Sophomoronology
Posted on 04 June 2010
A NEW SCIENCE
I propose the study of a new science, to be called Sophomoronology. It will investigate the pathology of philosophy, that is, this new science will study the causes and reasons behind the death of philosophy.
I do not propose merely a psychological study of why some folks believe, or say they believe, so many ideas that are so manifestly lacking in reason, common sense, and logic. Psychology is not our province here. Our province here is to identify the incentives which make it advantageous for a person to adopt and defend a certain philosophy. It is a study of the economics behind the growth and failure of philosophical schools, or, to use an older and clearer term, it is a study of temptations.
Keep in mind that the mere presence of an incentive does not imply that any particular person has decided to follow it; the mere existence of a temptation does not mean this man or that has fallen into it. It is possible, even likely, that most thinkers who believe a particular philosophy decided to adopt their system of beliefs honestly, and most thinkers uphold them because they conclude them to be true, and for no other reason.
Before turning to the study of philosophical autopsy, it behooves us to say briefly what a healthy philosophy looks like. What is philosophy?
PHILOSOPHY WHAT
Stated briefly, a philosophy is an attempt to take the maxims of the natural conscience and to use reason to extend the principles discovered to underpin those maxims to new and unfamiliar situations, namely, situations where our untrained conscience will not guide us.
For example, all men naturally know that camaraderie with one’s own peers and brothers-in-arms, both on the battlefield and in the feast hall, are admirable. Loyalty, generosity, and courage are traits of brotherhood, and the praise of these virtues is found in every civilization, and in prehistory, wherever men have peers and comrades. Wrath in combat was feared and admired, but so was gentleness and gentility in peacetime. It was an insight, a discovery of early philosophy, that the fortitude in adversity, not the actual anger which so often accompanied it, was the admirable principle, and ability to be bold in battle was not necessarily admirable in the camp or court, but, instead, the discrimination or judgment to know when to be truculent and when to be peaceful. This fortitude was distinguished as a virtue whereas anger was discovered to be merely a passion, and wrath a sin.
Likewise, everyone hates traitors and loves fidelity: this can be taken as a given in ethics, as clear and obvious an intuition as the topic admits. But this mere intuition is insufficient to tell a man caught in a paradox of loyalties whom to serve. When Clytemnestra, mother of Orestes, murdered Agamemnon his father, the filial piety Orestes owed his father was at odds with that owed his mother.
The human mind simply has no other rational way to proceed to discover the correct thing to do in such situations other than to regard the various and contrary moral intuitions of the conscience and seek a general or overarching system, that is, a principle or set of principles, a system of priorities and judgments, by which the complexity of the conscience can be explained. This is like the effort of astronomy to reduce the complexity of appearances to simple laws of mechanics. The human mind cannot simply chose to ignore the conscience any more than it can ignore the reason or ignore the senses or ignore any other faculty by which we perceive or discover truth.
Now imagine the noble pagan of Greece or Rome, seeking the common thread or common theme behind those virtues that lead to happiness, of which fortitude is one, judgment another. Aristotle proposed certain common principles to be followed by the magnanimous man, that he should be bold and just, moderate and even-tempered. The Stoics discovered an idea they called Cosmopolitanism, radically novel at the time, accepted without serious dispute today, which said that the same rules of moderations and justice which apply to our peers and brethren apply to barbarians and even slaves. The Christian discovered, or had revealed to them, an idea even more radical, which said all men were brothers, and merited our love. But without discussing the merit or demerit of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, or Christianity, let us merely note the philosophical evolution:
The reason attempts to find the common roots of the various moral maxims known to all man of all times, and to oppose those various excuses and self-justifications all men of all times use to quell the conscience. Primarily, philosophy is the study of virtue and reason, and only secondarily the study of more abstract questions, such as metaphysics, which are related to virtue and reason. The end or final cause of philosophy is to learn to suffer the pains and anxieties of life with a philosophical temper, that is, with the serenity that comes from a calm heart, clean conscience and a clear-eyed reason.
This, then is the picture of a healthy philosophy: it is contemplation of abstractions ranging from metaphysics to ethics, brought into daily practice by the subordination of the passions and appetites to the good government of the reason.
The various schools of philosophy differ according to the different conclusions reached about the basic abstractions or basic ideas about reality and the nature of reality, so that a Stoic will tell you not to steal because stealing offends innate duties, a Epicurean will tell you not to steal because stealing does not lend itself to pleasure rightly understood, a Utilitarian will tell you not to steal because it is against your self-interest rightly understood, a Platonist or Eudaimonian will tell you not the steal because it offends that Ideal of the Good by which the soul must be governed to achieve serenity, various theists will tell you not to steal because it offends the Sky-Father god, or the Way, or Nature, or the Almighty. In every case, the reason is exalted as the judge and umpire to which the various appetites and passions, and the insight of the conscience, must be referred to render a conclusion and a moral judgment on the rightness of an action. The point of philosophy is to codify the insights of the conscience, and to use reason to clarify cases where the intuitions of conscience are unclear. The point of philosophy is to train the soul to live and to live well.
But a modern intellectual will tell you to steal.
ANTI-PHILOSOPHY WHAT
There are certain philosophies, almost all of them modern, which are so nakedly and insolently absurd and irrational, defiantly irrational, that it strains credulity to say that the men who support it came by their conclusions honestly.
An attempt at an intelligent discussion with the partisans of unreason will prove neither edifying nor enlightening, because it consists almost entirely of persons less articulate, less well educated, less well read, and less insightful than yourself, and far less honest and upright, telling you how much smarter than you they are, and demanding you admire them.
In proof of their intellectual and moral superiority, they proffer a few incoherent slogans supporting the idea that humans are incapable of knowing the truth, and supporting the idea that some sickening or greasy crime, infanticide, theft, or sexual deviance, which all previous ages of mankind rejected in disgust, is for them licit.
I mean in this space to discuss a philosophy, which unfortunately does not lend itself to any particular name, but which in this essay I will call Intellectualism. It is the dominant and triumphant dogma of the modern (or postmodern) world. It is a collection of bits and pieces, scraps and patches, of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Logical Positivism and Behaviorism, often sprinkled with Darwin (or with a misreading of Darwin), perhaps with references to Einstein and Heisenberg, and almost always by people who have not read any of these authors. There is no coherent central principle, and there are countless local variations, but a few traits, something like a family resemblance, tends to emerge:
- In Epistemology, the Intellectual is a mystic who denies that he is a mystic.
- In Ethics, the Intellectual seeks the abolition of standards of decency and self-control, particularly in the area of sex and reproduction. He is a sexual revolutionary.
- In Physics, the Intellectual seeks to apply the findings of the physical sciences to areas where they do not belong, such as using Darwin to define human social relations, or using Einstein to support the idea that all ideas are relative. He says he is an empiricist, but he is really not. He merely uses the standards of empiricism to quell debate on topics not open to empirical investigation, so that ethics and economics and so on can be dismissed as unscientific without actually being examined.
- In Ontology, the Intellectual does not actually believe in the real world, or that objects exist. He often doubts whether he himself exists. The Intellectual is prone to Gnosticism.
- In Aesthetics, the Intellectual yearns for the ugly and incoherent, gibberish in his poetry, distortion in his paintings, noise in his music.
- In Politics, the Intellectual lusts for state control of the market, and ultimately of the minds of men: he is some variation of Socialist or Communist, but he rarely wishes to be called by those terms. He ascribes any differences of judgment or conclusion with himself to three causes: racism, sexism, and homophobia. Occasionally, he adds that you are a fascist. In sum, his politics consists of a lust for wealth he has not earned, and a hunger for control over your life and thought, and an accusation that you are a racist.
- In Semantics, the Intellectual is unfailingly a nominalist: he believes words are arbitrary, merely labels applied to things as part of a power struggle. The meanings of words are something manmade, not something men discover.
- In Theology, the Intellectual is vehemently anti-Christian, and his support of other faiths is proportionate to how well they can be used to oppose Christianity.
- In Logic, the Intellectual is allured to anything that seems to undermine or erode classical logic; the Intellectual prefers paradox to syllogism.
- In Metaphysics, the Intellectual mouths self-contradictory statements, paradox, gibberish, and nonsense. An Intellectual indeed can be defined as someone pretending to be a philosopher, but who cannot understand or follow a metaphysical argument.
- In person, the Intellectual is someone stupider than you who tells you he is smarter than you, and his whole ego hangs by that one slender thread of unrealistic self-assessment, or, to use an older and clearer term, vainglory.
Not all Intellectuals have all the traits, or, rather, these symptoms, in equal strengths. Different schools and schisms of the movement differ.
THE AUTOPSY
Modern philosophy is morbid. Those who follow it achieve the mere opposite of the goal of philosophers. Instead of being men of stoical and philosophical temper, who bear privation and pain with even temper, they are a generation of whiners, agitated over trifles. Instead of learning to control their passions, they learn to pervert and exaggerate them. Instead of peace, they urge and excuse tumult, riot, and violence. Instead of truth, propaganda. Instead of logic, nonsense.
To use a pragmatic and current example, the West is at war with Islamic nations who use the rhetoric of Civil Rights to mask their grisly and inhuman deeds of cowardly mass murder. The enemy goal is hegemony over the Near East, and the imposition of Sharia law, a draconian system of theocratic misogyny. Rather than heaping scorn and abhorrence on these fanatics, the modern intellectual helps, aids, abets, forgives and excuses them, even to the point of refusing to admit what he sees and knows. Instead of expressing solidarity for women trapped behind the veil, or for homosexuals stoned to death by this inhuman law, the modern intellectual blames the Christians for seeking theocracy, heaps scorn and mockery on Christ, and upbraids as racism jokes, criticism, or any other opposition to the Jihad program.
A more obvious spectacle of a culture committing cultural suicide cannot be imagined: it is too gross to be exaggerated.
What could make a whole peoples, once the conquerors of the globe and the leaders in philosophy, art, science, and all human achievements, into fawning toadeaters and lickspittles without sufficient courage or confidence to oppose the contemptible and nakedly evil demands of a weak, outnumbered, craven and incompetent enemy?
A vision of titans and giants bowing and trembling like slaves before an underfed and sickly rat, crowned and purple-robed as their conqueror, could not be more outrageous. What gives the sickly rat such power?
It is the power of the revenge of the conscience.
The modern intellectual tells himself the conscience, in effect, does not exist, or is merely an echo of social programming, the operation of gene mechanisms, or meaningless repetitions of data from the environment. But when the conscience, as umpire of the soul, condemns the soul as unworthy to exist, the man (whether he knows it or not, whether he admits it or not) begins to act as if he is unworthy to live, and so he seeks death and images of death.
What makes a titan bow before a rat is titanic guilt.
Let us proceed with the autopsy. There is a cruel and inevitable logic to the process by which philosophy, and then the civilization that follows it, dies the death.
ANTI-EPISTEMOLOGY
In order to justify what the human conscience cannot help but regard as undesirable or even wicked, the modern intellectual seeks to undermine the roots of all knowledge. The main attack of the modern intellectual is therefore epistemological: certainty (especially religious certainty) becomes the main enemy and the main target of scorn.
Uncertainty and nonjudgmentalism become the signs and passwords of moral superiority. Because this whole effort is rooted in the psychology of a guilty conscience, moral preening and seeking the peer approval of fellow intellectuals becomes the main topic.
So, even if the intellectual starts merely by being skeptical about the wisdom of his elders on one point or two, the logic of his position, willy-nilly, inclines him to be drawn one point after another into the wholly Uncertain and Nonjudgmental position.
I do not know if the particular case here is an example or not, but I notice a general pattern that applies to some, perhaps most, intellectuals. An intellectual of the modern kind will often find himself unable to condemn sadomasochism as perverse, because that would involve being judgmental, but the modern intellectual is required by his philosophy to condemn chastity as a perversion, because chastity by its nature makes a clear and distinct judgment about right and wrong. Such distinctions are forbidden by the modern intellectual epistemology.
Human nature makes it impossible to eliminate the conscience (or the reason) from human thought, including the thoughts of intellectuals. The intellectual hence becomes prey to whatever the fashionable moral code happens to be of his time and nation and little insular intellectual circle. Certain things, such as child abuse and bigotry against Blacks grow to be paramount issues of paramount importance, whereas other things, such as child-abortion and bigotry against Christians, things that have no less a claim on the conscience, are dismissed. The libertarian position of restricting moral imperatives only to those acts which harm and defraud others is insufficient for the modern intellectual: he continues to insist that speaking or thinking judgmentally about homosexuals, Islamists, whores or other protected mascot groups is fundamentally and abhorrently wrong.
But to what does he make his appeal in terms of right and wrong? On what grounds is it too obvious for discussion that the rule against fornication (for example) is a matter of opinion or a subjective or relative (if not monstrously oppressive) social artifice, whereas the rule against child neglect is a matter of absolute moral imperative not open to question or dispute? The double standard is both obvious to others and invisible to the intellectual.
Since the whole point of modern intellectualism is to sooth an unquiet conscience, this conviction of his own moral superiority, and this condemnation of others, is the prime and paramount consideration of this random grab-bag of rhetorical mechanisms, slogans, and unsupported assertions he calls his philosophy.
Condemnation is the point. The intellectual is an intellectual because he wants and needs to mock and deride the authority of his conscience, and therefore he must mock and deride any authority, spiritual or temporal, who echoes the authority of the conscience. He has to stick it to The Man. But if the epistemological claims of the intellectual were taken seriously, he would have no basis for condemning anything whatsoever.
ANTI-ETHICS
How can a philosophy that condemns nothing condemn authority?
A possible escape hatch offers itself in the concept of hypocrisy. The Intellectual finds that if the opposition can be found to contradict itself on any grounds, small or great, real or invented, then the skeptical epistemology of the intellectual can condemn the opponent without he (the skeptic) being required to take a stand or defend a position. If you do not really believe your moral code (so argues the intellectual) that is sufficient ground for me to condemn it, regardless of any surrounding code of morals or code of laws. I don’t condemn X because X is false according to my standard – I claim to have no standards – I condemn because X condemns itself on its own terms.
Since the accusation of hypocrisy is the only condemnation permissible in the non-condemnatory world of non-judgment and non-reason, it is popular to the point of being ubiquitous.
