John C. Wright's Journal

There is a crucial scene where the main character has to get help from the President of the United States, and his persuasion consists of an appeal to the man’s sense of the honor of his office. Got that? Not the man’s personal character, but the honor of the office in which he serves, the weight of history that surrounds the Presidency. There is nothing cynical or bitter about it. There were no cheap shots at George Bush or Bill Clinton.

The main motive of the Bad Guy? His family had been keeping a secret since the Civil War. He wanted his family name to be honored also.

A movie about honor! Yes, friends, I was in a parallel world for the space of an afternoon, and I like it better than this one.

Now, before you ask me if I saw any bad movies over vacation, let me just say that I saw Neil Gaiman’s BEOWULF. Unfortunately, I also just encountered the new translation by Seamus Heaney. Let me just say that the original epic poem is not about a lying drunk adulterous power-hungry braggart who sells his soul to an incubus and spends the last act flying around on wires like Spiderman doing Kung-Fu tapdancing acrobatics on the spine of an airborne dragon. In the original poem, Grendel’s motive for attacking Hereot is that the harpists are singing about the creation of the world, and beauties God graced it with, and because Grendel, as a son of Cain, cannot tolerate to see happiness in the sons of Seth. It not because Grendel had sensitive ears, and his mean, drunk neighbors were playing their stereo too loud. The original poem does not have gratuitous and pointless slams against Christianity. The original poem has heroes in it of a very Nordic and Germanic sort, grim and duty-bound, eager for glory, bound by the custom of gifts to give their lives for the lords and ring-givers. The Neil Gaiman version is basically a dark Film Noir set in the bronze age: it owes more to SIN CITY than it does to BEOWULF. The original poem is about honor. The movie version is from a parallel world, and one I like far less than this one.

I suppose you could claim that Neil Gaiman or the film’s director or whoever was trying to film something “darker and grittier” than the Old Norse epic. Unfortunately, I cannot fathom such a thing. Darker? Than the Norse? Grittier? Than an Old Norse Epic? Those guys invented Grim. All they did was remove the heart and the point from the story, and make the heroes more worthy of contempt than admiration.

It was a short step, but an illogical one, to go from the article of faith that non-empirical knowledge was uncertain to saying non-empirical objects simply did not exist.  Non-empirical reasoning from first principles was scorned, and whenever philosophers (such as Kant) were rude enough to point out that the scorners were themselves using nothing but non-empirical reasoning from first principles, the argument was neither answered nor acknowledged.

Now, certain abortive sciences grew out of this attempt:

Freud asserted that he could explain man’s mind by explaining the unconscious mind. All well and good, but no one will claim the unconscious mind is open to the senses. It is not even open to the consciousness.  Freud’s explanations were merely myths and fables: I think it is safe to say that Freud has by and large been dismissed by the scientific community.

The examination of the free will was merely a assumption that free will could not exist, because matter by definition cannot have free will, and all non-matter is matter. The axiom of the physical sciences is that every matter in motion has a material cause. This axiom is a necessary operating principle, a first principle, without which one cannot seek for an unseen material cause for a seen material motion. The free will was simply asserted, by Hobbes and others, not to exist, and the only argument given to support it is an argument from first principles: if you accept the axiom that only material things exist, and that thoughts and ideas exist, it follows that thoughts and ideas are material things. If you accept the axiom that all material motions have a determined physical cause, therefore thoughts and ideas have a determined physical cause.

It is  a perfectly logical argument, given its axioms, but so comically absurd that a schoolboy can explain the error in one sentence: the statement disproves itself, for the statement is itself an expression of a thought, the thought is the theory of materialism, and if the theory of materialism arose from purely material causes, it is thoughtless, neither true nor false. It is a thing like a rock. A rock cannot be true nor false. It has no truth-value because it does not symbolize or “stand for” anything. It is merely a rock. If the theory of materialism is true, then it is not a theory; it is merely ink-marks on a page in a book, electrons in a brain, pressure waves issuing from a throat.

