actions, consequences, and destiny all decided for you, outside of you, and thus (and ironically) having nothing actually to do with you at all. Because there is no “you” in Christain metaphysics. No self. No cognition nor agency nor conceptualization of any fundamental substance. You are made from “nothing”…spoken into existence; materializing into reality from a place that not even God can define (if you follow the logic) because it is nowhere and at no time…like the Big Bang. You are not of God, himself, because that would make you a part of God, and yet you are not from a substance which co-existed eternally with God because only God is eternal. You were birthed somehow from an infinite vacuum. You are something which is beget from nothing (ex nihilo). You are thus a contradiction—a lie. An unsolvable, indecipherable enigma…a lock with no key nor combination. You are, but what you are is absolute nothingness. Indeed, “you are nothing” is the rank metaphysical contradiction which forms the fulcrum upon which your liar’s existence pivots, points, and from which it proceeds, only to utterly return to itself inexorably and infinitely.

And that, my friend, is not hyperbole…it is theology. It is the sum and substance of your meaning and worth to God. it is the metaphysics of Christian canon. Your value as an individual is null because your individual self is the illusion in which only the unsaved reprobate indulges. To be saved is to recognize that there IS NOTHING of you worth saving in the first place, and this is because you don’t actually exist at all.

So what do you do with this cold slap of Christian doctrine? Well, you might do what many others have done when they realize that all hope must be abandoned once they cross the threshold of the institutional church. They flee to the ostensible “safe haven” of the stoic, cold, unflinchingly certain, emotionless arena of “objective” and “empirical” science, and embrace the metaphysics of scientific determinism (which is the practice of science as a philosophy). Its arms are not warm or loving; its embrace is not meant to comfort or sooth; its wings are not going to transport you to the safety of the eternal afterlife and lay you gently down in a diamond city with gilded streets. But what it does offer is the hard, rigid truth, so at least you always know where you stand. It doesn’t get your hopes up, but then there are no hopes to be dashed when the empiricism of reality inevitably comes crashing down upon you, grinding your life back into dust.

Scientific determinism is closed to bribery. It has no use for dreams or wishes, nor does it offer any. There is no Grand Consciousness to which one may nor must make supplication; it pretends no miracles…no defiance of reality does it promise. And despite the fact that its determinist metaphysics are indeed philosophical, it implies that philosophy is for fools—the opium of the masses because it’s really nothing more than religion, anyway. Metaphysics is psuedo-science and psuedo-rational, like alchemy or phrenology as far as science is concerned. Science explains “what is” in terms that can be measured, and thus in the only terms that can be trusted to be truly meaningful.

So…what of all of this?

Is it true?

No. All of this is a lie, of course, and thus what actually happens to erstwhile Christains when they flee the rational madness of Christian metaphysics for the nuthouse of the metaphysics of science—by becoming atheists or some other iteration of secular determinism—is that they become even more preachy and insufferable than before. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, as they say. The labels change…the vocab, the ribbons and bows. But the metaphysics—and the pretension—remain the same. If you want to know how the scientific determinist defines the nature of existence, and specifically man’s existence, you need look no further than the mysticism from which they ostensibly fled.

The reason, you see, why so many Christians turn to the scientific determinism of secular ideologies after their disillusionment with the church is because they are lazy. Atheism provides them with all the trappings of Christain metaphysics in new clothes…they FEEL better without actually having to do the work to GET better. Scientific determinism provides them with remedial and superficial change, and relieves them of the time and trouble and loss and hurt which accompanies real, substantive change.

Real change, you see, is humbling, not empowering. It proceeds along years and years of uncertainty, it does not gift wrap instant truth in the form of formulas and equations. It is not simply tearing off a red jersey and donning a blue one. It is not simply switching to another team that is still playing the same game. It puts you OUTSIDE of “cause and effect” and makes you an observer of it. Which is what you truly are.

The scientific determinist rejects “God” in favor of physics. They forsake an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient Diety for an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient Natural Law. But of course both mean the exact same thing. Both determine all things; both know what was, is, and shall be, forever and ever; both are everywhere and in everything to the point where it is impossible to know just where they begin and that which they govern ends, and vice versa. And both interpret man, his existence and his consciousness, in the same way: you are a function of that which is absolutely outside yourself, and so there is no “you” in the deep, foundational, and primary sense. “You”, in other words, are a direct function of “NOT you”…and thus You qua You is a lie. “You” do not, in fact, exist at all.

Christianity, and scientific determinism—which is the philosophy of secularism—are metaphysically identical; and this means that they interpret the PHYSICAL universe in indentical ways as well; only the terminology is different. Whether theology (God) or mathematics (Natural Law), both are notions of some kind of Infinite Causal Absolute, which is of course a contradiction in terms. The infinite cannot create anything outside of itself, by definition. At any rate, God or Natural Law are merely broken up into abstract units, organized into various categories of “reality”, and presumed (somehow…the logic is very loose at this point) to be creative…causal. But then beyond that, “God” and “mathematics” as Christianity and Science define them respectively in their spurious philosophical terms, by absolutely causing everything, must necessarily BE everything. In other words, outside of God and Natural Law there is no thing which they did not create ABSOLUTELY. In this sense then, there can be no distinction between what is created and that which creates it. In truth, then, “God” and “Natural Law” do not really explain reality so much as they eradicate the distinction between it and them.