However, hypocrisy does not consist of two ideas contradicting each other. That is logic, and logic is a discipline which the Intellectual abandons with a sneer.
Hypocrisy consists of a man’s actions or character contradicting his stated values and goals. For this reason, the Intellectual’s argument consists almost exclusively of condemnations of the character of his opposition, particularly including opponents of whom he has no personal knowledge. Hence we see the Intellectual insist that he and he alone can discern read the hearts of man like God in the Bible, and the he and he alone knows what evil lurks in the hearts of man, like The Shadow on the radio. The Intellectual must attribute a bad motive or wicked character to his opponents at all costs, because his “argument” consists of almost nothing else.
The irony is that the intellectual position is hypocrisy itself. He is attempting to quell his conscience by arguing that having a conscience is unconscionable. He is attempting to excuse his own frailties and self-indulgences by pretending the conscience does not exist, but then he (without cracking a smile) has nothing but the conscience to which to appeal when he attempts to condemn his opposition.
The ethical stance of the Intellectual is merely to be against hypocrisy, by which he somehow always just so happens to mean the teachings of the Christian Church, such as that sex should be within marriage, between consenting adults of the opposite sex not related by blood, but he somehow always just so happens not to condemn non-Christian teachings, such as the Islamic practice of non-consensual polygamy and purdah, honor killings, or the practice of female genital mutilation. The Christian condemnation of homosexual acts as an expression of an objectively disordered appetite is hypocrisy, if not bigotry and hate-speech, is a source of endless wailing and gnashing of teeth, but the Islamic practice of stoning homosexual people to death or throwing them from rooftops provokes no criticism nor discontent, and is supported, if not with gentle words, then with silence.
Either (a) the Christians are rank hypocrites whereas the Islamic are self-consistent, or (b) the claims and calls of hypocrisy are themselves grossly and comically hypocritical.
I use sexual fidelity as the example above, but any number of other ethical areas could be adduced as examples. Intellectuals approve of theft on the grounds that “property is theft” and they approve of self-indulgence and self-destruction on the grounds that “if it feels good, do it” and they approve of murder, prenatal infanticide and euthanasia on the grounds that since life is sacred, we must end it whenever convenient to do so.
The Intellectuals approve of violence, riot and tumult when it is committed by the thugs and vermin called “activists” but when honest and law-abiding citizens gather for the redress of wrong or the petition of their government when taxes are high and public debt insupportable, the intellectuals call the citizens racist berserkers, and they quail and wail and gnash their teeth in the anxiety that brutal mass violence is about to erupt, and they speak in hushed tones about fleeing the country. When the hose on a two-pound canister of propane on the porch of a brother of a senator is chewed through by a squirrel, the Intellectual is convinced that the Tea Party movement is about to explode into a bloody supernova extinction-level event of murder and dismemberment; but when riot police are called out against looters and rampaging mobs in Copenhagen or Seattle, this is passed over without a word of condemnation.
Intellectuals tacitly approve of violence because they actively disapprove of reason. When reasoning is not possible between equals, then equality no longer exists; all that is left is the discipline of the superiors against the inferiors. In order to insure that they, at least in their own minds, occupy the status of superiors, the Intellectual pretends mental and moral accomplishments to which he is nowise entitled.
In general, the ethical system proposed by various schools of Intellectualism is the erosion of ethics, usually by means of asserting that one maxim of traditional ethics (such as kindness toward children or charity to the poor) overshadows and deletes another maxims of traditional ethics (such as respect for property, respect for the elderly, chastity, humility or honesty). Rarely or never is any explanation given as to why the one maxim has particular sanctity, whereas others equally as old, intuitively obvious, useful, universal and sacred are to be dethroned and desecrated.
To emphasize the particular arbitrary nature of the selection of maxims, let us remember the common slogans of 1968, where the ethic theorists of the time, Timothy Leary and Alfred Kinsey, urged us all to turn on and tune in and drop out, and to give up our hang-ups.
The emphasis was not to live a guilt free life by avoiding the acts that merit guilt. The emphasis was not to live righteously and avoid the occasion of sin.
The emphasis was to live a guilt free life NOT by changing your life, but by lowering or eliminating your standards of guilt.
Guilt was dismissed as a psychological defect, not an innate part of human nature. The promise was that we would live ethical lives by eliminating normal standards of ethics.
Now imagine, if our imagination can reach so far, if this same philosophy, or, rather this same lame sophistical excuse, were used against any moral principles or ethical maxims the intellectuals revere.
Imagine a Muslim coming forth from a house where he has just beheaded two homosexuals, and his beard and flowing robes are coated with steaming blood, and he holds the two heads by their hair in his hands. The intellectual, seeing the horror, screams. The Muslim says, “Chill out! I just wanted to kill them because that’s my bag, baby! It is who I am. You have some sort of hang-up about murdering the innocent? You got to get free of them there hang-up, Man! It’s bad for your aura! Peace and Love and Allahu Ackbar!”
Or imagine a like scenario with someone violating some other ethical maxim cherished of Intellectuals, such as despoiling the environment of the planet whose stewards we are, or beating or neglecting children, or inciting race-hatred, or peacefully protesting the government for the redress of grievances if the taxes and public debt is too high.
Would any Intellectual agree that his detestation for these immoral acts is merely a hang-up that he has to turn on, tune in, drop out of and simply get over?
ANTI-EMPIRICISM
You may have noticed that I speak of the epistemology of the modern intellectual entirely in the negative. I do not say that they are empiricists, because they are not. They do not have things they believe, they merely have a laundry list of things they do not believe. One of the justifications they use to add things to the list of non-belief is that the belief in question is not supported by empirical evidence.
That this standard can be used and can only be used for beliefs that are empirically disprovable to begin with does not register with them, even after it is pointed out.
Empiricists, real empiricists, believe that the universe is objective and real and that our senses and our thoughts in our consciousness correspond to that reality. The modern intellectual believes that reality is personal and fluid and illusionary, and that the consciousness is either an illusion produced by nothing for no reason, or a nothingness produced by an illusion for no reason.
(He actually believes nothing of the kind, of course. If you short change him at the Laundromat, he will insist with fervor equal to a theologian that four ones and one five does not equal a ten and ergo you owe him another dollar: it is only in philosophical discussions that he pretends he is a meat-robot with no consciousness and no free will, and that the laws of logic and math are epiphenomena of brain-atoms jarring in meaningless collision. Only your belief that A is A is a “meme”; his belief that the Laundromat short changed him a dollar is unquestionable truth.)
GNOSTICISM
The absence of an epistemology leaves the intellectual prey to Gnosticism. Gnosticism is the ancient heresy, perhaps the most ancient, which (among other things) taught that only an internal and ineffable truth was true.
Truth was a matter experienced esoterically: attempts to codify or categorize the ineffable were sinister schemes that resulted in the truth being lost.
The main advantage of Gnosticism is that it is unarguable and immediate: if I base my knowledge of reality on a noumenal mental experience which I can neither understand nor describe to another, that knowledge cannot be contradicted. One cannot contradict what cannot be dictated; you cannot speak against the unspeakable.
Gnosticism also preached that those who had this unutterable internal illumination were the enlightened, the moral and mental superior to the others, the materialistic men, the benighted. The failure of the benighted to recognize the enlightened as their natural superiors merely confirms how benighted they are!
Since the claim of superiority was not based on any actual accomplishments, neither of the intellect nor of the will, the Gnostic could claim the palms and crowns of saints and martyrs without actually suffering the devotions or privations or the indignities of being saints and martyrs. This is sort of like the Caucus race of the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland, where everyone gets a prize because everyone is a winner.
The real difference is that, unlike the Dodo, the Gnostic must exclude the swift from the race, because the prize of calling yourself enlightened has no value unless you deprive those who truly merit that title of it.
In ancient Gnosticism this was done by claiming the real saints and sages were the foolish dupes deceived by the Demiurge, who was a nigh-omnipotent Deceiver able to create and to deceive the world; in modern Gnosticism this is done by claiming the real saints and sages are bigots, or cowards, or narrow-minded, or fanatics, or deceived by meaningless taboos.
It is another irony that the modern Gnostics cannot even be troubled to invent a metaphysical framework for their claims of a Demiurge: they merely claim the deception exists without inventing a Deceiver.
ANTI-AESTHETICS
The theory of the Intellectual is that tastes in art are utterly subjective, or, perhaps, are instruments by which the strong oppress the weak. In reality, aesthetics is the emotional or imaginative version of the reality a man’s reason imparts to him. Art is his sense of life.
The dreary vomit of modern art exists because the modern artists are obsessed with images of death and unreason. Picasso’s jarring angles of meaningless visual gibberish are a violent rebellion against beauty: and in this rebellion the modern Intellectual finds crooked comfort.
To use a current example, I hear of an art museum whose exhibit includes a ‘performance artist’. Among the exhibits , patrons are invited to squeeze between a naked fat man and fat woman standing in a narrow doorway. The artist has previously performed such works of art as standing utterly still for an afternoon, or such as stabbing herself.
The dreary ugliness and shock value and schlock value is, of course, deliberate: it is at once a nihilist expression of the nausea and vacancy of the modern intellect, and the Gnostic rebellion against the beauty and order of the universe: gross for gross’s sake rather than art for art’s sake.
ANTI-POLITICS
Since the basis of the Intellectual moral and ethical theory is to do evil and call it good, no liberal or liberty-loving system of political economy will satisfy his purposes. His purpose is to avoid his conscience by inventing intellectual excuses to silence the voice of goodness in him. His excuse is one form or another of unreason, the belief that life makes no sense and life is anything (or nothing) you make it to be. The outcome of unreason is death.
A healthy philosophy regards the study of political economics to be some combination of using the force and majesty of the law to train the populous to virtue, or using the force and majesty of the law to secure the natural rights and property, wellbeing, common defense and peace of the people. In a healthy philosophy the first consideration of politics is the study of the nature of man and the nature of economics, in order to see how man can learn to live with his neighbor, and to learn what laws and customs cause the prosperity of nations or deter it.
All of this has no meaning for the Intellectual. For reasons given above, he is tempted to be a Gnostic, a mystic in rebellion against reality and logic. If logic says there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, the rebel against reality demands that the government provide free lunch. If reality says wealth is created by hard work in a legal context where property is sacrosanct and can be traded freely, the rebel says that Utopia will be achieved, and all work become play, once all prices and wages and rents are set by the government, and no one shall be secure in his property because someone else, who has not worked, has a greater need and therefore a moral demand for it.
Economics is the science that studies the invariant relations in an extended order, namely, the benefits that arise from civilization and from the specialization of labor, from the exchange of goods and services either through barter or through indirect exchange via a currency. It studies prices and wages and rents and interest, and discovers the laws of nature that govern these things. In sum, economics is the study of the price system given that we live in a world of sacristy of resources.
Socialism is the advocacy of the abolition of the price system, and the imposition of a system of fiat and rationing in its place, connected to an assertion, which has no support in experience nor logic, that the nature of reality will change, and resources, goods and services will no longer be scarce, once all goods are rationed.
Socialism is an attempt to dismantle the system of prices and wages and rents and interest, so as to render the victims within the orbit of the power of the socialist commonwealth no longer able to obtain the benefits of specialization of labor and of civilization. It is an attempt to abolish civilization in the name of utopia.
Socialism is not, as it so often is called, a study or a type of economics. It is a blank denial of economics, a series of rationalizations to explain away economics.
Because it is a ferocious denial of reality, and based on faith in unreality, Socialism not only fails, it fails in spectacularly humiliating and ghastly fashions.
The peaceful versions of socialism, such as Fabianism, produce merely poverty and meanness and social pathologies and the wreckage of ancient and one-proud civilizations; whereas the violent versions of socialism, such as Communism and Fascism and Nazism, produce mounds and mountains of innocent corpses, a magnitude of pain and death not even Tamerlane and Genghis could have conceived. But whether violent or nonviolent, socialism is the denial of economics and hence the denial of politics, and the end result, poverty, misery, insecurity and chaos, is the same.
Now, no one in his right mind can overcome his natural desire for life and pleasure and plenty. Hence, the Intellectual must adhere to falsehood as a primary principle of thought and speech in order to deceive himself and others down the path of unreason, pain, poverty, and death.
No socialist can talk honestly about socialism: hence Political Correctness must control his thought and speech, and yours, since factual correctness is forbidden, or, to use an older and clearer term, truth.
ANTI-TRUTH
The Intellectual regards words as tools, not as things, and words can have no necessary, native or natural relation to truth, since, for the Intellectual, truth is merely a fiction, a taboo, or a social mechanism for the control of the oppressed.
If you note the description of Intellectual Political Economics I gave above, the words always found to denounce opposition (racist, sexist, homophobe, fascist) are words without denotation, leeched of all meaning, having merely a shell of emotional connotations into which any topic can be thrust.
If you noticed that I said the intellectual is never satisfied by a liberal political system, you may be jarred, because the modern use of the word ‘liberal’ means a socialist, one who abhors liberty.The meaning of this word is obscured, and deliberately so.
The reason why rational discussion either with or about modern intellectuals is made difficult is because thousands of men for scores of years have cooperated, guided by no more conspiracy that loyalty to the same philosophy, to obscure the meaning of words and to excoriate and denounce those who do not cooperate with this obscuration.
Normal words with normal meanings, like ‘liberal’ and ‘socialist’ or ‘fascist’ or ‘terrorist’ are reversed in their meaning, so that an empire like Soviet Russia is called a ‘Republic’ and said to be run for ‘The People’.
Normal words with normal meaning, if that meaning carries a normal hint of obloquy, ‘tyrant’ or ‘whore’ or ‘wetback’ or ‘sodomite’ or ‘pervert’, are by a general consensus of intellectuals decreed beyond the pale.
Only words that have an emotional or propagandistic energy are welcomed, or words from which all meaning has been etiolated.
Among decent men, words are used for speaking, for conveying thought from mind to mind. Among intellectuals, words are using for chanting, for screaming, for shouting, for shrieking, preferably in a mob, or for putting on bumper stickers in an act of moral self-congratulation.