In any case, Behaviorism and Pavlovianism and the related sciences never got off the ground: there are no vast state-run operations of conditioning as envisioned in Huxley’s Brave New World, for example. The impact of B.F. Skinner on the psychiatry is minimal. The science of non-free-will did not even reach the prestige of Freud before it was quietly dismissed.

Karl Marx further muddied the waters by claiming that he had discovered the occult forces that drove history, which was not free will, or the actions of men, but the inanimate motions of men-puppets conditioned by their economic circumstances and driven by the material dialectic of history. Marx did not explain how he was able to step outside the condition of being a man-puppet and perceive the secret springs and gears driving history. If the Marxist theory was like every other idea, it was conditioned by an economic category, not driven by a search for the truth, of course, it is just like other theories of materialism, not true or false, merely an ideological superstructure, merely something like a rock, something without truth-value.

Meanwhile Bertrand Russell merely asserted as a metaphysical postulate that all metaphysical postulates are false.

Wittgenstein asserted, using words, that all words were meaningless.

I cannot explain the psychology of it, but the philosophical mistake is a simple one: it is elevating empiricism from an axiom fit only for the physical sciences to a universal: and then attempting, blindly, stupidly, and with endless futility, to apply empiricism to aspects of reality and of human nature that are not open to empirical investigation.

Imagine for a moment that some fool said only experimental knowledge was knowledge and that observational knowledge was not knowledge. By that rule, astronomy is not a science. Not a single experiment has ever been done to create a Big Bang and form stars out of hydrogen. We have not even made a single star or planet in a lab. The absurdity of pulling a star larger than  Sol into a lab on Earth should give anyone pause, and make clear the rule is too limited.

Likewise, here. The rule that says only empirical knowledge is fit to be called knowledge is a rule that applies only to the physical sciences.

Now: here is the great drawback. Philosophy in general and Metaphysics in particular have been so scorned and demeaned in modern education that a rational discussion on the topic is almost impossible.

Too much has been lost. Technical terms once universally known to anyone who studied the subject are now as ill-known as the special jargon of the alchemists. A philosophical discussion, particularly an Internet discussion, consists of little more than explaining basic concepts over and over again. Never mind explaining Kantian categories to someone: you have to spend all your time explaining and re-explaining Aristotle’s four causes.

Because we live in an age where the knowledge of Metaphysics even among the educated classes has fallen to a barbaric and backward state, the conversation on an abstract topic founders. Never mind discussing a hard topic like politics or morality, topics that involve experience and judgment calls.  You cannot even discuss basic ideas like logic and geometry because the metaphysical underpinning of these sciences, once clearly known to all educated students, and carefully defined with an agreed-upon technical terms, have sunk like Atlantis.

People still have a metaphysics. For obvious reasons, one cannot have a philosophy without a metaphysics, any more than one can have geometry without axioms and common notions. It is just that now the metaphysical assumptions are primitive, unexamined, unvoiced, dogmatic, and unsubtle.

(Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mind saying the same things more than once, because this is a journal, and there is a new audience every night. I don’t mind explaining things to the curious. I do mind explaining things to the willfully ignorant, those wights who, even when an explanation is clear, neither answer it, nor refute it, nor give a counter-argument, nor acknowledge it. It would be easier to separate the wights from the sincerely curious if we all spoke the same language.)

Here is an example of what I mean. This was an idea buried at the bottom of a five-score long comment thread, and I thought it might be overlooked. It actually surprises me that an educated man would question the notion that ideas, Platonic forms and mathematical objects, were timeless and necessary as opposed to facts, which are contingent and temporal. Or, I should say, I am not surprised the idea would be questioned. It is actually a good question, a tough question, that should give any philosopher pause: but I am surprised that it would be questioned without a counter-argument being given.

My reader questioned the notion that there were any experiments to demonstrate the difference between ideas and facts. Here was my answer:

As for the temporal nature of the world, take a candle and light one end. Wait an hour. Has the candle changed? If you answer yes, the candle has melted, then you are living in a world where material things change.