Now, certainly theology and mathematics provide humanity some practical efficacy and utility, which lends them their veneer of philosophical sensibility. Christianity is good at listing rules for man to follow in order to promote some desired, and even perhaps remedially ethical, outcome…an ostensible moral existence: do not kill, do not covet, do not steal, and so on. Mathematics is a fine blueprint for the organization of what is observed in order to provide an a reliable abstract foundation for society’s infrastructure: here’s how you build X to do Y; here is how A can be measured and formulated in order to produce B, and so on. But when we take this rote practical utility and attempt to construct from it a full-on existential paradigm which INCLUDES man, the Observer, we go way astray. The practical utility of “God” and “math” is NOT philosophy…it’s not even a premise…of any kind. It is a tool of cognition…as hammer is a tool of the hand. You cannot reverse engineer “God” or “math” to a metaphysical primary (e.g. man is X, or man is Y) anymore than you can reverse engineer a screwdriver to determine what the user IS. Perhaps you can determine what he does, but not what he is. You do not derive existential meaning from mere practical application. But this axiom is lost on the world, it seems.

When it comes to our existence, the old idiom tells us that we have no control over the cards we are dealt. Some of us, we are told, win the “genetic lottery”. Others don’t beat the odds. They are unattractive, ignorant, awkward, disabled, in poor health…any, all, or some combination thereof. You’re either a “winner” or a “loser” as Nature has dictated. That we are born to rich parents or poor, nurturing or abusive; we are servant or ruling class; tall and handsome; short, fat, and ugly…all is determined for us upon our birth. True we may escape some of these circumstances, but the intrinsic characteristics which allow us to do so—our intelligence, toughness, resilience, diligence—these are all dictated to us by nature.

All of this is merely an appeal to the same fundamental metaphysical premise as that of the Christian who describes your “talents” and “time” and all other characteristics as “God’s gifts”. All of that which makes you you is nature’s gamble, nothing more—the cause and effect of the all-determining Law of Nature. And of course this premise carries with it the same rational failure of imagining that a distinction can be made between you and all of the characteristics endemic to your birth; that your eye color, for example, hair and skin color, height, intelligence, parents, the socioeconomic class into which you are born…all of these exist in a cosmic closet outside of your Self, and Nature costumes you with them upon your birth.

Well, except it is a little more complicated…or perhaps, more manipulative. If you examine the metaphysics which inform this idea, to say that you may somehow be defined as distinct from your inherent and endemic characteristics is at root to remove you from yourself, and THIS ultimately and necessarily renders You qua You an existential contradiction. All the things which make you, you, are not actually OF you, but outside of you, which makes “you” a false premise. Science and Christianity are truly the bedfellows of determinist metaphysics (which, by the by—because I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet—are simply a remedial version of Collectivist metaphysics). Ironic perhaps, but on the other hand, not really ironic at all. All variations of determinism are GOING to be based on mysticism—appeals to the Unseen, the Unknowable, the Infinite Cause, which create all things ex nihilo. Whether we call the the Creator “God” or “Natural Law”; whether the beginning is the Bible’s “In the beginning God created…” or the Big Bang, the definition of reality is the same. Reality is a place where “you”, at best, is entirely imaginary.

Think about it…science decreees that there is no “you” until the moment of your birth, or your conception, or of any given number of gestational weeks…it really doesn’t matter with respect to the metaphysics. Yet it simultaneously asserts that the child born to rich parents, and/or with abundant intellectual or athletic ability, for example, has simply won the genetic lottery. And this means that he has been birthed as a function of random cosmic occurrence. He is a child as much of probability as he is of his parents. Of course the question that is either unknown, ignored, or forgotten is: how can one win the genetic/cosmic lottery if one does not exist until AFTER the lucky number has been drawn? Or perhaps better said: how can one win the lottery if he is a FUNCTION of that lottery? The lottery—meaning the determined cause and effect of all object interaction as a function of Natural Law—is what CREATES the one who is said to have won it. The “lottery” generates the winner out of itself. The one who is said to have won (or lost) the “lottery’ is created DIRECTLY out of it…it doesn’t select a winner it produces him. The “winner” is nothing but a direct function of the very probabilistic mechanisms which are also said to have given him his winnings. This is a contradiction. What I’m trying to say is that there is NO ONE to “win” the “genetic lottery”…the “winner” doesn’t submit the lucky numbers, the winner IS the lucky numbers.

The “lottery” isn’t actually a lottery at all, then. The “lottery” is only random manifestations of the Infinite Determining Cause. There is no “you” who upon his birth wins or loses some cosmic game of chance. “You” is an illusion. You can make no claim to Self because the Self is a lie.

The question which follows then is: If there is no Self then how can be conscious of yourself?

The answer is that you aren’t, according to the deterministic metaphysics of science. The spurious assertion that there is a “you” somewhere behind all that genetic code and foreordained cause and effect is a bromide given to the masses to placate any possible protest. Behind that bromide however is the truth…and the facade is very thin indeed. Behind it is the truth that scientific determinism is an ideology which is fundamentally anti-human and pro-Authoritarian.

The insidious nature and consequence of both the Christian and Scientific determinist metaphysical premise of the fundamental non-existence of the Individual Self is that man shall therefore not be ALLOWED to exist AS an individual. Since all men are a function of the exact same determinist force (“God” or “Natural Law”) there is no possible individual distinctions to be made among them. Mankind is thus collectivized under the auspices of some fatuous, subjective, abstract ideal and then ruled by an Authority, usually the State, which acts as a surrogate—the physical incarnation of that ideal which exists to eradicate all expressions of individuality, as these are considered an imposter to reality.