Such words are meant for emotion only, to express an inner and private reality, and could be with no loss of meaning substituted for the growls and roars and whines of brute beasts, or the twittering of birds.
Now, you might wonder, as do I, how sincere or serious such word-games might be? Calling a dog a bird does not allow it to fly. Calling a whore a sex-worker does not change the vice to a virtue. All that changing a word for another word does is swap one set of connotations for another, without changing the denotations. The old connotations soon creep to the new word, because the connotations are based in reality, and the Ministry of Truth issues yet another word whose meaning is even more bleached of meaning to serve in its place. In this way, ‘Paynim’ becomes ‘Muslim Terrorist’ becomes ‘Muslim Extremist’ becomes ‘Militant’ becomes ‘Activist for the Religion of Peace’.
No one alert to the trick would be fooled, and it can hardly fool oneself. So why do it?
Ah, but this confusion is the confusion of a philosopher, someone who thinks. Intellectuals prefer to emote than to think. For an emotional man, especially one prone to hysterical or excessive emotions, the emotional connotation of a word is all that matters. It does not have to be meaningful, only striking.
The springs out of and reinforced the metaphysical and epistemological belief of the intellectual. If there is no truth, is it just as true to call a slave-camp a republic, or call a whore a worker or call a terrorist a freedom fighter.
If there is no reality, my calling something by the changed name could change its nature, or, at least, the only part of nature with which the postmodern Intellectual concerns himself, his own subjective stance toward it. Reality is always merely in his head.
Why not change good words to evil, true to false? If there is no moral law, then there is no imperative to be honest. If everything is a matter of opinion or a matter of taste or a matter of social or genetic programming, then nothing means anything, and words mean nothing.
Let us pause to notice that this modern anti-Christian and anti-intellectual philosophy rules half the globe absolutely, and influences the central institutions of the other half, the media, the halls of power, the ivory towers, the marketplace and the courts of law, with an influence far beyond the numbers or merit of its partisans. It is a success as rapid and all conquering as the spread of Mohammedanism in the Seventh Century, and it overthrew province of the civilized and semi civilized world even more quickly and over larger tracts.
Hence on a practical level, the abuse and the contempt of language is done because it works, and, to judge from results, works remarkably well.
FAITH versus SOPHISTRY
How well? The only places where the philosophy of the Intellectual encounters resistance are where Christianity both was well regarded, reigned in the hearts of men, and resisted. This last element is crucial. In areas where the Christians, no matter how numerous, voiced no protest against their marginalization, such as in Modern Ireland, the descent of the Church from paramouncy to impotence was breathtakingly swift.
One would think other religions would also provide a bulwark against the cruel excesses of modern Intellectuals, but in point of fact, Islam, while rejecting the sexual libertinism of the moderns, has adopted without a blush the language and tactics and propaganda techniques of the Civic Rights movement and the terrorism of Marxist guerrillas. Socialists and Mohammedans also agree on the basic point of collective repressive totalitarianism imposed by terror, the abolition of the individual conscience and of the free market, and other features unique to Christendom.
Hinduism, which might provide a stronghold against Intellectualism, is not incompatible with socialism, and the Indian subcontinent has been smothered and deluged with socialist inanities for many decades, and is only now recovering.
Confucianism and Marxism go very nicely indeed together with each other.
Tribal religions such as animism are embraced by the Intellectuals, who admire every form of spiritualism except Christianity.
Judaism is beholden to and practically owned by the political Left, and continues to serve and support the Intellectual movements both in Israel and around the world even while the world Intellectuals conspire to destroy Israel, and never cease to express their hatred of her. Why the Jews continue to flatter and support and excuse their open and deadly enemies, and continue to distrust and despise their friends and supporters among Christians, especially Evangelicals and Catholics, is a mystery only the end of time will reveal.
ANTI-CHRIST
That bigotry and hatred against Christ and His Church is the sole and singular bigotry thought to be both witty and entertaining and socially acceptable among the Intellectuals is too obvious to need any emphasis from me.
I will point to a single example among countless: in a book about the staged Danish Cartoon Riots, the publisher decided not to print the cartoons in question, on the ground that it might be perceived as insensitive to Islam. Meanwhile Comedy Central, at the time of this writing, plans to field a show about Jesus Christ living in modern Manhattan, trying to escape the control of his overbearing father, addicted to internet porn, and defecating on President Bush.
In any number of private conversations with Intellectuals, even back when I was an atheist, I have had the disconcerting experience of discussing one topic, say, for example, ethics, self-discipline, chastity, and virtue, when suddenly before my wondering eyes, my partner in the debate would suddenly transform into a bleary-headed Antichrist, and start ranting and vaunting on and on about how he did not believe in God. As best I can tell, the rant had the most tenuous relation to the topic, or no relation at all. Libertarians and Leftists were particularly prone to this, but the behavior was by no means found in them only.
As I said, being at that time an atheist myself, I had no quarrel with their disbelief in God, and, indeed, I had much more rigorously logical reasons than theirs for my atheism, including reasons not based on gross historical inaccuracies, and including reasons not based on anger and contempt against a being I took to be non-existent.
But no, somehow the conversation swerved into this strange Wonderland of Humpty-Dumpty logic, where I was told in thundering tones that (1) God did not exist (2) God favored self-discipline, chastity, and virtue and therefore (3) Self-discipline, chastity, and virtue must be avoided at all costs, lest God win some sort of moral victory.
Try as I might, I could see no necessary logical relation between the three statements, but it happened often enough, and from several different people in several walks of life, that I realized I was seeing a pattern.
These were men scandalized by the excesses of the Crusades, but not of the Paynim conquests of Asia Minor and North Africa and the Middle-East. Conquering the Holy Land in the name of Allah was unremarkable, but re-Conquering it in the name of Christ was abhorrent, the worst excess of history. Likewise, the Spanish Inquisition was thunderously condemned, but the much bloodier and more thorough and ruthless inquisitions and purges of Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Castro and Pol Pot escaped their notice, or the religious wars between Shiite and Sunni, or the Shinto-based Emperor-worship of the Imperial Japanese during World War Two.
The pattern was this: the atheists with whom I spoke were not real atheists. Real atheists disbelieve in Jove as well as in Jehovah, and have no more respect or disrespect for Confucius as for Christ, Lao Tzu or Luther or Thor. Real atheists simply don’t believe in ghosts or ghostly things.
These were not real atheists, they were merely anti-Christians. They were willing to believe in any ghosts, from Casper to Captain Gregg, provided they were not Holy. The only god in which they did not believe was the God of Abraham.
UNREASON
So the modern sophomore ends up in the awkward rhetorical position of both claiming to be our enlightened intellectual-moral superior, but also claiming sexual perversion is not perverse, but that sexual self-control is. Vice is courage and virtue is evil. Wrong is right and right is wrong. A is not-A.
Not just his conscience but his reason is suborned.
Obviously, a sincere skeptic who made no moral value judgments could not condemn chastity any more than he could condemn unchastity, nor could he condemn the enforcement at law of moral norms any more than he could condemn the liberty at law to disregard moral norms, because he can condemn nothing. To be perfectly consistent, the sincere skeptic also could not condemn the lack of skepticism as wrong.
If I chose to be what a non-hypocritical skeptic saw as utterly gullible and intellectually dishonest, believing things on blind faith merely because it pleased me, or because I was too craven and unimaginative to dare think otherwise, he could not condemn that gullibility or dishonesty or cowardice any more than he could condemn unchastity or drunkenness. If there are no rules for the goose, there are none for the gander.
ANTI-METAPHYSICS
Finally, with this mess of illogic as their philosophy, we can expect, and our expectations are not cheated, to find that Intellectuals are helpless and incoherent when the topic turns to Metaphysics. What was once the Queen of the Sciences, in modern hands, is not even a slattern.
One of the main thrusts of modern philosophy, and its main source of confusion and morbidity, is the attempt to do away with metaphysics.
Now metaphysics, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, does not mean table-tipping or Tarot card reading. It refers to the examination of being as such, the reasoning about of those things which are necessarily true in this or any possible universe. Metaphysics concerns such topics as the nature of being, the nature of reality and the relation of the mind to it, the relation between cause and effect and free will, the nature of logic, and so on. All of these are based on metaphysical principles.
In the opening chapter of his ELEMENTS, Euclid, with a clarity rarely seen in more modern textbooks, lays out with admirable precision his definitions, common notions, and first principles or axioms without which the science of geometry cannot be reduced to a set of rigorous deductions. Metaphysics is the study of the axioms and common notions of the other philosophies and sciences, including natural philosophy.
By its very nature, conclusions or inductions of metaphysics cannot be opened to empirical verification or empirical dispute. The materialist who believes that nothing exists by atoms in motion, and that consciousness is an illusion, and the immaterialist who believes that nothing exists but consciousness, and that matter is an illusion, and the Buddhist who believes that nothing exists, neither consciousness nor matter, all three could see a ray of light deflected around the sun during an eclipse, and come to the conclusion that Einstein’s predictions of what their senses would tell them about the physical world was correct. All three could be convinced of the conclusions of physics without it having the least influence on their metaphysics. This is because metaphysics is not an empirical science.
Indeed, empiricism is not an empirical science, it is a theory of epistemology. No physicists was convinced by an experiment that there is regularity in nature and that the complexity of appearances have in underlying simple relation. No one saw Occam’s Razor through a spyglass like Galileo seeing the moons of Jupiter. Empiricism is a conclusion of metaphysical principle, a principle which says that we men are rational beings who live in a rational universe, and that the objects and events in the universe have a nature, a physis, that can be described in terms of simpler elements or proportions or equations.
Do not be deceived! It is a common mistake to assume that because the materialist believes in matter, his metaphysics are somehow more modern, more scientific, or more empirically verifiable than immaterialism or Buddhism. Nonsense. Modern scientific thought is characterized, as Newtonian thought was not, by the presence of an observer. The whole of modern physics rests on the principle that the observer influences what he observes: this is the core of the Heisenberg principle. An observation is a mental, not a physical, act. An observation, also called a perception, logically implies a perceiver and a perceived. A materialist argues that there are atoms in motion, but no movers, no mind, no one to perceive, that perceptions themselves are merely atoms–in other words, he argues that there are no observers. His argument would be more at home in the universe of Newton, or, more likely, Lucretius. In truth, no argument or observation from the physical sciences gives any preference to materialism over immaterialism, dualism, monism, spiritualism, Buddhism or What-have-you-ism.
The prevalence of materialism among the schools of modern Intellectualism has to do more with their ethics than their metaphysics. A materialist argues that no man is responsible for any of his acts, since the brain is merely a mechanism programmed by blind nature or inhuman historical or cultural forces, or shaped by selfish genetic molecules into its conclusions, axioms, preferences, and judgments.
Obviously no sane person believes this even for a second: moral categorization of human behavior is an inescapable metaphysical category. If it were not so, we would regard even the act of being dishonest during a philosophical debate as a fact, not an act.
Facts have no moral component: something either is merely the case, or it is not. Acts have a moral component: an act is good, bad, or indifferent, but it is not merely a fact. A materialist who pretends that my acts are facts, him I can dismiss by saying my brain is programmed not to regard his arguments, or “memes”, as valid, and I say that while I know that it is illegitimate to ignore a valid argument, I cannot act on this knowledge. Somehow, no materialist is ever convinced by this logic. Maybe their brains are pre-programmed to reject it.
But materialism is irresponsible, since it alleviates by special pleading any particular act from moral condemnation. Buddhism and immaterialism do not have this particular quality of irresponsibility, and so have no incentive, and offer no temptation, to the sophomoric or moronic mind.
Immaterialism does not help the Intellectual to achieve an unearned sense of intellectual grandeur or moral sanctity to believe in consciousness, and so such a belief is under-incentivized.
WHY SMARTS?
You might be wondering why Smartness is the quality that the Intellectual reveres and reserves to himself as his badge of honor, and why moral uprightness?
There are two reasons making these things the centerpiece as the feast of self-admiration rather than something else.
The first reason is invisibility. Smarts are invisible. If you went around claiming you were tall, people could look at the crown of your head and measure its distance to the floor, and therefore confirm if you were boasting. If you claimed you were heroically brave, they could look at your chest to see if you have any medals there; or if you claimed you were a poetic genius, they could read your poems. And so on. But to be smart, all you have to do is repeat like a magpie whatever the people self-identified as the Smart Set say. You do not have to be Einstein to repeat E=MC^2. All you have to do is memorize it and utter it when appropriate.
You can be as dim as a Rock Star, and still make jokes demeaning a president whose scholastic and academic accomplishments outstrip your own considerably, and be greeted with applause rather than hoots of disbelief, because no one can actually check your smarts against the President.
You (the rock star) say all the right things, and he (the Republican) says things the Smart Set scorn, so it must be a gift in innately superior intelligence that leads you aright, and sets you to parroting the popular conformity, and not a defect of the independence of your thought and the poverty of your insight.
The second reason is neutrality. Keep in mind that the Intellectual lives in an aggressively amoral universe. He recites the maxims of Nietzsche, and wants to live like the Superman, beyond good and evil; he recites the maxims of Marx, and wants to justify any crime in the name of the greater good. This is not because he believes Nietzsche or Marx (indeed, it is unlikely that he has read either) it is because he wants to live in a universe where his conscience is arbitrary, and therefore its messages of right and wrong can be and should be ignored. So the Intellectual cannot compliment himself on any objectively good virtue, since virtue and vice do not exist in his mental universe, and he would rather not compliment himself on some merely subjective preference. But Smartness is scientific! It can be measured by I.Q. tests! It is objective! It is so very modern!
It would be embarrassing to vaunt over your moral supremacy when the whole point of the exercise is to dismiss morality as an arbitrary taboo or as a tool of oppression against the weak. Intellectuals do this nonetheless, to be sure, but vaunting over one’s own intelligence does not suffer this obvious drawback.
Let us add a third reason. In addition to being invisible and neutral, claiming smartness is a flexible and ever-ready excuse to avoid any demand one exercise it. If you are smart, you give yourself a free pass to disregard the rules of courtesy and integrity that bind the lesser folk.
If one is smartly Smart, one need not bother arguing with the stupid people, who, by some odd coincidence, always just so happen to be Christians or Republicans or both, and who just so happen to remind you of your father.