Now take a concept like “A is A” or “Twice two is four”. Contemplate it. Wait an hour. Come back and contemplate it again. Is it the same concept? Or does it now read “Twice two is three”? If your concepts change from the passage of time, then they also are temporal. If not, then they are not temporal. Whatever is not temporal is eternal.

So much for that. Next question: is the world contingent or necessary? There is a simple experiment here also. Take a material fact, such as, say the diameter of the world. See whether or not you can imagine it otherwise.

If Eratosthenes of Cyrene had accurately paced out a different distance between Alexandria and Syene, then the figure in his calculation for the diameter of the earth would have been different. Likewise, the other way: if the world had been of a different diameter, the distance paced out between Alexandria and Syene by Eratosthenes would have been different. The test of truth of the conclusion of Eratosthenes DEPENDS on the accuracy of his observation. Hence, our deductions about the diameter of the world depends on, and is contingent upon, other facts and deductions and principles. A simple thought experiment: could the diameter of the earth be different if the measurements had been different? If you answer yes, you are saying that another conclusion is possible and imaginable. If another conclusion is possible and imaginable, then the conclusion is contingent upon the facts. Conclusions contingent on facts are not certain, since fact are open to re-examination, and can change from time to time: Earth’s diameter is not likely to increase or decrease soon, but matter could be added or taken away from her over the course of cosmic time.

On the other hand, contemplate that, if A is A therefore A is not not-A. This is a principle, known as the principle of non-contradiction. Since we cannot imagine another conclusion, the conclusion is inescapable and inevitable. If the conclusion is inevitable, it is the same no matter what the contingent facts are. Therefore the conclusion does not depend on any contingencies. The conclusion is certain because it is self-evident, its mere utterance is a sufficient proof for itself. What is self-evident is certain.

Now, as I say, it is a perfectly good question, but it could have been answered quite easily if the educated men of the modern day read the classics and were part of the ongoing conversation with history.

Remember this guy? Too busy studying dentistry to learn important elf-skills like wiggling his ears? Well, my four-year-old pointed out something that I had not noticed in 35-some-odd years of watching this Christmas Special. Little Juss points at the screen and says, “He doesn’t have elf ears. He’s not an elf.”

It was true. All the other elves had noses shaped like doorknobs, were bald, and Vulcan-eared. Most of them have little black beads for eyes rather than showing a pupil like a human eye.

Same species? We report, you decide.

The grim truth was borne home. Hermie is a Changling, one of those humans kidnapped at birth and swapped for a an elf-cub by malignant Svartalfar. Check out the picture above. Hermie is clearly a homo sapiens; Celebrimbor the Artificer there is clearly a Noldor of the house of Feanor, who of all elves was the proudest and most selfwilled.

Hermie the Dentist, victim of Human Trafficking! No wonder he does not fit in.

Shocking. I never noticed–it took a four year old to point it out to me.

Merry Christmas to all! Peace on Earth, good will toward Men!

There are, hence, four approaches to reality:

1. Treat matter as a mechanism.

2. Treat people as mechanisms: this is the neuropsychiatric approach.

3. Treat matter as if it had intention: this is the magician’s approach.

4. Treat people as if they had intention.

I submit that these approaches are wise and useful each in its appropriate circumstance, except, perhaps, the magician’s approach, which seems to be mere anthropomorphism, seeing human faces in the mountains of Mars.

(Of course, if I ever were confronted by a vampire, I would flourish a cross, in hope that a mental entity like faith could fling back and destroy a physical entity like Bella Lagosi or Frank Langella. I mean, I might be a philosopher, but let’s be practical about this.)  

I am a methodological dualist: I am agnostic toward the question of how mind and matter are related. I don’t think it can be answered; I am not even sure if it can be asked in a meaningful way.

Let us look at the facts. It is obvious to me that I exist and that my thoughts have intention. I am self-aware. I can move my hand, which means that mind can move matter in some circumstances. Drugs or damage to my skull can impair my thinking, as can sleep or sleep deprivation, which means that matter can influence that mind in some circumstances. Obviously mind and matter can affect each other.