Which it is…IF we concede the false metaphysical premise that the Self (You qua You) cannot exist. And by the authority of THIS foundational belief comes every and all manner of moral violation…everything from petty crime to the Holocaust. The idea that man is not in fact himself is the ideological root back to which all violence and violations of humanity can be traced.

Think about it. Man does not actually exist as himself. Thus he does not earn himself. His existence stems from a birth that provides him with ALL of his attributes—all that he IS—by mere accident; infinitely determined outcomes by the Infinite Determining Force, which is the infinite essence of all of reality and everything in it. Your existence has nothing to do with you…it’s not work; it’s not an action of you, and thus you cannot rightfully claim ownership of yourself and thus you cannot claim ownership of anything that proceeds from your existence. Your life is not your own because YOU are a lie. Your time, talent, property, family, business, labor…these are things over which you can claim no just ownership because you don’t even own yourself. You didn’t earn YOU, so you cannot claim to own anything that is a consequence of you.

We can sum all of that up with this simple maxim: You’re existence is a function of forces outside of you; you do not earn yourself and therefore you do not own yourself, and therefore you do not own anything you produce.

Of course it is hard to avoid the glaring contradiction in this determinist argument. In order to assert that you do not earn and thus do not own yourself, YOU must be assumed as de facto. In other words, the essence of the claim that “you do not earn yourself because you are a product of forces outside of you” is this: YOU do NOT (de facto) exist. However, the claim “you do not exist” is self-nullifying—a contradiction in terms, like “false truth” or “unknowable knowledge” or “infinite time”. In order to make any claim about “you” you must have an existential reference for “you”, and to have that reference “you” must by definition exist. In other words, you must exist in order to claim that “you do not exist”. The very notion itself is utterly dependent upon the presumed existence of “you”.

To be clear, the claim that “you do not exist” is not the same thing as saying something like “unicorns do not exist”. This is because the “you do not exist” is a metaphysical argument based upon “you”, which is a metaphysical premise, not merely a distinction between what is physically present verses what is only imaginary, cognitive or abstract. In other words, “you do not exist” more precisely means “you CANNOT exist”. That is, “you” are impossible to reality itself in all its forms…physical, cognitive, object, abstract, etc.. “Unicorns do not exist” can never mean “unicorns cannot exist” simply because unicorns qua unicorns are NOT contrary to reality itself because they are not a metaphysical premise. Unicorns may exist in reality, though they may be limited to the imagination; the Self, or You qua You CANNOT exist in reality AT ALL, even in the imagination, because it is a metaphysical concept which is categorically contrary to determinist metaphysics.

”You” is an all or nothing proposition. You either absolutely are or you absolutely are NOT. But only one of these propositions is correct; only one does not self-nullify due to rational inconsistency. I submit that you ARE, period. “You” as a metaphysical premise cannot be parsed, divided, or distilled. “You” is irreducible. Your essence…your Self is a root metaphysical premise, and the proof is that you speak forth the pronoun “I” via an apprehension of its greater meaning in language in general and in communication. The very fact that this is a concept that can be meanginfully and efficaciously formed and communicated is proof that you ARE. “I” would be infinitely impossible as a concept were it a metaphysical fallacy and thus anathema to existence and reality. “I” is either devoid of all context within reality or it IS the context for reality, itself, and irreducibly so. And as you have no other reference, and will NEVER and can NEVER have any other reference for reality, this statement MUST be true: You are you; You qua You is, in fact, a thing.

And by your ability to be you, you EARN you and all of the characteristics which make you YOU in the practical sense; and therefore you own you and thus own all which exists as a willful consequence of you.

END

Memory Implants: Another impossible sci-fi trope

March 24, 2019General Philosophy, Identity, Metaphysics, Physics and Metaphysics, scientific determinismartificial intelligence impossible, memory implants impossible, the philosophical error of artificial intelligence, the rational problem with artificial intelligenceArgo

Implanting memories on some unsuspecting, or suspecting, victim or person…make them believe that they have done or said this or that by giving them a memory, from OUTSIDE of them. They thus accept it was derived FROM (or within) them. We’ve seen it more than once in fiction…and fiction is where it shall remain, I’m afraid.

Think about it…think about how this idea contradicts all rational consistency, and thus must contradict all practical utility. Before a memory implant could actually induce a memory one would need to implant, as a necessary corollary to the memory, a sense of SELF…an “I” to serve as the constant…that is, the existential frame of reference for the memory. For without this reference, there can be no memory. There may be an image—like a mental picture—but not a memory, which is a very, very different thing. A memory is a personal experience; and an experience, to be personal, needs one’s singular existential frame of reference. The memory is ACTIVELY manifest by the personal and singular experience of the ACTOR, not DICTATED to him by another…this is why it’s a memory and not merely a mental image. I can think of a green car, but the memory of the green car I saw parked at the store yesterday is a memory because it is in my mind not as an abstraction, but as an OBJECT which I physically ACTED upon to and of and from my SELF…I SAW it. The memory requires me to be an active participant/observer; the mere mental image does not. And for one to be an active (conscious) observer requires an “I”—a Self—and that can only come from within, not from without. MY singular sense of MY SELF, which is the crux of memory, cannot be implanted into me from outside of me. It is not dictated TO me, it IS me, and “me” (me qua me) is absolute, and absolutely necessary to make a memory a memory. The metaphysical ME is the foundation of all memory. Memory is grounded in the ontological singular frame of reference, which acts upon the physical (through the senses) to create one’s wholly unique existential experience.