And since all the people who disagree with what the Smart Set is saying this season are stoopids, one need never argue with them. Indeed, one need never argue or reason at all, examine one’s premises, think through the implications of one’s beliefs, or do any of the hard and tedious brain-work that real philosophers have been known to do. One need not cultivate a scrupulous sense of intellectual honesty, or show any courtesy or chivalry to one’s foes and opponents in debate.
In a word, telling yourself you are smart is like a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card: it is an excuse for mental torpor and smugness that never stops excusing. Why, you don’t even have to explain yourself to anyone! If you are smarter than they are, then they are just wasting your time!
And since the intelligence of other people is always known only indirectly, whereas a man’s own wits are known to him at first hand, it is relatively easy and painless to underestimate the intelligence of others, and to overestimate one’s own.
The Intellectual can explain his inferiority to men of common sense and common decency merely by attributing their conclusions and convictions to some unworthy motive or mental defect: they are not smart nor bold nor pure-minded enough, as I am (so he tells himself) to violate the various commandments of morality and prudence.
He ascribes his difference of opinion with them not to a defect of his experience, or the distortion of his conscience, or the insubordination of his passions, but instead to their lack of mental acuity.
This becomes an article of faith, unquestioned and unquestionable. Even when enormities no one can ignore are pressed upon his awareness, such as when a devout Socialist sees the 250,000,000 murders caused by Communism in the last century, the Intellectual, due to his superior smartness, can smartly deny with a smirk of smartness that there is anything wrong with his theory. It is reality that is deficient.
VANITY
The root of the Philosophy, or, rather the Sophistry, I have here examined is vanity or vainglory. I have spoken of the various incentives or temptations that make is easier for a Sophist to argue as he does, but I have not said why he takes the easy road rather than the honest one. The psychological reason will differ from man to man, but the sophomoronic reason, the thing that makes his philosophy easier to defend and articulate, is a cost to benefit calculus.
You see, the Sophist can, on a moral level, treat himself to the palm and honors of a martyr without suffering the discomforts or torture of martyrdom merely by likening any moral rules he wishes to discard to the crucifix and raging lions of oppression. He gets to wrap himself in Christlike sanctity, the poor victim, without suffering the passion of the Christ, all those messy whips and painful nails and such. Far from it! Merely by bashing Christ and praising socialist thugs or sexual oddities, the anti-martyr can find himself larded with praise for his nonconformist bravery.
On an intellectual level, the Sophist can treat himself to the laurels of a philosopher, and think himself as wise a Socrates, without ever once either questioning anything he is bottle-fed, or causing any gadfly disturbances to his insular circle of intellectual friends, flatters, and cheerleaders. The anti-philosopher is in no danger of disturbing the flabby excrescences of his comfortable biases, uninformed opinions, fashionable daydreams, or drifting visions of Utopia. He certainly is in no danger of the hemlock.
He gets freely what he has no right and no ability to earn. But it is all vanity, vainglory, and passing gas. There is no substance and no reality to it.
Like the ever inflating currency the Intellectuals so adore, worthless paper money with no gold to back it, there is nothing backing the vainglory. Inflation means the virtue or utility or value of the debased good adjusts to its new low level. The prize awarded the Dodo in the Caucus Race is really not worth a thimble.
So, likewise, here: the self-praise of a man of modest intellectual accomplishments overvaluing himself above his betters, the great and wise philosophers and sages of old, must inevitably ring hollow. The conscience of the Intellectual can be pushed under a pillow to smother its words, but it cannot be asphyxiated. Something else must be done to silence the whisper of truth.
That something can take several forms, either irony or love of paradox, but the final form is always nihilism, the belief in nothing at all, the belief that no philosophy is better than any.
Because humor allows a man to speak a paradox and get a smile rather than being asked why he contradicted himself, humor is usually the defense mechanism used here. Because it is not funny in the least, it is that particular humorless humor called irony, where a man can contradict himself, but it is considered gauche to ask for a clarification or retraction.
Irony is the emotional counterpart to the intellectual conclusion called nihilism. Irony is deadness in the mirth and soul in the same way that nihilism is deadness in the reason.
Lest it be noticed that I reserve most of my scorn for Sophists of the political Left, let me use an example from a conservative. In his most recent column, conservative pundit John Derbyshire announces that human consciousness will soon be scientifically proven to be illusory. To whom this will be proven, if neither we exist nor any standards or operations of proof exist, is left unasked and unanswered.
Let me quote him word for word, because it is more stupid than even I, a relatively imaginative science fiction writer, could ever imagine.
http://article.nationalreview.com/435258/genomics-and-humanitys-future/john-derbyshire
Living processes, presumably including those that comprise human thought and feeling, are complicated chemical reactions. … Our folk metaphysics [here he means a belief in the human consciousness] is false; the facts uncovered by science are true.
Can we live without comforting falsehoods, though? Or rather: How many of us can? There is a line of thought … which argues that life is insupportable without self-deception.
The overall picture that emerges from the cognitive science researches of the last half century is one of a brain that struggles to cope with reality, and rarely does very well at it.
Worse yet: its not doing very well may be adaptive. That’s a term of art in biology. A trait is adaptive if an organism that possesses this trait gets a reproductive edge thereby over an organism that doesn’t.
Derb is saying that his mind now knows that his mind does not exist and knowledge has no truth content, i.e., no knowledge. Since this is an obvious self-contradiction, as impossible as a man biting off his own head and swallowing it, John Derbyshire merely retreats into the posture of irony. He pretends that the absurdity is not a logical absurdity but a humorous absurdity, and he with a smile invites us to share in the joke.
And note the sly invitation (or rather, how many of us can live without self-deception?) to join him in his intellectual hermit cell or hermetic cell, where we few, we happy few, who know that we do not exist and that our thoughts and feelings are merely chemical reactions, can smile without mirth in gloomy melancholia at the hoi polloi, the deceived masses of dupes, fools like Aristotle and Aquinas, who believe that belief exists and logically implies a believer and a thing believed.
We enlightened believe in non-belief, because that is the non-conclusion of the non-logic of our non-minds.
DEATH
I also note with some disquiet that John Derbyshire ends with an admission that to be totally honest in one’s own thought is maladaptive, and creates a death wish or some sort of tendency to die. In other words, as in an HP Lovecraft tale, to know the truth will not set you free, it will drive you mad or to an early grave, since the truth is something horrific. You can’t handle the truth.
Now, my suspicion is that this is not an admission, but an invitation, since the allure of death always walks closely in the footsteps the allure of such vacuous nihilistic intellectualisms.
The intellectual knows his intellectual accomplishments are modest; at some level, he knows he is a sophist, and not a philosopher; at some level, he knows that to abandon reason is to abandon life. In the case of men like Mr. Derbyshire, a lukewarm Christian who lost his faith to neuroscience and general weariness, the infidel knows at some level that he has forsworn not only life, but life eternal. Suddenly death seems as appealing a figure as something from a Neil Gaiman comic: not the Grim Reaper, but the welcoming silence that will at least smother the buzzing cries of that cricket conscience, and drown all sorrow and stale disappointment in endless dark oblivion.
But this is merely speculation. I am not a psychologist. I cannot say whether that writer in particular yields to the temptation of embracing a death wish.
But I can say that once a man believes his mind does not exist, or lies to him and lies all the time, that his thoughts and wishes are merely chemicals, that his dreams are false and his sense of self and soul is a gross mistake, once a man embraces a sophistical opinion that the mind is mindless, it is but a small step, and a tempting one, to embrace nihilism, the belief that everything is nothing, and that death is preferable to life.
Whether any particular man yields t that silent siren song of death, and takes that small step, is up to him: for now, we can merely conclude that taking that step is coherent with the other elements that make up the philosophy of modern intellectualism.
A WORD OF WARNING
So what is the conclusion of our new science of Sophomoronology, when applied to the incoherent flotilla of ideas I here labeled ‘Intellectualism’. Does this mean that when we come across an Intellectual we can proudly tell him he believes what he believes for such-and-such a reason, and that since the reason is illegitimate, ergo his beliefs are false?
No! Not if we are true philosophers or even honest men! It does not necessarily follow that a bad motive leads to a false conclusion. An Intellectual with the most wretched and self-serving motive in the world could get a post as a tenured professor, and use his position to train the young and innocent minds under his tutelage that his various paradoxes and mutterings and peepings are the Gospel truth. The young and innocent will then go with vacant smiles out into the great wide world, filled with the joy and enthusiasm of youth, and preach the doctrines of misery and decay and death, all the while thinking they are doing the world a favor, nay, verily, thinking that they are crusaders saving the world from the forces of wickedness, who always (somehow) just so happen to be Republicans or Christians or both.
You will never know if the seething, stinking wrongness, ambiguity, nonsense and vainglory is coming from a tenured professor of evil, who knows he serves the cause of unreason and unlife, or if the nonsense is being parroted by a glassy-eyed blank-smiling youth or maiden full of goodness and crusading zeal.
Telling them the causes of their belief is not the same as telling them the reason for the belief.
The reason for the conclusion is the logic of the axioms. That is the level at which a philosophical discussion plays out. The cause can be psychological or personal or due to the temptations I here listed in my shiny new science of Sophomoronology. These causes form no part of a serious discussion.
CONCLUSION
The modern intellectual is morally backward and simpleminded hypocrite, afflicted by a death wish and having execrably bad taste in art, no training in logic, and little ability to make even common sense deductions of moral calculation, but his modern self-esteem leads him to believe he is a moral genius as well as an intellectual giant.
However, the process of logic that continues to operate even in a mind devoted to illogic creates an incentive, or a temptation, for the Intellectual, even if at first goodwilled and honest, to renounce epistemology, reason, philosophy, ethics, economics, and all other rigorous intellectual achievements. If he surrenders to these temptations, he becomes a emotional pawn of whatever the current fashions happen to be, readily angry, easily offended by the most trivial of symbols, utterly indifferent to massive suffering of real people in the real world. Intellectualism is a philosophy that hates philosophy and kills the intellect.
The ancients pegged this psychological type by coining the term “sophomore” the wise fool, and the ancient Jews exhaustively described this psychological type in the book of Proverbs and elsewhere. It is nothing new. The only novelty is the power and influence this childish sophistry now commands, which rules half the globe and dominates the other half.
Intellectualism would be comical in its clumsy absurdity were it not so dangerous and gross, in the same way a red-nosed clown in floppy shoes is no longer a figure of fun once you spy the bloodstained chainsaw in his fists.
o.o Wow.
Let me catch my breath.
Sophomoronology… so they never got over their teen age, huh? ::snicker::
There are any numbers of permanent sophmores out there. . . .
“It is possible, even likely, that most thinkers who believe a particular philosophy decided to adopt their system of beliefs honestly, and most thinkers uphold them because they conclude them to be true, and for no other reason.”
This may fall under the heading of “causes”, and therefore not properly belong in this discussion as per your conclusion, but if you felt like a digression on this point I would be interested to hear your thoughts. What experiences do you find cause people to adopt Sophomoronology (Sophomoristry?), or would cause them to think its assertions and positions, as you describe them above, to be true?
For myself, I find it has a distinct tendency to be based on a very subtle and vicious trap, in that it almost always takes root by browbeating its neophytes about some example of suffering, then casting that suffering as an arbitrary and unjust thing that must be alleviated or eliminated by any means necessary. If that particular example is an arbitrary and unjust one, all the better; if it’s personal to the neophyte, or he’s sufficiently imaginative and empathetic to internalize it as if it was, even more so. And from there the neophyte is primed to accept the greatest step of all: dispensing with moral guidelines and philosophical principles wherever and whenever they can be presented as causing “unnecessary” suffering or preventing its alleviation.
(The casting of chastity as a form of intolerable suffering is unique to this age, largely because until the 20th century it was impossible for all but a very rich few to be nymphomaniacally unchaste without the economic and medical cost of it biting you in the butt in short order. But even chastity is cast not as sexual deprivation but as loss of or lack of True Love — who could be against denying anyone Love?)
I do feel you may be unfairly harsh on those who espouse Intellectualist beliefs, in that I generally find most followers of *most* philosophies tend to be less educated and less certain in their understanding of it than they wish to give out. (God knows I ain’t read much Aquinas or Augustine, for all I bloviate here.) Philosophical competence does require a combination of time, aptitude, opportunity, discipline and inclination that only a comparative few have the luck to possess; most people in most movements tend to make do with the talking points.
Ah — love!
How dare anyone notice that love does not allows mean the desire for the good of another and, indeed, (under various meanings of the word) has inspired numerous vicious crimes.
“I do feel you may be unfairly harsh on those who espouse Intellectualist beliefs, in that I generally find most followers of *most* philosophies tend to be less educated and less certain in their understanding of it than they wish to give out.”
Anyone who speaks of high things humbly, or admits, like Socrates, of how much he does not know, does not earn my discontent or fall under my poisoned pen.
I am not being harsh at all — if a layman wants to discuss philosophy with a philosopher, let him realize that philosophy is a discipline, as much as any other science or field of study, and let the layman not assume the lecturing, hectoring, condescending, overbearing, smug, smarmy, scornful approach and attitude of a wise fool.
Precis: most people who think about philosophy aren’t Catholic; also, they’re bad people.
We’re all bad people. We just vary in the degree and nature of our badness, in the accuracy with which we assess that, and the honesty with which we admit it.
>> “We’re all bad people.”
First – yuck. Second, by what standard? To what or whom are you comparing when you say we are all bad people?
Well, to Christ, basically.
All of us are sinners, possessed of selfish, self-destructive and exploitative instincts and desires that none of us restrain 100%; all of us hurt other people knowingly, deliberately and unnecessarily for our own benefit, to some degree or other. The majority of us keep this down to a minimum and feel bad about it, but not a single one of us can say “I don’t do it.” Only one Man could, and He had the advantage of also being God.
This doesn’t mean you can’t, or shouldn’t try to, productively differentiate between degrees of that difference. Rapists, drug dealers, thieves and murderers should be in jail, and our own inability to achieve absolute moral perfection is not a reason not to give up on such efforts.