Does one determine the other? Does mind determine matter? Does matter determine mind?

Once physics reconciles quantum mechanics with relativity and can answer the question for certain that cause and effect is a meaningful and immutable category that applies to all physical entities, will we be in a position to ASK the question if it also applies as an immutable category for mental entities. At the moment, alas, we are not in a position even to ask the question.

At the moment, we do not even know if everything in the physical world is determined; we certainly know that everything in the physical world suffers from microscopic limitations to the ability of the observer to measure physical reality (see Schrodinger, etc). So the two questions are whether physical reality is determined, and whether it is determinable from the viewpoint of an observer.

At the moment, we also do not know if formal logical systems are determined by their axioms. There seems to be a logical incompleteness in every formal theory (see Goedel).

At the moment, even knowing the initial conditions of a set of logical rules in a system, we cannot necessarily determine the outcome or end-state of the system. If you have chessboard and a simple rule that three adjacent chessmen place a new man between them, but that two adjacent chessman capture the piece, you’d have to sit and play through the game to find out the final position of the pieces. (See cellular automaton theory).

We also know from chaos theory that tiny difference in initial conditions produce disproportionate and hence unpredictable outcomes in multivariable systems. You do not know where a magnet on a pendulum swinging between two other magnets will be after twenty swings.

Are you following all these qualifications, dear reader? (1) We don’t know, thanks to Heisenberg, if matter is determinate. (2) If it is determinate, we don’t know, thanks to Schrodinger, if knowledge to the observer can be determined. (3) We don’t know, thanks to Goedel, if knowledge in formal systems is determined or determinable (4) We don’t know, thanks to cellular automata studies, that even determined systems are not predictable and (5) multivariable systems are innately chaotic. At this point, the idea that you could predict with apodictic certainty what I would do and think twelve days hence if only you knew the position and mass of every particle of brain-matter and every atom and impulse of incoming stimulation or biological influence at the current moment is an idea that is beginning to look pretty attenuated. If you want to predict my actions, you’d be better off just asking my wife.

We have no facts, no experiment and no observation, to back that assertion that matter determines mind: it is an article of faith for materialists, which they take as an axiom. I will be convinced of materialism when and only when someone puts it into a hypodermic and injects me with it, and I don’t mean by impairing my judgment or intoxicating me. I mean they have to inject me with the idea before I will believe the idea can be reduced to a determined material substrate.

Sticking, as a skeptic must stick, only to what I know for certain, I know my mind exists (because (1) I know it and (2) I know I know) and I know that I have a theory in my mind that matter exists independently of my perception of it.

If I am uncertain about my self-awareness, I cannot me more certain about that than I can be about anything else, since my awareness is the instrument by which I am aware of my conclusions and their certainty. It may be true that I can be given cause to question the trustworthiness of my self-awareness, but, logically, that same cause whatever it is must give me cause to question the trustworthiness of my cause of doubt. If I do not know I exist, how can I know that my doubt that I exist exists?

The first idea is a fact, that enjoys the certainty of Descartes: the second idea is a theory, or, to be precise, an a priori category, a metaphysical axiom without which no reasonable statements about matter can be made. The first idea is certain, the second idea is an assumption.

Where I ever to become convinced that mind and matter are two substances that cannot possibly interact (and I have read many a philosophical treatise that assumes so, but not one which has proven so) I would be forced to conclude that all appearances or phenomena of duality are in truth one numenal substance: at that point I would be a theological idealist in the fashion of Bishop Berkley, since, of the two substances, mind and matter, the only one of which I have immediate experience is mind. Matter is just a theory I use to explain my perceptions: and perceptions are subset of thoughts in mind.  

But since the division of substances into two has never been convincingly argued to me, I am in practice someone who observes that all men in practice are dualists, no matter what they say they believe.

Short answer: I default to dualism, but not for the reasons other dualists give. If pressed, I retreat into the idealism of Berkley, also called Immaterialism.