So, no, memories cannot be implanted from one to another. One, from THEIR singular ontological frame of reference, cannot experience FOR another, and thus cannot GIVE them a memory. There is no way to do this since by definition one cannot BE another FOR them. The idea of a “memory implant” is a fundamental violation of rational human identity, in which case, there is no “one” to whom a memory can be given. The idea of a memory implant collapses upon the very logical fallacy, making the whole endeavor a categorical waste of time. We can psychologically manipulate another person, control them by deception and suggestion, but we cannot BE them FOR them. An implant may one day control the mind of another through manipulation of the brain, but this is only euphemistically called a “memory implant”. You may be convinced that you experienced something you did not actually experience, but you cannot ACTUALLY experience what you did NOT ACTUALLY experience. And this is the subtle, but profound, difference. One is psychological manipulation, the other is memory.

And this topic relates to why I have asserted, and continue to assert, that it is impossible for consciousness to be created OUTSIDE of itself…this is one of the great rational and philosophical paradoxes. Consciousness, for a human, for a computer, for an android, artificial or organic (not that I accept that consciousness has been achieved “artificially”, or that it will or can be achieved) may involve the actions of humanity or nature or God, but it will never be CAUSED or CREATED by them, fundamentally. Consciousness represents a wholly singular ontological perspective…it is absolute, period, and thus is only and can only be a product of Itself. The root of man is his identity of SELF, and this is utter—absolute. There is no before it which can be claimed by it except FROM it; there is likewise no after. In order to speak of “before I was”, I must BE; in order to speak of “after I am”, I must BE. The ontological constant is the Self…and the Self is, was, and shall ever be. It is infinite. And this is the mark of God upon man.

“I” cannot be function of “NOT I”; consciousness has no frame of reference for a cause outside of Itself. If it could be created or caused from outside itself it could not exist. To say “my memories were given to me”, or “my Self came from another”, is like saying “there is no such thing as absolute truth” or “it is impossible to know ultimate truth”. The claim completely nullifies its assertion. It’s rational madness; dead on arrival. Mouth noise.

For the same reason that “you” cannot also be “me”, and “me” cannot also be “you”, “I” cannot cause “you”, and “you” cannot cause “I”. This metaphysic may be paradoxical, yet it IS rationally consistent and, I would submit, even consistent with empirical reality. The very reason why man is able to exist and thrive is because the natural root of his powers of conceptualization and language is that meaning NEEDS a reference, and that MUST then imply “I”. “I am” must be BEFORE meaning can be determined. “I” is not dictated, IT does the dictating. “I” is not created, IT is the creator.

END

“White Privilege”: A Racial Epithet Meant to Destroy the Joy of White People, and Then Destroy Them, Period

February 9, 2019Ethics, forced compliance, General Philosophy, government, Identity, individualism vs collectivism, Metaphysics, morality, Violence, Voluntarismrace and collectivism, race collectivism, race metaphysics, race philosophy, racism of white privilge, the philosophy of white privilge, white privilge and the left, white privilge racist against whites, white privilge reverse racismArgo

The ideology of “white privilege” is an arrantly racist pejorative rooted in the deep and fetid bowels of collectivist metaphysics. It’s not a casual accusation; it’s not merely an empirical social observation; it’s not simply a commentary on Western Democratic sociopolitical hierarchy. It is a product of despotic ideology which concludes with genocide. Racists who appeal to it should be called out as racists. Those who pretend to denounce bigotry by using it as a political cudgel should be called out as hypocrites and drummed out of power, no matter what color they are.

“White privilege” means, among other wicked things, that whatever joy a white person happens to experience, however he wants to define “joy”, is to be considered an abomination against nature and morality. Any pleasure a white person derives from his existence is a categorical perversion of justice and truth. Concordantly, whatever misery a white person happens to experience, howerever he wants to define “misery”, is a natural virtue and an affirmation of truth. A white person’s misery thus is infinitely, naturally, and necessarily deserved, by the mere fact that the white person exists at all. In other words, the exercise and expression of a white person’s existence, meaning his will, is anathema to nature, and an offense to reality. You may think I’m exaggerating, but I assure you I will barely be scratching the surface of this pernicious political weapon. To value whiteness as “privilege”, and then associate “privilege”, implicitly or explicitly, with the exploitation and destruction of all other races, and then judge all white individuals as being at root an existential function of Whiteness, is NECESSARILY to devalue their individuality, which reduces their existence to that of “Evil Whiteness”, which makes the categorical destruction of white individuals an object moral imperative. And if you think this isn’t true, or couldn’t really happen, or both, take a cursory look at history. EVERY political mass murder in history is rooted in the same metaphysical paradigm. The only difference is found in the semantics. Group labels may change, but the practical application is identical. Take “white” and replace it with “Jew” or “Capitalist” or “Infidel” or “Wog” and you will find the EXACT same philosophy at work. The “progressive left” never, ever seems to progress beyond the guilotine, killing field, or gas chamber.