I just think summarizing Mr. Wright’s essay as saying “non-philosophers are bad people” — and implying that you thought he was also really saying, “and therefore Philosophers like Me are really GOOD People!”, which did seem to be the subtext of your reductio — is a bit of an oversimplification. If that’s just me oversensitively reading too much into your comment, I apologize and will withdraw this post at your request.
robertjwizard isn’t me.
Anyway, while certainly a one-sentence precis is going to contain some kind of simplification, I don’t think it’s wrong in the particular way you say it is.
After all, the subtext could be “and therefore Philosophers like Me are really better People!”
And after all a rich man is the one who makes more than his brothers-in-law
>> “Well, to Christ, basically.” >> “Only one Man could, and He had the advantage of also being God.”
Well you are doomed to failure if your standard is the non-human. He had the advantage of also being God. You hold yourself up to the standard of the creator of everything? Would you not think it unfair to be judged (whether by your self, others, or Him) when the cards are absolutely stacked in favor of he that cannot possibly fail?
>> “All of us are sinners, possessed of selfish, self-destructive and exploitative instincts and desires that none of us restrain 100%; all of us hurt other people knowingly, deliberately and unnecessarily for our own benefit, to some degree or other. The majority of us keep this down to a minimum and feel bad about it, but not a single one of us can say “I don’t do it.” Only one Man could, and He had the advantage of also being God.”
How do you have access to the motivations of all of mankind? I have always found this characteristic of the Christian to be most baffling. Are Christians just nasty people that assume man by nature must be just as nasty as they are? I doubt this. Is it by empirical observation? Some testimony will witness this, but does not ground it as necessary from human nature.
Do you knowingly hurt people? And for your own benefit (although the benefactor of the action of hurting others is not really relevant, especially from the victim’s point of view)? Do you have a desire to do so?
>> “This doesn’t mean you can’t, or shouldn’t try to, productively differentiate between degrees of that difference. Rapists, drug dealers, thieves and murderers should be in jail,…”
I do not differentiate between degrees in this context, but differences in kind. The difference between myself and a rapist is not one of degree. I am not a “mild” or “passive” or “repressed” rapist – I am not a rapist, and I share none of his characteristics. There is a universe of difference between falling short of absolute moral perfection (using “moral perfection” in a completely generic sense) and engaging in total evil.
At least from this perspective I can grasp the Christian concept of forgiveness. Viewing man as a piece of mud by nature one would have to forgive everyone of everything. I do not believe in forgiveness.
On your last paragraph: you got me mixed up with WF who posted right before me. I wish Mr. Wright would stay with LiveJournal for this reason alone.
Some of us do not find “I am not a rapist” to be a sterling proclamation of virtue.
“Precis: most people who think about philosophy aren’t Catholic; also, they’re bad people.”
Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, I offer this as exhibit A of the mindset described and defined above. Note the lack of coherent argument, note the snide and condescending tone, note that it is an ad hominem argument, mocking me rather than mocking the argument, and note that the writer brings up religion, when religion is not the topic.
It always amuses me to write some conclusion I held when I was an atheist, which I can defend on entirely secular grounds of prudence and logic, and watch my feckless opponents, whose only concern (apparently) is to denounce religion in general, the Christian religion in particular, and the Catholic Church most of all, rather than to discuss the matter.
Labeled Exhibit A.
Is it not true that the worldview that informs the post is held primarily by people who are Catholic?
“Is it not true that the worldview that informs the post is held primarily by people who are Catholic?”
I believe most or all Catholics hold that twice two is four, that fire can burn you and water can wet you, yes.
The ad hominem form of argument is an informal logical error, because even if a Catholic believes twice two is four because he is Catholic, this is merely the cause, and not the reason, for the conclusion. The conclusion stands or falls on its own merits, independently of who believes it or for what cause.
(I am using ’cause’ here to mean efficient or historical cause, and ‘reason’ to mean formal or final cause.)
To answer your question, no, this post expresses the conclusions I came to as an atheist. Unlike modern atheists, I merely happened to be an atheist who believed in logic. I realize this is getter more and more rare these days, but it is not impossible. There are many rational atheists. Their numbers are shrinking, because they are being overshadowed by people who, frankly, cannot tell the difference between a valid argument and an informal logical error.
The ad hominem form of argument is an informal logical error, because even if a Catholic believes twice two is four because he is Catholic, this is merely the cause, and not the reason, for the conclusion. The conclusion stands or falls on its own merits, independently of who believes it or for what cause.
This is of course true.
To answer your question, no, this post expresses the conclusions I came to as an atheist.
That doesn’t answer my question at all. Nor does the “water is wet” claim, since everyone thinks that, but not everyone shares the worldview that informs the post. The question, again, was whether it’s true that the worldview expressed in this post is held primarily by Catholics.
The answer to your question is no. Everyone, not just Catholics, everyone except for followers of that philosophy here called Intellectualism, shares the worldview expressed in this post.
Keeping in mind that not all intellectuals agree with each other on all points, we can nonetheless note a certain tendency whereby the Intellectual denies and rebel against, not merely against the Catholic worldview, but against all rational or mystical world views whatsoever.
1. The intellectual denies Confucius, because Confucius holds that defining words accurately is the beginning of wisdom, whereas the intellectual holds that word have no meaning.
2. The intellectual denies Buddha, because Buddha holds that right action consists of overcoming suffering by resignation of human desire, whereas the intellectual holds that right action consists of exaggerating desires and demanding redress.
3. The intellectual denies Odin, who holds that courage in battle is a paramount good.
4. The intellectual denies Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, because the intellectual holds that reality is radically subjective, and not vulnerable to analysis by the reason.
5. The intellectual denies the Jewish and Islamic writers, because the intellectual holds that sexual libertinism is a right, and sexual perversion is glorious rather than shameful.
6. The intellectual denies Osirus, because the Intellectual does not believe in Maat or Mi or any other concept of universal good or harmony.
7. The intellectual denies Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Cicero, because the intellectual denies the four classical virtues and the concept of duty.
8. The intellectual denies Luther and Calvin, because the intellectual denies that man is justified by faith, or that omniscient God determined the damnation and salvation of every soul before Creation.
9. The intellectual denies Euclid, because he hold rational conclusions about eternal mathematical objects to be temporary and subjective socially determined brain-atom motions of no particular meaning.
10. The intellectual denies Ayn Rand, because Ayn Rand believed in liberty, reason, and self-actuated productivity, and the utopian envy-based political economy of the intellectual is in direct and vehement contradiction thereof.
11. The intellectual denies the teaching of the ancient traditions of Witchcraft, or Wicca, because the Witches hold that the supernatural world is real, and that what you do will be done again to you ninefold, whereas the intellectuals hold that morality is a temporary and arbitrary human social construct.
I could go on until I have listed every sage and saint and philosopher and witch-doctor from every literate tradition in the world, spanning all of history aside from the current, if you like. There is nothing particularly Catholic about recognizing peevish postmodern narcissism as a falsehood.
I suppose, if we were generous, we could liken the intellectual to the Gnostic, or perhaps to the child-sacrificing servitors of Molloch, or the Florian Heresy, but even these would run afoul of the Intellectual imperative to rebel against all authority, and deny all supernatural and natural nature. Even the Aztecs and Phoenicians actually believed in their gods. It was not all about them.
The answer to your question is no.
Actually, rereading the post, fair enough, the Cathlicism bit was unfair
I am not a Catholic, and I accept what Mr. Wright has written. When I was atheist, my own thoughts pointed towards these conclusions. When I followed Judaism, I accepted them. Oddly, when I became Christian, I became skeptical of the above. However, I was in error.
Even as an atheist, for all my other errors, I thought the idea that truth somehow equals untruth was nonsense. I thought the modernist debate that I was subjected to in a college English between subjective and objective truth was silly. Obviously, there is an external, objective world that we share with others. There is also a private, subjective experience that only I know. It was also my supposition that one (subjective truth), had something to do with the other (objective truth). This would form the basis of everything that I would come to agree with later (from the Stoics to Ayn Rand, to Aristotle).
A conclusion from natural means, like 2 + 2 = 4, or that water is wet, is a nonreligious one.
Any view that is widespread and randomly distributed in Western civilization will be held “primarily” by Catholics, since Catholicism is, at least nominally, the overwhelming religion of Western (or Westernized) civilization.
If, however, you mean “a greater percentage of Catholics hold to the views of the writer than of Baptists, Methodists, Mormons, Presbyterians, Lutherans, …”, then that is in my experience completely false. Except of course in the special case of Episcopalians and other Unitarians…
The second largest worldwide, by the way, is Eastern Orthodoxy, which I would expect to hold to the writer’s views even more strongly than Catholicism, Orthodoxy never having had a Vatican II.
>>”In his most recent column, conservative pundit John Derbyshire announces that human consciousness will soon be scientifically proven to be illusory.”
I will admit that I did not have time to read the entirety of your essay, but this particular part jumped out at me.
I know I don’t have to tell you, but when the hell are we going to get past the stage where the basic axioms are regarded for what they are? Namely, axioms. There is no such thing as scientifically invalidating one of these axioms. A scientific repudiation of consciousness is a self-contradictory notion of the most elementary kind.
It is so self-evident that I indeed have to immediately wonder at motive here.
Are such statements aimed at the philosophically uninitiated?
I suspect a problem with sensational language, rather than philosophy. Obviously consciousness as such cannot be an illusion. But the apparent fact of the conscious experiencer making decisions may be illusory. When you move your arm, the impulse is moving along the nerves well before your conscious mind registers the decision; apparently then, the orders are being given by some subsystem, and the rest of the brain is only informed later. Consequently, although you experience the sensation “I decided to move my arm”, this may be an illusion – you merely made up a story explaining what a subsystem of your brain had decided. In other words, although consciousness is real by construction, it may not be in the driver’s seat – it’s quite possible that it is merely along for the ride.
>> “But the apparent fact of the conscious experiencer making decisions may be illusory.”
Well I understand why you say “may be” “apparently” “it’s quite possible that…”…it may not be…”; without a faculty of volition coupled with your subsystems lack of certainty all things are tentative. Can a subsystem have certainty? Is it conscious? Obviously, although only probably or possibly or maybe it is the case that, a consciousness cannot come to certainty. It can (maybe or it is quite possible that) only follow whatever deterministic mechanism allows it to arrive at whatever conclusion it somehow arrives at through some process of non-choice.
I guess the conscious thing could somehow discover that it may have arrived at an error – somehow – and some subsystem routine would be somehow unconsciously triggered (because there can’t be a such thing as a conscious being deciding to do something) to start the whole unchosen mechanical process again to arrive at some further unchosen conclusion. Or the mechanism could not be triggered – inexplicably. There are such people that never question their conclusions, I guess – perhaps – there is a nerve ending that is misfiring somewhere. Of course the person that does question and correct cognitive errors clearly has that nerve ending functioning properly no need to send him to the C3PO Repair Shop.
I just had this illusion that I was going to stop replying, but I just realized by some means that my fingers are actually just sending signals to my brain that they are getting tired, and it is not true that I could go on mocking your determinism till the end of time….
If you have any actual evidence of non-deterministic activity in the brain, feel free to bring it. Note that the electrical impulses that move your fingers are running down your arm before you consciously ‘decide’ to write anything; unless you wish to claim that your conscious mind is acting backwards in time, I suggest that you cease to mock the current best guess of actual science with your own half-formed prejudices. You might learn something.
“I suggest that you cease to mock the current best guess of actual science with your own half-formed prejudices. You might learn something.”
The syllogism that, if consciousness is not consciousness it has no truth-value, ergo no statement (including the statement denying consciousness) is neither true nor untrue, ergo the statement refutes itself — that is not even awarded the dignity of being a fully formed prejudice?
I suggest that the experiment was not rigorous, since it did not control for the possibility of other forms of brain activity undetected by the EEG or the verbal report of the subjects. All we really know is that some form of brain activity followed the arm motion of the subjects in the experiment, not that this brain action was one and the same as their decision to move the arm. It may have been, for example, a recording of the decision into the shoert term memory, or some other side effect issuing from the decision.
>> “…I suggest that you cease to mock the current best guess of actual science with your own half-formed prejudices.”
And I would suggest that you not use concepts while simultaneously denying them.
You suggest? If you are talking to an automaton, why would you suggest something? Is there a choice you are assuming I am to make?
>> “If you have any actual evidence of non-deterministic activity in the brain, feel free to bring it.”
Here again you are asking for things while undercutting that which it depends on. Do you know what concept proof depends on, what evidence depends on? Volition. It is not only because we are not automatic, and because of this not automatically guaranteed the the truth; it is also because without volition concepts of proof and evidence would be simply meaningless. One would simply believe whatever it is they are led (somehow) to believe.
This is why there exists whole sciences like epistemology, logic, ethics, politics, law, education etc.
>> “Note that the electrical impulses that move your fingers are running down your arm before you consciously ‘decide’ to write anything;”
That is truly fantastic. I decided to respond at 5pm (my time obviously) but delayed it until I got other things done that are higher on my value hierarchy (a concept you are forced to believe is an illusion). Then I sat in front of the computer at 3am rereading your post thinking about how to go about answering. Only then did I decide to proceed, based on my conscious thinking. But I wonder how those “impulses” knew where to go before I formed a sentence in my head.
>> “…unless you wish to claim that your conscious mind is acting backwards in time…”
Wish? Another smuggled word.
The problem here is you are seeking proof for an axiomatic self-evidency. As one of the foundations of human knowledge, it presupposes concepts such as proof or evidence.
Just the same if you were to deny existence. You could demand to show proof and use all the words that depend on the concept you are denying. You can do that, but it merely shows a want of philosophical education.
Too long; didn’t read.
Why comment?
I was just offering a piece of valuable and perhaps non-obvious feedback, namely, that Mr. Wright wrote one bigass post.
Ok, I dared to take a look and stopped at this paragraph:
“Stated briefly, a philosophy is an attempt to take the maxims of the natural conscience and to use reason to extend the principles discovered to underpin those maxims to new and unfamiliar situations, namely, situations where our untrained conscience will not guide us.”
Mr. Wright is free to improvise his own definition of philosophy and philosophers, but one such as that, which leaves out Plato (you know, the totalitarian would-be social engineer who said that common sense is wrong and we all live in a Matrix-like virtual reality… not his exact words though) is going to leave a little to be desired.