One caveat —  I feel about Immmaterialism much the same way I feel about Solipsism: even if I conclude for abstract reasons that other people are computers, as a matter of fact I have to treat them as if they are people. Since they are peoplelike computers and are distinct from computerlike computers, I might as well call them people.

Likewise, here. Even if we conclude for abstract reasons that the things we see as objects are in fact “ideas” present in the objective mind of what is basically a mental universe (or the Mind of God) all we have done is define the word “idea” to cover both the ideas in our head that act by intention (idealike ideas) and the ideas outside our head that act without reference to intention (matterlike ideas) — so we might as well stick to the simpler nomenclature and call those so-called ideas that act like matter in our perception “matter”.

The same pragmatic impatience works the other way, which is why I am impatient with members of the materialist religion. Even granting that every thought in my head and yours is made of “matter” the cold fact of the case is that this is the only form of matter we can move with our naked minds by manipulating signs and symbols, and the only way you can convince me of jack is to use signs and symbols to get me to volunteer to move the so-called matter in my skull into the symbol-arrangement called “you talked me into it.”

So it is thoughtlike matter that acts like thoughts. Let’s just go ahead and call it thoughts until proven otherwise.

*   *  *

Since, as a Christian, I believe the material universe, or the appearance thereof, was created and is sustained by the Mind of God at every second, and since modern science now prefers, for reasons of parsimony, to talk about the information of matter rather than the matter of matter (for example, I hear physicists say no “information” can leave a black hole, or I hear them describe subatomic particles not as things but as collections of “information” concerning spin values, etc.), I have no theological problems with immaterialism, nor does it necessarily create a problem with physics. 

From the Christian point of view, asking if matter exists independently of the mind of the Creator is sort of like asking whether Professor Tolkien is strong enough to throw down the Dark Tower. No matter how strong and massive and imposing the storybook tower might be, the author can topple it with the stroke of a pen.

From the god’s-eye point of view, I speculate that nothing in the material universe is “made” of anything, since the Creator could, in His omnipotence, with a word, unmake or change anything that was made. If we want to portray the impotence of matter in the face of the Mind of God by simply calling all material things “thoughts” in the Mind of God, we may do so: but His thoughts are not as our thoughts are. The thoughts of God are matter to us. The human mind cannot part the Red Sea with his own willpower, or even levitate a single drop of dew. No matter the real condition of matter, it is extrinsic to us. 

As a philosopher, I grant that the paradox of how mind, which is insubstantial, can move or be moved by matter, which is substantial, can be solved by Berkley’s immaterialist formulation. All things are made of the thoughts of God, in much the same way all characters and props in the book of an author are the author’s inventions.

I can move my material arm with my material brain, by the grace and permission of God, in the same way that Hamlet can move his arm to pick up the skull of Yorick, by the grace and permission of Shakespeare. Since both Hamlet’s mind and Hamlet’s hand are made up of nothing more than Shakespeare’s imaginings, there is no reason why Hamlets immaterial mind cannot move Hamlets material arm.  They are actually one and the same: dream-stuff in the mind of Shakespeare.

That part of God’s thought-stuff which was stirred to independent life and granted free will in the divine image, we call mind or soul. That’s us. That part of the thought-stuff which God put outside of our control (either at creation or after the Fall, depending on whether you envision prelapsarian man as having miraculous command over nature) we call matter.

Let us take an inventory of what we can and cannot control. I can control some of the thoughts in my imagination (I can imagine myself a cubit taller); other thoughts I can perceive but not control (I cannot imagine myself a cubit taller, while imagining myself to be greater or less than six spans taller. A cubit is six spans. I cannot change the rules of math in my mind); there are certain thoughts were I have little or no control (I do not deliberately forget what I have forgotten, nor do I script out the odd things that I seem to see in dreams); there seems to be something damaged or corrupted in my mind, because certain things I should be able to control, I cannot control (various passions of lust and pride and anger, for example); I am aware of sensations and sense-impressions, but I cannot alter them, except in trivial ways (I can stare at a optical illusion and make one line or the other look longer to me). What I cannot do is make myself a cubit taller by effort of thought. Even if I did not know where the boundaries of the physical world were, I could discover them by seeing what I could and could not control with a silent effort of willpower. I suppose a baby born with psycho-kinetic superpowers might never discover exactly what was external in the environment, and what was an image in his thoughts only.  In any case, the Fall seems to have put the control the passions outside the willpower, or, at least, outside the unassisted willpower: and so the passions are matter-like in this one respect, whether you actually think “the flesh” literally causes wicked thoughts to arise in the mind of its own power or not.