Following the false and evil metaphysical premise of “white privilege” down its twisted trail of perverted logic, we find, as I mentioned, that any exercise and expression of a white person’s will in ANY capacity—that is, any white person exercising ANY degree of will in serivice to ANY form of self-interest—is considered an object moral atrocity. His own personal benefit and blessing, however he wants to define it, in any measure, is only possible via a perversion of nature and its concomitant moral truth; and this perversion then fundamentally and ultimately proceeds…from what, exactly? From the fact that the white person possesses individual will at all. You see, the very fact that the white person has a root sense of individuality makes him existentially incapable of perceiving and thus experiencing—in and of himself—his COLLECTIVE guilt as a manifestation of his “Evil Whiteness”; he cannot ever truly understand the guilt of his REAL COLLECTIVE identity…that of Whiteness the Enemy of Reality.

This in turn makes it impossible to reason with the white person. Having a sense of Individual Self apart from his collective Whiteness makes him say “irrational” things like “Well, I never owned slaves”; or “I’m not responsible for what white people did in the past”; or “My ancestors died fighting slavery”; or “Blacks are as culpable for slavery as any white person; for every black slave sent to the New World from Sub-Saharan Aftrica was captured by other blacks”; or “the word ‘slave’ is a derivation of the word ‘Slav’, and the Slavs were white’”; or “Muslim nations promoted slavery to an exponentially greater degree than the Christian nations of Europe, and the Muslim version was exponentially more brutal, so why doesn’t the progressive left ever mention that?” Yes, the white person cannot understand his true collective evil because of his sense of individuality, which forms his frame of reference for reality, thereby making his personal reality as through a lens of Perpetual Lying. And this being the case, ALL of his protestations at being judged by his skin color, his cries of injustice and his pleadings for mercy, his supplications for personal exception (“But I have black friends; my WIFE is black”) should be summarily ignored, and consistently so, and he should be compelled by force and feint into his collective white guilt, and his collective racial identity, and just deserts heaped upon him via the power of the State (mass censorship, exploitation, castigation, enslavement, flagellation, and eradication) as an expression of the Truth and Justice of Collectivized Reality.

Of course, this is all just Collectivist Ethics 101; all collectivist ideologies by their endemic philosophical premises necessarily scapegoat the “Other” based upon some group identity that happens to serve the power interests of the Authoritarian regime de jure. Jew, Christian, Black, White. Capitalist, Majority, Infidel, Privileged…sometime it’s a buffet of identities: White-Christian-Cisgendered, Male-Capitalist-Conservative, Black-Post-Reconstruction-Freeman…whatever bullshit collectivist label appeals to the snarling, snapping, frothing maws of the Collectivist Ideology power movement shills at the moment.

Today, the demon spawn of American neo-Marxism have simply, and simplistically, borrowed from our nation’s historical playbook of exploitative racial politics and swapped the moral categories. Now, it’s no longer “bad” to be black (or, more loosely, a “person of color”), instead it’s “bad” to be white.

Yes…drink deep of this unmitigated, unveiled, object horseshit, my friends…for this is how the grand, virtuous, progressive brain-children of the American political left have chosen to address four hundred years of New World racism: They hand it back to us in full, with merely a different colored bow adoring it.

Yes, my white, Generation X comrades—we of the “Free to Be You and Me” and “It don’t matter if you’re black or white” era of American history—the “racially enlightened” purveyors of socialist progress of our Baby Boomer elders never intended ACTUAL equality, as we were so often assured. For they understand, like all those who lust for power, that “equality under the Law” is a death knell for the ruling class. A population of Individuals does not need to be controlled by government violence…for they are a population that perfects cooperation. And thus Collectivism, being the utter antithesis of the Individual, will ALWAYS be divisive, and will exploit those divisions for power and wealth. No, our elders, as a political constituency, intended and intend to fleece us…to harvest us for wool and mutton, and send objectors and critics off to prisons (or worse) built with our own money. The “equality” schtick was mere folderol…a siren song to lure you into complaisance and complacency; to the oven and under the cloche.

And here finally we have arrived at the inevitable contradiction which invalidates the idea.

”White privilege” reduces the white individual to an existential state of that of mere animal…or perhaps more accurately described, a destructive force of nature. A force driven and determined by the intrinsic and utter malevolence of his (entirely abstract) “Whiteness”….a demonic force. This fatuous reduction of the white person’s nature completely deprives him of volition…of moral agency, and this necessarily makes it impossible for him to be morally culpable for the evils of which he is accused. A person with no real, no natural sense of Self cannot posses Self-agency. And possessing no sense of Self he cannot possess a will, since volition and agency and Self are inexorably corollary. In other words, a force of nature—“Whiteness”—has no Self, and thus is incapable of choice, and choice is a prerequisite for violations of morality. You do not accuse a tornado of evil when it flattens your barn or throws a tree into your chimney. You do not accuse a mountain lion of evil when it mauls a passing jogger.

If the white person MUST do evil because he IS evil, then he CANNOT CHOOSE good. And this abolition of choice makes describing his actions as “evil” a failure of logic. “Evil” as an adjective of morality cannot be applied to that which is conceded to lack will and thus choice as a function of its natural identity. The collectivist metaphysics of anti-white racists preclude the white person from culpability for “sin”. So speaking of things like “Social Justice” and “Reparations” and “Fairness” and “Responsibility” with respect to the manner in which whites are obligated to defer to “people of color” is a lie according to the VERY RATIONALE used by “progressives” to collectivize whites and thus inculcate their guilt as a group.

And by the by “people of color” is another racist label meant to denegrate the value of whites. Whites lack “color” you see, verve and spark and life and vibrancy…they are colorless, soulless, bleak, pedantic, inanimate. They can’t dance, are robotically cerebreal, and seek to anhillate the beauty of colorful peoples in order to reduce existence to a blank canvas. White people are the opposite of art, art being nature’s greatest gift.