Why on Earth should philosophy take “natural conscience” as gospel? Maybe “natural conscience” is wrong. Not to mention than its dictates seem to vary considerably across cultures. For Aristotle, nothing was more natural and common sense than the fact that some men were only fit to be slaves.
Paging Bertrand Russel: “And I regret to say that all too many professors of philosophy [you can add Mr. Wright here] consider it their duty to be sycophants of common sense, and thus, doubtless unintentionally, to bow down in homage before the savage superstitions of cannibals.”
(That was one long answer. Feel free to tl;dr me.)
Although I’m not surprised that someone quoting Bertrand Russell is this bad at philosophy, here are some of your more obvious errors:
1. Plato said none of that; Socrates said it all. The division is important. That you take everything he says literally is another issue. There’s a reason why Aristotle, in the Ethics, uses Socrates as the exemplar of the virtue of irony.
2. You appear not to have read anything other than the Republic. Had you read more of his dialogues, you might have recognized that Plato fits Mr. Wright’s definition quite well – although even the little bit of the Socratic inquiry technique in the Republic
3. You apparently also took the Allegory of the Cave literally, if that’s what you meant by the Matrix-like VR bit and not the concept of Forms as a whole. That passage isn’t about material reality at all; it’s about the incorrect mental ideas most people have about what is true and untrue.
Mr. Wright’s definition of philosophy may be begging the question in some respects, since philosophy’s job also should be to examine and define what the axioms are, I don’t think your poor counterarguments and philosophical explications are doing the job.
No, Aristotle was completed at odds with his culture in that passage, because he rejects slaves taken as prisoners of war, which were what almost all slaves were at the time. Instead he makes what is a pretty common-sense observation – that some human beings are completely incapable of making moral or rational decisions, and as such slavery is a beneficial position for them. It reads more like a support for the care of mental patients, if you actually read the words he wrote rather than filtering it through the lens of the American Civil Rights movement, which was certainly my problem when I initially came to the Politics.
Aristotle and Plato are also pretty poor figures to choose if you want to argue cultural determinism.
In what sense does Plato not conform to my definition of philosophy? I submit that Plato’s primary concern was how best to live. His REPUBLIC was an attempt, among other things, to analyze the human soul in order to define the nature of justice. He makes no independent argument to support the desirability of justice that I recall; he merely assumes, that is to say, he appeals, to this natural conscience of his audience. He assumes anyone reading his essay is interested in living justly. To me, it seems as if Plato confirms, rather than is excluded by, my essay.
Bertrand Russel, whom I consider to be more of a mountebank than a philosopher, in the passage you quote merely attempts the rhetorical slight of hand of equating “common sense” with “cannibalism.” Of course, if common sense did not reject cannibalism, there would be no point making the comparison, because Mr. Russel’s audience would not be repelled by cannibalism, and be fair-minded enough to be willing objectively consider whether common sense is equally repellent. He is attempting to impeach the conscience by appealing to the conscience.
Read and loved every word of it including the, “bleary -headed AntiChrist” whatever that is.(It’s the adjective that throws me, bleary-eyed, tossled-head but bleary-headed?).
I think this comes close to Chestertonian lacking only the natural good humor that he seems to exude even in his most intellectual writings.
Please consider expanding on it. I’ll put it on my shelf next to “Orthodoxy”.
This entire article summed up:
“If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts—i.e. of materialism and astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.” -C.S. Lewis
Still enjoyed it John!
A check of Liddell and Scott shows that the Greek word (transliterated) is moros, more, moron (with an omega for the first o and an eta for the e). The combining form would be moro-, not morono-. Hence “sophomorology.” Inserting the -no- to bring to mind the English word “moron” and made the defamatory intent obvious to those too ill-educated to recognize the common Greek root strikes me as, well, sophomoric humor. Or, in Greek, morologia.
Though to be even more pedantic, L&S give morosophos as the attested Greek word for a learned fool. Perhaps we might say that the Greek word for “sophomore” is “morosophos”?
Oh, I confess my own humor is sophomoric. I admit the term is defamatory.
I simply assume my readers are fair-minded enough to recognize and dismiss, perhaps with a smile, the scorn in the title, and read the essay on its own merits, such as they are.
I was not objecting, my dear sir, to the expression of scorn; I was objecting to its expression in a word improperly derived from Greek roots.
I accept your correction with an appropriate deferential blush of a schoolboy’s cheek hidden beneath my philosopher’s beard.
In fact, sophomore is not derived from moros at all. As far as the etymologists can tell, it derives from an earlier English word sophumer, sc. sophum + -er, meaning a practitioner of sophum (which is an obsolete variant of sophism).
When you criticize Mr. Wright for incorrect construction of a Greek word, you had better be sure that he is using the Greek word you have in mind. Otherwise it makes you look a bit silly.
[...] readers should consult John C. Wright, a recovering lawyer and now science fiction novelist, who has given the name [...]
Interesting to see Libet’s old “free will” experiment being brought up again! They never fail to get people talking.
Personally I never saw why people have such a problem with it. Obviously the conscious mind arises from the subconscious, otherwise you’d need subconscious processes to underlay that too. One’s conscious experience greatly under-determines the work you brain actually has to do to perform an action – ie. you consciously decide to move forward, the brain has to subconsciously co-ordinate millions of muscle cords all over the body. No wonder it has to start early. I’m glad I’m not conscious of all that, to be honest!
However, see here:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WD0-4X5HY69-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=369e8144917a3cb7f8e50e9f9010d12e
This group has repeated Libet’s experiments whilst also occasionally ordering people not to move (or to do the opposite of what they had planned to do). They claim that the “readiness potential” that Libet took to imply the decision, apparently happens whether you choose to press the button or not, and furthermore can be overridden whilst it’s in progress, even though it’s initiated before awareness. So it may more likely represent the brain loading the remembered arm movement.
I suspect that if you repeated the experiment with a baby that was learning to press a button for the first time, the planned movement would have to go through awareness first, maybe several times, in order to memorise the muscle movement. Once you’ve practiced enough, however, it can then be done automatically. Just think of driving a car becoming second nature after a while.
To put it another way, perhaps the mind simply has a loading lag between deciding something and being aware of having decided it. In any case, when we refer to a human person we’re talking about the whole system anyway, including muscle, skin, vasculature and bones. I fail to see how the readiness potential experiments have any consequence for individual freedom or personal responsibility.
Well yes, that’s what the experiment shows!
But the point is that if this is so, then whatever has the awareness cannot be making the decisions, at least if you want to keep the ordinary meanings of those words.
[i]If this is so, then whatever is having the awareness cannot be making the decision.[/i]
On a conventional reading perhaps, but deep down I suspect that this whole conversation still has a Cartesian whiff about it. Epiphenomenalism may appear consistent with these experiments, but it still suffers from the interaction problem no less than conventional dualism.
Personally I think it would be more conceptually useful to abandon thinking of consciousness as some “bit” that’s attached to the rest of the brain and think of it as being the subjective aspect of the system as a whole. I suspect, however, that this might end up forcing me to commit to either panpsychism or idealism.
But I am not arguing that consciousness is not consciousness. I am arguing that the conscious mind does not make decisions, it records decisions. The half-formed prejudice I refer to is rather this syllogism:
I experience uncertainty about what course I will take.
Therefore my conscious mind is making decisions.
That-does-not-follow! Further, although my post explicitly clarified the difference between the two positions “Consciousness is an illusion” and “Decisionmaking is an illusion”, Robert continued to respond as though I had asserted the first. If this is not an expression of the prejudice – however fully formed – that a non-belief in free will is ridiculous, then it shows remarkably bad reading skills.
This is of course a possibility; hence my phrase “best guess”. I do note, however, that not many hard scientists are actively stupid, and it seems likely that the ones doing the experiment thought of this, and indeed of any other objection a layman (not derogatory; in biology I am a layman too) can come up with in five minutes or so.
>> “Robert continued to respond as though I had asserted the first. If this is not an expression of the prejudice – however fully formed – that a non-belief in free will is ridiculous, then it shows remarkably bad reading skills.”
Remarkably bad reading skills? I think you should read again. The only reason certainty came in was because of your complete non-commital language on such a philosophically rudimentary subject matter. Certainty was merely one question that sprang to mind from your fence-straddling choice of words.
I have no syllogism for volition, it is axiomatic. Even the concept of a syllogism rests upon the axiom of volition so why would I put forth an argument?
To be honest, it was all mockery to draw you out to see how many concepts you would use that depend on free will while you were denying it.
David Hume is the prototype of this sort of argument. Read the quote below and see if you see anything wrong with it. It is from A Personal Identity, where he basically denies the concept of a self.
“‘For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception’.”
Beautiful, isn’t it?
Dr Rolf,
No-one lives as if there is no such thing as free will. Not only human society (of any description), but all morality, and even criticism of specific morality, is meaningless without free will. That’s what an axiom is. It’s a ‘given’ in the theorem, where morality is the ‘required to prove’.
To put it pragmatically, if ‘whatever has the awareness’ _doesn’t_ make decisions, there can be no such thing as a crime.
To me, it’s quite logical that volition is not detected by recording equipment. The soul is immaterial, after all.
You could go even farther. Anything above the basics of metaphysics hinges on the concept of volition.
SAVING THE APPEARENCES
“But I am not arguing that consciousness is not consciousness. I am arguing that the conscious mind does not make decisions, it records decisions.”
The faculty that records decisions and does not decide them is not the consciousness, at least, not as that word is ordinarily understood. Indeed, if no faculty of making decisions exists, the things called ‘decisions’ are not decisions, merely the mechanical outcome of a non-deliberate process.
“This is of course a possibility; hence my phrase “best guess”. I do note, however, that not many hard scientists are actively stupid…”
My experience is that scientists are aggressively ignorant and hostile to metaphysical argumentation, and this gap in their learning causes them to make errors a layman can see in a moment.
I do not mean errors in empirical technique, I mean errors in interpretation, such as when a scientist proposes that an empirical test (nerve-muscle response) can have a bearing on a metaphysical conclusion (free will and determinism).
It is not the experiment, the facts, that are in dispute here, it is interpretation, the leap of faith that concludes that consciousness is not deliberative, which is (1) by no means the only possible interpretation and (2) a conclusion that is paradoxical, if not self-refuting.
Indeed, I would liken this to the conclusion of Zeno that reality does not exist because motion is impossible because no arrow can travel through the infinite number of mathematical points necessary to strike a target. An interpretation of an experiment that abolishes the experimenter is not a useful interpretation.
To put it simply, any theory that does not save the appearances is bad science.
If an astronomer made an observation of the motion of the planets, for example the procession of Mercury, and concluded that, because Newtonian mechanics cannot account for the motion, ergo all planets, including the sun and moon, do not exist at all, ergo the sky is utterly black and empty, unfortunately this theory (even if self consistent) would not save the appearances, that is, it would not explain or predict the motions of the planets we do see.
A metaphysical theory of consciousness which does not explain the fact that I am conscious of my consciousness is not a theory of consciousness. It might be a zen koan, or a mistake, or even a jest, but it is not a theory.
If a scientist concludes that his own thinking process is nondeliberative, or does not exist, or does not think, or is unrelated to reality, this fails to explain the appearances.
Why this word ‘merely’? A compass reliably shows you the way north; a dog can reliably track a scent; you do not deny their accuracy or meaning on the grounds that they are ‘mere’ assemblages of flesh, without the spirit that moves a human. The outcome is just as meaningful whether it is mechanical or not. I could just as well say that, if the ‘decision’ is merely the outcome of some non-material process of ‘deliberation’, no decision has taken place. The meaningfulness does not arise from the source, but from the sensation of meaning in a human brain!
You argue in circles: You wish to show that the elan vital is special and necessary to making decisions, and thus you argue that if the elan vital is not involved, then the outcome is not a decision! Well, by that definition I am forced to agree that there are no decision-making entities in the universe; but this reflects the circularity, not the force, of the argument.
But that is not in dispute at all! Of course you’re conscious. But it seems you are using the word to mean something rather different from what I understand it to mean. Perhaps, before we go any further, it would be useful if you defined the term?
I have one question to ask. I would be most grateful (and surprised) if you can answer it.
Me: “if no faculty of making decisions exists, the things called ‘decisions’ are not decisions, merely the mechanical outcome of a non-deliberate process.”
You: “Why this word ‘merely’?
Me: “The word ‘merely’ in this sentence here refers to the absence of a decision. A deliberate process that involves a mechanical process has two elements, or, if you prefer, two dimensions: first, the dimension of physical fact, which is expressed in terms of mechanical causes and related concepts, such as mass, length, energy, and duration; and second, the dimension of meaning, which is expressed in terms of final causes and related concepts, such as efficient-and-inefficient, successful-or-unsuccessful, and specifically concepts related to symbols and human action, which are and inevitably are expressed in terms of concepts like accurate-or-inaccurate, valid-or-invalid, rash-or-craven, useful-or-useless, prudent-or-imprudent, virtuous-or-vicious.
Obviously the one cannot be reduced to the other. Prudence cannot be measured in inches, seconds, or grams; a turning cogwheel in a clock cannot (except by analogy, or except by reference to a human observer) be described or defined in terms of prudence, accuracy, or efficiency.
Therefore a sentence that announced the self-contradictory proposition that all meaningful acts can be reduced to meaningless acts with no loss of meaning, leaves aside the only important part of what makes meaningful things meaningful, namely, their meaning. An reaction which is merely a reaction is “merely” a reaction because it is not an act.
You (continued): “A compass reliably shows you the way north; a dog can reliably track a scent; you do not deny their accuracy or meaning on the grounds that they are ‘mere’ assemblages of flesh, without the spirit that moves a human.”
I am not sure what to make of this sentence. A compass in a universe with no observer does not reliably show anyone anything. It is merely a mass of meaningless atoms being influenced by a meaningless energy to turn one way as opposed to another. A dog is a living thing and not a machine, therefore dogs have meaningful (goal-directed) behaviors which inanimate objects do not have.