Now of these things of which I have partial control, I still thing of them as being mental rather than material, and for precisely this reason: mental things admit of mental properties, such as true and false, moral and immoral, logical and illogical, meaningful and meaningless. A stone is stone. It has mass and volume, but not honesty. There is no speaking of a “false” stone, except as a metaphor, or of an illogical or evil or meaningless stone. But we do speak of true and false dreams, or meaningful or meaningless dreams, and honest passions or evil passions or even false passions. The mental things have internal and intrinsic properties physical things simply do not have.

For practical purposes, will all due respect to Bishop Berkley, if all matter is made of divine thought, it is still matter to us, because it is not something we can change or manipulate by thought alone, and it is not something that possesses intrinsic properties such as true and false, right and wrong, meaningful and nonsensical. Tradition says that there are saints who walk on water, bilocate, levitate, and routinely treat the material world as casually as a lucid dreamer treats a dream: maybe so and maybe no, but if so, the saint is not abrogating the distinction between matter and spirit, he is overcoming the barrier between his spirit and that sovereign Spirit who is the father of all. At that point, perhaps material things would seem to that saint to have intrinsic properties, and he would read sermons in stones, see the gladness in the falling waters, hear the singing of the stars.

We use the word “sentence” to refer to the ink marks on a page. You can count the letters in a sentence, and weigh the exact amount of ink it took to write them. We also use the word “sentence” to refer to the ideas in that sentence. But weighing the ink will not tell you if the sentence is true or false. Observe: “This sentence has five words.” And “This sentence has four words.” Both sentences have the same number of words; they differ only in the matter of three letters; but one is true and the other is false.

Normally we use these two meanings of the word sentence interchangeably: perhaps this is the source of your confusion. Whenever I talk about the idea-sentence, you think I mean the ink-sentence.

We also use words like “book” and “story” interchangeably, sometimes to comedic ambiguity. If I say the book was light, obviously I mean the story had no serious point, not that the physical paper and leather binding and ink-marks had small mass. Again, if I say the book was weighty, you might think I mean I was using the book as a doorstop, that the physical object had weight, when actually I meant the story made a moral point that influenced my thoughts profoundly, that it addressed a weighty issue. If I say the book weighs on my mind, I do not mean I am holding the heavy volume on my head.

We also use words that refer to thoughts and ideas likewise: we say a man’s thoughts are “in his head” or “in his imagination” even though his head is a physical object and his imagination is a non-physical entity without location. This is merely an ambiguity that can be cleared up by noticing a simple distinction.

Symbols are not objects. The map is not the territory. The word is not the thing it represents.

Do you understand the difference between the word “rock” and a physical rock? You must at some level grasp the distinction, because you make it every day in your everyday life. If I were to shout the word “rock” at your head, your head would not be bruised.

When I say the word “rock” there is not a stone in my mouth that flies out of my mouth and strikes you in the ear, entering your ear and lodging in your brain. Nothing like that happens.

I draw your attention to the fact that the word “rock” can be true or false. If I point at an ice cube and say “this is a rock” I have spoken falsely. Falseness is a characteristic that applies to words.

A real rock is a rock. A rock cannot be true or false. A rock, on the other hand, can be heavy or light, warm or cold, white or black. A word cannot be heavy or light, warm or cold, white or black.

Properties that we perceive with our senses are called sensible properties. They include things like heavy or light, warm or cold, white or black. We call things with sensible properties physical things, or matter.