Absent any root volition, then, we can safely exonerate the white person of his Universal Guilt and Collective Crime Against Humanity. For such accusations require moral agency, and by the intrinsic fatal error of racist leftist ideology this becomes quite impossible.

Not that the metaphysical deprivation of choice for the white person, according to leftist hypocrisy and ignorance, should provide him any sense of security. Individuals who have been stripped of their human identity are much easier to annihilate should enough power make its way into the hands of the anti-white racists to do so. After all, one feels little guilt over delivering a bullet to the brain of a rabid feral dog, or burning a field of devouring locusts. However, the white person can take some comfort in knowing that the anti-white racist gun barrel targeting him will inevitably be turned upon he who holds it, and this by the gun-holder’s very own kind and motivated by his very own ideology. Collectivist metaphyics, you see, are unavoidably self-destructive. And this because they are Destruction, Itself. Collectivist metaphysics hates ALL of humanity, not just white people. The deeply buried and ignored little truth is that just as the infinite benevolence of Individualism is no respecter of persons, neither is the infinite perniciousness of Collectivism. Collectivism survives by cordining off humanity into units of “collectively innocent” (“perpetual victim”), and “collectively guilty” (“perpetual criminal”), and uses the power of the State to direct and manage the conflict. Once one group of “guilty” is sufficiently exploited and annihilated, then another is needed to take its place, and thus a new group of “criminals” is culled from what was once the group of pure “victims”. And so on and so forth until there are no longer enough “criminals” and “victims” left for the power structure of the State to thrive; and without the monopolistic violent power of the State, collectivist ideology cannot thrive. Whereupon it collapses back into Hell’s maw where it lays dormant until resurrected by another bunch of leftist, power-hungry psychopaths, towing their seemingly interminable string of useful idiots along behind them.

Remeber this well, my friend:

It is NEVER a privilege for the Individual to be collectivized.

No matter what color he is.

The Cognitive Dissonance of “Easy Contradiction”: Why I am accused of being too rigid and abstruse (PART TWO)

January 12, 2019Christian fallacy, Epistemology, General Philosophy, Objective Relativity, Physics and Metaphysics, scientific determinismabsolutism vs compromise, Christian contradictions, contradiction and truth, judgemental Christians, reason and contradictionArgo

I am a “black and white” absolutist philosopher simply because I deny that black can also be white at the same time…that A is also B, that the square is also the circle, that what IS simultaneously IS NOT. The fact that I reject rank contradiction, which is the bane and the intellectual, moral, and rational failure of pretty much ALL world philosophies, makes me much too petulant and pedantic and confusing to pass for a serious thinker. I boil down to a thin, simmering layer of arcane (at best) ideology, selfishly demanding that 2+2 not equal both 4 AND 5, and throwing a temper tantrum when this childish demand is not met.

Hmm…

I must say I find it both ironic and hypocritical that so often this criticism comes from some of the most rigid ideologues the world has ever spawned: Christians. Usually of the orthodox pedigree.

Hmm…

If you are a church member today in good standing, I dare you to try espousing the virtue, or even the mere possibility of virtue, of any other doctrine or theology, be it from another religion altogether or merely a deviation from orthodox Biblical interpretation. Suggest even a mild stray from traditional thinking, like, say, questioning the moral necessity and efficacy of abstaining from profanity, and watch what happens nine times out of ten. You’ll be met with polite but utterly categorical disregard, and tacitly denounced as nurturing abject wickedness. You’ll soon be tagged as a likely insurrectionist…one to watch out for, and there will be a hyper-vigilant monitoring of your presence and influence. Now, dare stray from a truly cornerstone doctrinal issue, like the Trinity or Pedestination or Penal Substitution, and all but the very slimmest pretense of civility goes right out the stained-glass window. You will be explicitly denounced as an emissary of Satan…an apostate of the worst kind. Overnight those “Christians” who were once so emphatically and eternally devoted to you and your family become, effectively, total strangers. You may retain a smattering of “rebels” who are willing to risk eternal damnation to send you an email now and again, or to get together for coffee, but make no mistake, the vast majority of your “church family” will have held court without you, denounced you as a traitor and a wolf, and will divorce you from their reality entirely. You are dead to them. No, worse than that. You are never-born to them.

Don’t believe me? Go ahead and try. See what happens. I dare you. Walk up to your nearest member of the church leadership next Sunday and tell them that you have rejected the doctrine of Original Sin, Total Depravity, the Fall of Man, and/or the Trinity, as irrational and unbiblical. When the leadership and its sycophants eventually engage you for the purposes of “gentle correction”, explain to them that none of those terms appear in Scripture, ever, anywhere. When they mellifluously tell you that the spirt of scripture clearly implies that such doctrines be absolutely true, ask them when “clearly implies” stopped being an oxymoron, and where scripture implies that one also means three, God controls all things yet doesn’t control them because man is still responsible for his sin and sin nature, or that punishing the innocent for the sake of the guilty is a moral duty (with respect to Penal Substitution).

Watch what happens. After a merely ceremonious appeal to divine enlightenment followed by some rational equivocation, they’ll pull the “God’s chosen Authority” card and you’ll be banished as an imposter and interloper. And then you will feel the stress of yet another completely irrational and unbiblical doctrine oft employed by Christians: Excommunication.