A dog acts. Its behavior can be described in terms of things like true and false, as when a dog follows a false trail, or thinks he sees an enemy when all he sees is the mailman. A compass reacts. It is an unliving object acted upon by an external energy .The compass does not care or prefer or decide to turn north. The compass cannot be trained or commanded or threatened to turn North, nor do we give a compass a treat, petting and praise, when it turns North correctly.
I am not sure what the reference is to the spirit which moves human beings. I was talking about logical categories of behavior, i.e. human action versus inanimate reaction. This may be one more example of an obsessed atheist who keeps bringing supernaturalism into what should be a naturalistic conversation.
“The outcome is just as meaningful whether it is mechanical or not.”
That statement is so self-evidently false that it needs no further refutation. Propping up the corpse of a bride next to a bridegroom and telling him that moving the dead body’s limbs by wires is the same as if he married a living woman who loved him would be a falsehood of the same magnitude. I assume you are using the word “meaningful” here in some fashion unknown to human beings, or to mean the precise and exact opposite of its real meaning.
“I could just as well say that, if the ‘decision’ is merely the outcome of some non-material process of ‘deliberation’, no decision has taken place.”
Indeed you could, and that would be a true statement. A decision that is not decided is not a decision, it is merely a mechanical process, or, in other words, meaningless externally causes motions of matter-energy from one meaningless state or location to another.
“The meaningfulness does not arise from the source, but from the sensation of meaning in a human brain!”
Your statement is self-refuting, because the concept “sensation” presupposes meaning or final cause, which cannot, for the reasons above given, be reduced to meaningless motions of magnitudes under external influences. A sensation presupposes two things: a reality that is sensed, or an object, and an observer or perceiver who suffers the sensation and is aware of its meaning.
In any case, whether the meaningfulness arises from the source or not is indifferent and irrelevant to the discussion. The question being discussed is whether a decision can exist without a decider, or, in other words, can a non-decision decision exist.
I drew your attention the fundamental distinction between mechanical causes (a non-purposeful reaction, as when a billiard ball pushes another) and final causes (an action done for a purpose as when a dog chases a rabbit FOR THE SAKE OF catching it). The billiard ball does not recoil from the impact of the other billiard ball for the sake of any purpose. The ball is not trying to do something or become something, and it is not moving because it is greedy or hungry or afraid or to preserve its vital properties.
Actions done for the sake of a final cause cannot be understood and cannot even be described except in reference to a meaning: the amoeba ‘wants’ food, the cat ‘hates’ rain, the intellectual ‘craves’ false recognition.
Actions done for the sake of final causes, particularly the action of perceiving or symbolizing perceptions, cannot be understood and cannot be describe except in terms of categories that have no meaning when applied to mechanical or inanimate reactions. The bird ‘mistakes’ his reflection in a mirror for a rival; the dog follows a ‘false’ scent; the intellectual ‘lies’. These concepts, such as mistake, false, or lie only have meaning when dealing with symbols and perceptions. Inanimate matter has no category of symbols and perceptions. Atoms do not see things. Cameras do not see things, either. A billiard ball cannot strike another billiard ball falsely or illogically or (except by analogy) viciously. All these concepts deal with the relation of symbol to object. Objects themselves, inanimate objects, do not think about symbols and do not form percepts of perception, do not reason, and do not flinch in fear of anticipated pain. They have no final causes, no action, no deliberation, no preferences. They are not alive.
To describe living things in terms of a metaphor to the nonliving is misleading. To take such a metaphor literally, as you have done, and then by logical implication to deny that the conceptual categories of living things exists at all is not merely false, it is self-refuting. If you were really a meat machine, a corpse moved by wires, you could not conceive the idea that you were a meat machine, because meat machines don’t have any thoughts at all, true or false.
Here is my one question:
Do you agree that this distinction between final causes and mechanical causes is true?
No.
Which is likely the essence of our disagreement.
It seems possible that our conversation cannot be carried beyond this point, because we simply disagree on something utterly fundamental; nonetheless I will try to convince you that what you take as obvious is not, in fact, obvious. Ultimately, if we cannot agree that it is a point on which reasonable men might differ, we shall have to either ignore the disagreement or resort to violence. I trust we’ll be able to avoid the latter.
You keep using this word ‘obviously’ to describe your side of the exact things which are in dispute. This is rude. If your position were indeed self-evident, I would share it. If you wish to converse with me, please do me the courtesy of assuming I have thought about the issue and, if I’ve reached a conclusion different from yours, it is necessarily because your conclusion is not self-evident. If you do not wish to converse with me, by all means say so and I shall bother you no more.
How do you know this? Again the circularity: You wish to show that we are not meat machines, and so you say
1. We have thoughts.
2. Machines do not have thoughts.
3. Therefore we are not machines.
A valid syllogism, but your second axiom presupposes the thing you intend to prove! You define ‘thought’ as something a machine does not have, and then ‘derive’ “thinking things are not machines”! This is not philosophy, it is logic-chopping, and specious logic at that.
Let us consider, for simplicity, the monkey rather than the man. If we can reach agreement on the monkey, perhaps we will be able to argue about the man later on. The monkey, to first order, does four things:
1. Search for food.
2. Mate.
3. Avoid predators.
4. Chatter volubly at its pack-mates, presumably conveying warnings of predators or information about food.
I take it you will not deny that a machine could be built to do these things? (And the many other monkey behaviours I left out.) And, if it exactly mimicked a monkey, then it would appear to human eyes to act with purpose; when it reached for a banana while its visual sensors scanned the environment, you would say “It is watching out for its pack-mates; it hopes to keep the banana to itself, but if it’s spotted it will share, expecting a future quid-pro-quo.” This might not be technically correct usage of the word ‘intends’, as you have defined it, but you would certainly make yourself understood.
Now, in this case you might argue that there is still a final cause involved, namely the intent of the human who built the machine. I shall therefore go one step further, and take the designer out of the loop. Do you deny that such a machine could evolve from simpler precursors, without intelligent intervention?
“Do you agree that this distinction between final causes and mechanical causes is true? No. Which is likely the essence of our disagreement. ”
I do not have the time at the moment to answer this fully, but let me ask a follow up question.
Once upon a time a defendant in a homicide case decided to take the stand in his own defense. He was asked on cross examination: “Why was the victim shot?”
The defendant gives two answers:
ANSWER ONE. The finger, actuated by nerve-firings in the finger muscles, caused the trigger of the murder weapon to be depressed, which dropped the hammer, which ignited the primer, which caused the gunpowder in the cartridge explosively to expand, propelling the bullet from the barrel at such a velocity that it struck the victim in the chest, penetrating his heart and lungs, killing him instantly from hydrostatic shock. That is why he died.
ANSWER TWO. Coming home unexpectedly, I found my wife in bed with the mailman copulating like weasels. When she saw me, she screamed that she was being raped and tossed me the revolver I keep in my bedside nightstand for self protection. The mailman advanced toward me in a threatening manner. I decided to kill him, not because I believed he was a rapist, and not because I thought his manner was threatening, but because I hated him for soiling my wife, and therefore I wanted him dead. It was my intent to shoot him in order to kill him.
The Judge then instructs the Jury. As a legal matter (1) if the defendant did not form the specific intent to commit a criminal act in his mind before or during the act, he cannot be found guilty of murder in the first degree. Also, (2) a crime of passion, such as when a man suddenly finds his wife in his lover’s arms, is murder in the second degree.(3) If the man was acting in his own self-defense in a place where he had no duty to retreat, then this defense might mitigate the crime and lead to a finding of not guilty.
Now if only Answer One is given to the Jury, and not Answer Two, then the legal meaning of the act of (1) whether it was murder in the first degree or (2) whether it was murder in the second degree or (3) whether it was in self-defense cannot be determined. This meaning defined of what crime the defendant can justly be found guilty. On the other hand, if Answer Two and not Answer One is given to the Jury, the legal meaning of the act is not defined, or even addressed. Answer One fits all three legal meanings of the act. Answer Two does not.
My question is this. Is Answer One, the mechanical cause, contain the same information as Answer Two, the final cause?
If there is, as you say, no distinction between mechanical cause and final cause, then the two answers must contain the same information. Please note that if Answer Two can be deduced from Answer One, it would indeed contain the same information, merely in an implied or derivable form, much in the same way the shape of a bird is material in the genetics in the egg.
Is that the case here? Can the information in Answer Two be derived or deduced from the information in Answer One?
Is it the case in this example that there is no distinction between mechanical cause and final cause?
“1. Search for food. 2. Mate. 3. Avoid predators. 4. Chatter volubly at its pack-mates, presumably conveying warnings of predators or information about food.I take it you will not deny that a machine could be built to do these things?”
You take it wrongly. A machine cannot “search” for food any more than a clock can wonder what time it is, or decide to be helpful and decide to tell you the time. The gears in a clockwork merely move according to the pressure of external actions (whoever winds the mainspring) upon the clock. The clock is not trying to keep time and not being lazy if it fails to keep the time. Likewise, a machine can be low on fuel, but it cannot be hungry. Machines do not die when they run out of fuel. They do not mind running out of fuel. They are not aware of running out of fuel.
A machine cannot mate. A machine that is constructed by a designer so that the designer’s intent is to make a machine that makes certain motions that construct another machine is not mating. Machines do not go into oestrus or feel the longings of springtide.
A machine cannot avoid any more than it can seek. Avoiding is a mental act when you anticipate something you fear, and you take steps to avoid the anticipated fear.
A machine cannot chatter to convey information. Information is meaning. The numbers written on a clockface have meaning to the watchmaker, but not to the watch.
“If it exactly mimicked the monkey, then it would appear to human eyes to act with purpose.”
Maybe so, but from the point of view of the monkey, does the monkey seem to act with purpose? From the point of view of a corpse of a monkey dangling on wires, does the corpse seem to act with purpose? I submit that a corpse has no point of view, and therefore to ask what the point of view of a corpse is, is meaningless. I submit that a clockwork, or a machine, is like a puppet on a string, merely a mass a matter reacting (not acting) according to external pressures and forces.
“Now, in this case you might argue that there is still a final cause involved, namely the intent of the human who built the machine. I shall therefore go one step further, and take the designer out of the loop. Do you deny that such a machine could evolve from simpler precursors, without intelligent intervention?”
You are asking if I think a machine that is able to have a point of view, suffer hunger and anger and fear and lust, can come into being without any deliberate machine-maker? Yes, by definition. A thing that comes into existence without any design is not a machine. A machine is a tool. Tools are made, so far as we know, only by Man, albeit some higher animals use rocks or twigs as tools. A configuration of matter made by a natural but unthinking and unintentional process is not a tool. Tools serve a purpose.
I am a little confused; did you perhaps lose a ‘not’ somewhere in this? You seem to be arguing that a machine with feelings could evolve, but it would not be a machine, which presumably implies that such a machine could not evolve – so in short, I don’t quite understand what you are saying.
However, it seems we are using words differently. I will try to define my terms more carefully, because I do not believe you are understanding the intent of the way I use them. As you observed, arguing about axioms is a nitpicking task!
By ‘search’, I did not mean to imply that the machine would have a conscious intent to search. I meant rather that it would go to places where there was fruit (or rather, where a mechanical algorithm indicated that there was a reasonable chance of finding fruit), and that machine arms would then detach the fruit from the tree and place it in a suitable receptacle. By ‘chatter’, I meant that the machine would send signals to other machines – it can be radio if you like, or any other means – and that those other machines would then change their priority-numbers for visiting the location they received the signal from, bumping them up if the signal was the code for “Here is fruit” or vastly decreasing them (and perhaps increasing the priority of “The top of that tree, right now!”) if the code was “Ack, tiger!” And similar comments apply to the other verbs I used.
By ‘machine’, I did not intend “A tool designed by an intelligent being, with a purpose in mind”. Rather, I meant to imply that the object in question would have neither soul nor consciousness; I meant it as a contrast to your idea of a living being.
As you’ll observe from my paragraph above, it becomes quite hard to describe the physical actions even of a robot if you are not allowed to use verbs usually taken to indicate conscious intent. I suggest that, to indicate the intended meaning of my terms, I shall add a star to my verbs where I use them in a sense which is not equivalent to your intuitive understanding of them; thus I would say that “The machine* would search* for fruit and chatter* at its machine* pack-mates*”. This is clumsy but, I think, necessary when our intuitions disagree on such fundamental matters; if you think of a better way, let me know.
If you do not mind, I should like to return to this question later. I do have an answer, and it will indeed rescue the appearance of humans experiencing intent, but I would prefer to settle the issue of machinery* first. There are many inferential steps between the existence of machinery* and the explanation of how humans experience consciousness, and it is necessary to cover each in some detail. You are asking about the end of my chain of reasoning, where we haven’t yet agreed that the beginning is sound.
And my answer is this: Yes, if Answer One is given more fully than you have done, and if the jury is sufficiently intelligent.
You gave the mechanical-cause answer starting with the nerve impulses in the finger. But the full list of mechanical causes would include such information as “a pattern of neurons in the accused’s brain encoded the (false) information that his wife had not had sex with other men”. The intent to kill that your Answer 2 mentions likewise existed as a pattern of excitation in the accused’s brain. A full list of all the mechanical causes would include the movement of every atom in the room, and also make reference to causes for why those atoms were in the patterns they had when the accused entered the room; but it would all be physics. I therefore say that yes, Answer One if given in full detail does contain Answer Two within it, and your analogy of the genetics containing the bird’s shape is a good one.
Now, I will admit that it is not practical to give the full details of Answer One in a court case, and in any case it would be a rare jury that could derive Answer Two from it, just as it would be a rare jury that could see the majestic eagle in a listing of DNA code. Thus, for practical purposes we evolve shorthands. We say “The accused intended to kill” to mean “There was this-and-that pattern of neuron firings in the accused’s brain, which encoded the information that pulling the trigger would kill the victim, and also sent the nerve impulse to the fingers”. This is a clumsy circumlocution already, and I haven’t even specified what the neuron pattern actually was! “The neuron at location (0.02, 0.06, -1.3) had excitation level 4mV; it was connected to neuron (0.01, 0.065, -0.9) with effective resistance 1.2mOhm…” Such a list would not, alas, be practical either to construct as evidence nor to contemplate with a human brain. (And at that I’m using neurons and not atoms!) So we use shorthands. But the shorthands are not the physics, they are merely models; the map is not the territory. The physics is atoms all the way down.