So, yes, I find it just a little bit precious when I AM the one called “absolutist” and “unforgiving” for merely refusing to accept that “tree” also means “mailbox”. In psychology, I believe they call that kind of thing “projection”.

I find it insulting and intellectually lazy when my ideas are labeled too abstruse or confusing…too full of enigmatic, circumspect rationalizations; too unwieldy for any practical use. Just too damn hard to understand.

Okay. Here’s a list of ideas that apparently are not too hard to understand, if you’ll indulge me. And in this list you will see arguments and ideas I have encountered from not just Christian circles, but political and scientific as well. And this is just a mere fraction of the conflicted ideas I have stumbled across in my attempts to get at a rationally consistent interpretation of reality. And make no mistake, these ideas are taken very seriously by the most accomplished and prodigious intellectuals in the world, and are often also accepted wholesale as axiomatic by the vast majority of laypersons.

-Government exists to protect private property, and it obtains the resources to do so through the tax code, which takes one’s private property by force. This is thought to be not only completely rational but many times a moral necessity!

-Libertarians want to reduce the size of government by running for office. In other words, they intend to use the power of the government to reduce the power of government.

-God is infinite and man is finite. This means hat the finite and the infinite co-exist. In other words, what is infinite stops where finite begins. In other words, “limited infinity” is a thing.

-Time and space were created at the Big Bang. In other words, the Big Bang never actually happened, since it has neither a location nor an instant.

-Space is a vacuum. Wormholes are holes in space. In other words, there are physicists seriously considering the reality of holes inside another hole.

-We often hear the phrase “beginning of time”. Of course, time is the beginning. In other words, there is such a thing as the beginning of the beginning.

-Atheists don’t believe in God, and assert that the concept of God is completely irrational whilst simultaneously appealing to omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinite, untouchable, transcendent powers called the “Laws of Physics” which are invisible as distinct from the objects they supposedly control and create. In other words, atheism is polytheism, soon to be monotheism once the geniuses at MIT and Cambridge get around to discovering the “answer to everything.”

-Scientists claim that the observer is a function of what he observers. In other words, the observer observes himself from outside himself.

-Consciousness is a direct function of unconsciousness (categorically unconscious natural law). In other words, consciousness is an “illusion”…which in this case is a euphemism for “doesn’t actually exist”. So what exactly is it an illusion of?

-It is true to claim that absolute truth cannot be known, and that the inability of man to truly know anything absolutely is intellectually and morally meaningful to him. In other words, its very important to know that you can’t know.

-Einstein’s theory of time travel implies that such travel is both to the future and the past, depending ENTIRELY on the observer, making time travel so completely relative that it becomes functionally meaningless. In other words, time travel is both possible and ABSOLUTELY irrelevant…which is to say, possible and impossible.

Now, this is what I have gleaned from that short list. Apparently, for my philosophy to be sufficiently digested by the masses and made fit for practical employment, I must somehow find a compromise—in gentler terms…what is meant is actually a synthesis—between mutually exclusive concepts. This will make me warm and fuzzy and comfortable and relatable and rational.

And here it seems I’ve stumbled upon yet another contradiction to add to the list. It never seems to end.

All right, let us finally put away the rabbit and hat and reveal just how the logical magic trick of contradiction (often mislabeled, either deliberately or unknowingly, as “paradox”) is performed. Humanity has for too long accepted that contradiction is a legitimately rational means of reconciling extremely complex or seemingly unresolvable concepts, or explaining observations (e.g. the wave-particle duality of light) that are not easily integrated into linguistic paradigms. In other words, humanity has consistently revealed itself to be, in unfortunately typical fashion, intellectually lazy on the whole. Or at least, too willing to accept intellectual insufficiency as the apogee of man’s mind. The reason why it’s easier to “understand” contradiction as “truth” is simple: because there’s NOTHING to understand. And I mean literally. To declare that A is also B makes both A and B…well, nothing. A is also Not A; and B is also Not B. By this methodology we get a complete vacuum of meaning…a hole in one’s consciousness instead of a truth. The assertion that the square is also the circle is to admit that you cannot actually say which is which, and this, ultimately, only means that you have thrown up your hands and surrendered reality to…well, who knows? You cannot say, because you’ve rejected the means by which anything is said at all. And if you have surrendered your grip on reality by accepting even a tincture of contradiction as somehow commensurate with truth, then you have spoiled the entirety of understanding. A pinch of leaven leavens the whole batch, so it is said, and this is true likewise of contradiction. To claim even one contradiction as truth is to render the entirety of reality ITSELF a contradiction.

If you find my ideas too arcane and rigid, and too aggrandizing of human reason, then I humbly submit that this has nothing to do with the actual substance of my ideas and everything to do with the fact that you have become shamefully complacent in your thinking, and have compounded this error with ignorance. That one who asserts that mutually exclusive concepts can be synthesized to form truth, or that truth is a measure of degrees, or that the key to understanding is realizing that humanity lacks sufficiency for fundamental understanding…yes, that the one who peddles this mystical, ethereal, esoteric, senseless, pseudo-spiritual bromide should suggest that I am the one whose ideas are much too far beyond the boundaries of human sensibility is exceedingly facile. I might even say amatuerish. If you struggle to comprehend the axiom that there can be no such thing as a square circle, then might I suggest you glance in a mirror to discover just which one of us is the real rational grifter.

And look, I get your oblique point. Unraveling contradictions that have been accepted as axiomatic of reality and truth for often hundreds of years or more can seem exceedingly tedious, complex, full of ostensible random minutia, and just plain nonsensical. But that this is MY fault is an accusation I refuse to accept. I am not the one who built whole civilizations out of bullshit. Civilization and all of its bullshit—from the Church to the State and all of the the little religious and scientific determinism bullshit in between—was already here when I got here. And this is precisely my point. It’s not okay to fault me, intellectually or morally, for a problem I did not create; nor is it okay to condemn me for the mess a fully ensconced contradiction makes when it is finally extracted. Don’t blame the paramedic because the bandages get hella bloody.

END

The Cognitive Dissonance of “Easy Contradiction”: Why I am accused of being too rigid and abstruse (PART ONE)

January 7, 2019Christian fallacy, Epistemology, General Philosophy, Man's Ability, reasonabsolutism vs compromise, contradiction as truth, judgemental Christians, reason vs contradictionArgo

I have heard it a million times…it’s become simply a toll I must pay daily to make my commute to philosophy and back. I am too much of an absolutist (I love that one…makes me sound almost tyrannical); too “black and white”. I am unwilling to compromise…things are either this or that, yes or no, there’s no room for negotiation, no allowance for mystery, the unknowable, divine intervention, truth beyond man’s mind; that there are notions and ideas which matter but which we cannot fully explain. Which of course begs the question: If we can’t really explain them, then how do we know they matter?

But we won’t worry about the rational failures coming from my critics. Rationality clearly isn’t a priority. Pity.

By being labeled an absolutist, too committed to stark demarcation between truth and lie; right and wrong; black and white, it is insinuated that I reject the bell curve. That I believe and assert that there is no such thing as degrees of anything, but all either is or is not. This is ludicrous. Now, I can understand how one might initially perceive this to be the case with me, as my focus is on rooting out contradiction from meaning and understanding…which is to say, to indicate what MUST be false, and from that determine what MUST thus be true, and then explain why truth then cannot be integrated with its own nullification (though I’m not sure why this needs explaining at all, exactly…once we know what must be false it seems to me a pretty direct and obvious line to the determination that it cannot also be true). So, in the sense that contradiction is in fact NOT a bell curve, yes, I am an absolutist. For example, the contradiction that says that it is somehow relevant for us to know that God controls all things but yet we are still responsible for our own moral choices is COMPLETELY false. Why? It’s obvious! Why does this even need explaining to anyone not five years-old or younger?! You cannot integrate the concept of personal responsibility with an utterly determinist God. To attempt to merge these mutually exclusive concepts is not “thinking in degrees” or some form of virtuous compromise, it’s complete bullshit and should be rejected out of hand by anyone with an ounce of intellectual integrity.

You don’t have ANY frame of reference for the assertion that A is simultaneously B! You can’t assert that such a contradiction is true without implying that you have NO MEANS by which you can EVER ascertain truth. Because your fundamental epistemology is rooted in the fact that something can both be true (God controls ALL things) AND false (man makes his own choices and thus bears responsibility for them, which means that God doesn’t actually control all things) at the same time. In which case truth is impossible, because it intersects with falsehood. Truth is and isn’t true, in other words. And THAT is nothing. Just irritating noise coming out of your mouth hole.

But by making it a constant theme in my philosophy that contradiction cannot somehow pass for rationally consistent truth I am called too rigid…an absolutist. Just too doggone black and white. No compromise; no bell curve. The only two flavors are chocolate and vanilla. The only dinner options are Italian and Mexican. The only breed of political ideology is American Republican or American Democrat. By rejecting contradiction as in any way meaningful, I somehow reject the existence of strawberry; believe that Chinese food is a myth, and declare that Libertarianism is only practiced in Fantasy Land. There are only dog people and cat people, no one ever owns a turtle; there are only squares or circles…the liar claims to prefer rectangles. There is no gray…no spectrum of color. My philosophy is fundamentalist in the most LITERAL and OVERT of ways. EVERYTHING is an illusion that isn’t A or B.

C, D, E etc. are mere interlopers.

I show myself nothing more than an immovable ideologue…nothing but “black and white” philosophy, you see, because I DARE commit the OUTRAGEOUS intellectual sin of declaring that black cannot simultaneously be white. This makes me a moral pariah to “learned” and “less judgemental” Christian acquaintances, who are much more versed in the holy and compassionate virtues of wisdom, compromise, temperance, and forgiveness than a recalcitrant asshole like myself could ever be. I’m a prick because I won’t let people have their cake and eat it, too. The bromide of soft contradiction is something I refuse to ingest, and that makes me a criminal.

Do you remember who it was that was so intent on convincing Adam and Eve that knowledge (truth) came from OUTSIDE of themselves, from a tree, and not from their own rational minds…not from living life as a thinking agent? Do you remember who it was that was so enthusiastic about the idea that man’s own reason had nothing fundamental to do with reality? That truth is a function not of man’s own innate ability to reason fact from fiction, and thus integrity from perniciousness, morality from mendacity, but from some special, magical, ethereal enlightenment granted from beyond? And thus implied that man’s mind itself could not be trusted to SAY what is TRUE at any given moment because what man says “IS” might simultaneously be “IS NOT”, and so man should simply accept a DICTATED truth, rather than think for himself….do you remember who this was?

You who are so quick to judge me as stubborn and cruel and arcane and abstruse and exacting and pedantic and judgemental…why don’t you root out the serpent in your own tree?

END PART ONE

unreformingtheology

Faith, Philosophy, Physics through Reason