You will please note that I do not attempt to argue that the jury should ask for Answer One in full detail, and seek to determine Answer Two from it. They are correct to go straight for Answer Two from other evidence. But this is not because Answer Two is not contained within Answer One; it is because we simply haven’t the computational power to derive it, nor indeed to reconstruct Answer One fully. Thus, in daily life it is perfectly reasonable to think of Answer Two, and to reason about it from other evidence at the same level of conception. But this is only a model of the underlying physics.
An analogy: I linked the other day to my thesis; there is some discussion in Chapters 2 and 6 of the model we use to describe the Dalitz plot, because we cannot solve the full strong-force equations. If you read the thesis, you’ll observe that there are two fictitious particles used in the model, named sigma and sigma-prime; these particles do not exist (that is, we’ve never been able to detect them outside of a three-body analysis), but we use them as a convenient way to describe the structure in the S-wave. We don’t know how to calculate the structure from first principles, we simply haven’t the mathematical tools; but we can see it’s there in the data, so we introduce these particles merely as an arbitrary way to make one part of the S-wave a bit fatter. (It’s convenient because we already had the code to calculate Breit-Wigner resonance amplitudes, since there are a lot of particles in the model which do exist. A different parametrisation would require us to write more code.) Now, when the sigma particles were first found to be necessary, the Brazilian scientists who introduced them thought they had really discovered a new particle. They were making the same mistake as you: They were mistaking their model for the underlying physics. Your final causes impose a bit of easily-understandable order on the intractable underlying math; they are useful abstractions. But they do not exist in themselves.
As a side note, the reason we believe the sigmas do not exist (apart from being quite unable to produce them in collisions) is that we find a different mass and width for them in every decay channel; this leads us to believe that there’s something going on in the strong-force dynamics, but it’s not a particle resonance. But this is a detail.
I notice you say this:
(1) “You keep using this word ‘obviously’ to describe your side of the exact things which are in dispute. This is rude. If your position were indeed self-evident, I would share it. If you wish to converse with me, please do me the courtesy of assuming I have thought about the issue …”
(2) “Your second axiom presupposes the thing you intend to prove! … This is not philosophy, it is logic-chopping, and specious logic at that.”
I cannot reconcile your first statement with your second. I do not see why it is more offensive for me to call what is obvious, obvious than it is for you to call what is specious, specious.
But no matter: I will not impose on your limited supply of patience, and I cannot increase my limited supply of courtesy. Let us shake hands and part friends. I regret your decision, because I thought the conversation was beginning to reach a point where we might find a common ground and build from there. Adieu. You have my good wishes.
To call something ‘specious’ is an argument; it is directed at the logic, not the man. To call something ‘obvious’, when its correctness is the matter in dispute, is not an argument, it is an attempt at appealing to authority, or perhaps ad hominem. To say “This is so obvious that I cannot defend it” is an end to argument, an attempt at declaring victory by admitting defeat, and – in that it implies one’s opponent cannot see what is obvious – a subtle insult; to say “That argument is specious” is an invitation to show that it’s not.
By the same logic, when I say it is a statement is obvious, this is an invitation to show that it is not; whereas calling an argument specious is to imply that the man making it is unintelligent.
You took my words in a sense in which they were not meant. If you did this innocently, the fault is mine for being ambiguous, and I offer an apology for the misunderstanding. If you did this intentionally or through negligence, the fault is yours, and you must look elsewhere than to me to correct it. In either case, I am unwilling to further explore this dead end in the conversation. Further complaints from you about my manners will be ignored.
How can one show that a statement is not obvious other than by a rather querulous “It’s not obvious to me!”? Although indeed, that ought to be sufficient! I’m reminded of the old joke about the mathematics lecturer who says, of some intermediate step in the proof he is elucidating, “we can trivially see that”, and stops, and considers. He thinks for a minute or two, then says “Excuse me” and leaves the classroom. The students are left looking rather surprisedly at each other, until he returns half an hour later, steps up to the blackboard, and announces briskly, “Yep, it’s trivial. Now, the next step is…”
When a step in your chain of logic does not appear clear to your interlocutor, it is not enough to re-iterate that it is obvious; you must explain the intermediate steps, no matter how tediously trivial they appear to you, or else quit the field. Surely this cannot be onerous to one who prides himself on the clearness of his thinking and the correctness of his philosophy?
However, since you are not willing to be corrected on the matter, I will pursue it no further.
On Thursday I wrote rather a long post in response to the substance of your previous argument, but it seems to be stuck in moderation; could you perhaps have a look for it?
“However, since you are not willing to be corrected on the matter, I will pursue it no further. ”
I thank you for your patience.
“On Thursday I wrote rather a long post in response to the substance of your previous argument, but it seems to be stuck in moderation; could you perhaps have a look for it?”
My apologies; I have been occupied elsewhere over the weekend. I would be happy to look over your response as soon as time permits.
I respond to several people.
Firstly, let me note that two questions are being conflated. The first question is free will versus determinism; the second is the question of conscious being as decision-maker or recorder. Observe that free will may exist even if the conscious being is not its locus. My original argument did not say anything about free will, and I was rather surprised to see determinism levelled as though it were a devastating counterblow; it is simply orthogonal to what I was actually saying. This is partly what I was referring to with “half-formed prejudice”; you were posting as though the argument was about free will, when no such claim was originally made.
This is simply mistaken, although it is a common assertion among theists; it is akin to, although more subtle than, the assertion that without theism there is no morality. I do not recall if you followed the discussion (in one of the posts labeled ‘Question about chastity’) about a non-theistic source of objective morality; if not I request that you read my comments there. In a similar vein there is a non-spiritual (using ‘spiritual’ to mean ‘not related to the observable material interactions of the brain’) source of meaningfulness, to wit, that our fleshly brains find things meaningful. There can be no source of meaning other than humans finding things meaningful, and this is true whether or not we are material or non-material beings. It is only the long tradition of the church, trained to consider the observable parts of the world as less important, that confuses this point.
Consider a parallel universe in which all the physical stuff is the same, but there is none of the elan vital, or whatever you name it, that you believe drives ‘meaning’ in this one. What do you predict will occur differently in the parallel universe?
Quite so, but generally the argument is not made about such propositions as “two plus two makes four”, but about theory-spin of airy nothingness. For example, does anyone who is not a Christian believe that the bread and wine are really flesh and blood? There is no reason for this belief; there is only cause. To point out “You only believe that because you are Catholic” is equivalent to saying “You have no evidence of that”.
This is either factually wrong, or a merely semantic claim about the meaning of ‘crime’. There is certainly a decisionmaker in there, and the decisionmaker can be guilty even if it’s not identical to the awareness-haver. A dangerous decision-maker is locked up for perfectly pragmatic reasons of prevention and deterrence; no consciousness is required. If an elephant goes rogue, you shoot it for having a faulty decision-maker; you would perhaps not call the killings it did ‘crimes’, but this is merely because you are confused about meaning, as above.
Because evolution formed my brain in such a way as to make it work for status within my local group; one way to gain status (a combination of mating-attractiveness and food-gathering power) is to make others act in accordance with your word-noises, as for example by bringing you a yellow curved fruit when you emit the syllables ‘Ba’, ‘na’, ‘na’; and if you emit the sounds (in this case, letters) corresponding to “Very well, I agree”, that is a reliable proxy for such obedience, or at least it was when our brains were evolving.
You will observe that I have carefully avoided using any desire-words here, because you apparently believe that a useful shorthand signifies a belief in the underlying concepts. An automaton may still have ‘intent’ and ‘desires’ in the sense that its actions can be predicted from knowledge of its internal state; thus human languages have evolved to have shorthands for expressing such states rapidly. We want to communicate “His next action will be to take the banana because it is a long time since he ate and the reward/risk ratio is now sufficient” without using long circumlocutions, so we say “He’s hungry, watch out”. The existence and use of shorthand expressing such intent does not imply a belief in a metaphysical intent which is not patterns of neuron firings in a purely material brain. In a similar vein I can say “Evolution has designed” and not be understood as meaning that any conscious volition is involved.
Now that this is understood, I can express myself in simple language: I communicate with automatons because I want them to act in certain ways, and thus I provide inputs I think will increase the probability of them doing so. In a similar way, I press buttons to make the automaton on my desk behave in ways I desire, and you do not think this a case for mockery.
I am forced to believe nothing of the kind. Any computer can have priorities. As for decisions, you know perfectly well I was referring to decisions of the level “Write the phrase ‘value hierarchy’, not ‘respond to blog comment’. I would, however, be entirely unsurprised to find the neuron-pattern putting ‘respond on blog’ in your todo list formed a good two seconds before you were consciously aware of it.
Regarding how the impulses know where to go, I would suggest you try thinking carefully about where your fingers are moving as you type. I think you might find your speed dropping rather considerably. Clearly, your consciousness is not in charge on this task.
You accuse me of being unskilled at philosophy. I suggest that you mistake an unfamiliar position for mere noobness; the fact that I disagree with your position does not imply that I am unfamiliar with it or have not seen the arguments in its favour. Perhaps, rather, it is you who are unskilled; you are so bound up in the position of your own school that you cannot respond to another except with mockery. This is not mastery, it is parochiality. “The skill that is expressed in putting down others is not the true skill”.
http://www.ruthblog.org/2010/06/07/sexual-liberation-does-not-liberate/
A very interesting video on the origins of the sexual revolution – the result of marxism translated from economic terms to social?
Hey Rolf, what’s the deal with continuously giving the option of ignoring a disagreement or resorting to violence when there is a disagreement? Don’t get me wrong, watching two nerds battle it out in hand to hand combat over materialistic determinism vs. free will would give my insatiable appetite for war delightful pleasure. Wait, never mind. Proceed with the fight.
Would you like to suggest a third option? If axiomatic systems differ sufficiently, there can be no sensible argument, as we are, I think, demonstrating here. Propositions which you label ‘self-evident’, and on this ground refuse to defend, are not at all self-evident to me. Now, if the question is important, how can one settle such a disagreement other than by violence? Conversely, if the matter is not important (or not of sufficient importance for the resort to violence), but discussing it is a waste of time, then what is there to do but live and let live?
If our axioms genuinely differ – not a mere misunderstanding or different use of words, but actual disagreement about fundamentals – and neither of us can convince the other that his axioms are correct, then discussion is sterile. With discussion ruled out, there is no middle ground between silence and war.
The reason why I continue the discussion is that I have faith that we will eventually find some axiom in common, and from that common ground be in a position to have a more fruitful discussion. Something in our mutually incomprehensible intellectual systems must map on to each other, if both our systems can map onto at least one common element in the world in which we both find ourselves.
Even if our axioms are entirely alien to each other, the process by which we came to believe those axioms to be axioms can still be investigated to our mutual edification.
There are also things that are simply differences of judgment. You and I, logically, might both recognize a potential danger, but I might regard the danger as small and the cost of prevention as high, and you regard the danger as grave and immediate and the cost of prevention low: there is nothing self-contradictory in differences of judgment. The discussion there would not be a philosophical discussion investigating the soundness of the argument, but, instead, would be the testament of evidence to attempt to convince the other of the soundness or unsoundness of the judgment involved.
Now, whether or not we should we willing to continue also depends on other factors, such as our amount of free time and our hope of getting some edification or entertainment from the discussion.
Unfortunately, discussions of axioms tends to be a very arid, precise, nitpicking, and abstract sort of thing, and only students of philosophy take much joy in it. To layman, discussing axioms is painful and annoying, because it is impossible to feel that anyone questioning what we hold to be self-evident is really serious. Deep down, no layman really and truly believes in any honest or honorable disagreement. You have to be a philosopher, or, at least, a gentleman, to accept the idea of a disagreement by an honest and honorable enemy.
It sounds to me your primary complaint is one against the state of philosophy after the double whammy done to it by Kant and the Vienna Circle, rather than against today’s intellectuals. Metaphysics and epistemology have never recovered from the state in which Kant left them, and system building went out of fashion with the rise of the Vienna Circle. The industrialization of academia after WWII has resulted in more philosophy being written and taught, with less of it being worthwhile.
I am sympathetic to your position. In my philosophy classes, I was actively discouraged from pursuing metaphysics on anything other than a historical basis. System building, likewise, is discouraged. LPUs, Least Publishable Units, are the order of the day. Producing a grand idea covering a great deal of ground was discouraged in favor of many separate bits and pieces which would be CV building. Robert Nozick is the primary exception who comes to mind bucking this trend.
I think you overstate the deficiencies found in modern intellectuals. As you have noted, there is great variance in what intellectuals actually think. Very few subscribe to a majority of your list. I think that part of their problem is they are trying to cobble together an ad hoc system of their own out of the fragments they’ve found true over the years. People have a desire for a consistent system which explains the world, but looking for one which accounts for the evidence they find presented to them yields little success. So they try to create a system on their own, implementing many items which are beyond their area of expertise. They must rely on choosing between experts who often promote contradictory positions. I think much of the rise of the modern conservative movement has been a result of its appropriating much of Nozick’s modern political system building.
Mary says:
>> “Some of us do not find “I am not a rapist” to be a sterling proclamation of virtue.”
You really need to learn how to abstract. “I” is a more convenient thing to type than the alternatives. You could be a cross-dressing stripper in an alternative sex-bar with a heroin habit, and I could be the biggest serial rapist of all time. I am not advertising myself, and I do not care who this “us” is you include in every irrelevant reply you make to me. I am making arguments, which you would recognize if you could leave your high school worldview behind you.
I really couldn’t care what you, or anyone online, thinks of me, in the end we are strangers. So let’s drop the playacting.
[...] my essay on Sophomoronology, I offered that the ideals, or the view of life, or the sophistry collage (I cannot call it a [...]
Your term “sophomoronology” is not properly coined.
It ought to be “sophomorology.”
For someone who likes to use fancy Greek and Latin words, you don’t know Greek that well, do?
I know my sense of humor better than I know Greek. If you had upbraided me for being plebeian in my taste for plays on word, I would have accepted the correction with good grace. As it is, all I can do is regret that some of my readers are a little slow on the uptake.