All properties of matter can be reduced to a few measurable magnitudes, such as mass, position, duration, vector. They are quantities. They are external to the mind.

Properties that we apprehend with our minds are called mental or intellectual properties. They include things like meaningful or meaningless, true or false, futile or useful. We call thing with mental properties nonphysical things, or ideas.

No properties of ideas can be reduced to a magnitude of any kind. They are qualities. They are internal to the mind.

All that seems to be confusing you is that an evil fairy cast a spell on you, so that you cannot tell the difference (like the man who thought his wife was a hat) between the physical object used to symbolize a word, and the idea to which the word points. The physical object can be anything: airplanes can write words in the sky out of smoke. Penmen can write words on paper with ink. Speakers can utter words in the air, using pressure waves that issue from the throat.

And all that happens when I tell you these things, is that you continue to insist that the word “rock” is a physical object like a rock. The smoke, ink, soundwaves, or what-have-you that carries or embodies the word is indeed a physical object, but the physical nature of this object is accidental and indifferent to the essential symbolic property of the object. “Rock” is the same word whether written in chalk on a rock or written in smoke in the air. The meaning of the word does not change when the color of the ink changes. The meaning of the word does change if the idea being represented changes: “Rock and roll” does not mean the same thing as “Rock quarry”.

Again, if I point to a rock and I make soundwaves, the soundwaves have physical properties that can be measured. The soundwaves, qua soundwaves, cannot be true or false, because truth and falsehood is not a property waves can have. Only symbols can be true or false. Truth cannot be measured: it does not have mass to tip a balance scale or height to compare to a yardstick or duration to count with a stopwatch. A word cannot be measured.

You can say that the spoke word is embedded or carried or accompanied or associated with the soundwaves, if you like. But the words would be the same whether spoken or unspoken, written or unwritten. If I look at an ice cube and I think “Rock” I have thought a false thought. Again, if I look at a rock and my brain produces brainwaves, the brainwaves have physical properties that can be measured. The brainwaves, qua brainwaves, cannot be true or false, because truth and falsehood is not a property waves can have.

So there are two problems with your statement:

(1) It is unsubstantiated.

What is the time and place where you came across evidence that proves that it is merely a function of our scientific ignorance that qualitative and interior statements about the mind can be reduced to quantitative and exterior statements about the brain, but just not yet? Friend, I have heard more convincing testimonies from people who have seen ghosts. They can tell me the time and place where they saw a ghost.

Just admit your belief is an article of faith, not a belief based on scientific evidence, and not a belief based on rational deductions from first principles, and I will stop questioning you.

(2) It is patently false and logically absurd.

Even if the relationship between every brain atom and every thought or sensation were tracked, the logical categories into which you and I and all other rational beings place ideas in order to make sense of ideas would require us to treat people as if they were people, and rock as if they were rocks.

These categories include concepts like final cause, intentional and unintentional, perception and misperception, blame and praise, love and hate, will, actions, true and false, logical and illogical, and so on. These categories include all concepts related to internal meaning.

For let us assume otherwise. Let us assume you had the power, the Thought Control Helmet, to reorganize at will any brain you came across, so that the ideas in that brain would conform to whatever conclusions and ideas you preferred. The moment you use it, you are treating people like rocks: they would for all practical purposes be inert material, robots or animals, things without any moral or human meaning to you.  If you used the Mind Helmet on Trilby to make her fall in love with you, it would have no more meaning to you than if you wrote a love letter to your self and forged her name on it. It would not represent any judgment or thought or honest emotion on her part. It would be fan-fiction, but one where you put yourself in as a character and get Uhura to kiss you.

You would never discuss or debate or disagree with anyone again. Instead of the frustration of trying to make your ideas clear to them in words, you could merely zap them with the helmet-ray, and their thoughts would be whatever you wished. You could perhaps as a game pretend these robot people were real, and let them say and think whatever nature had randomly written into their brain-mechanisms, but it would be you pretending they were human. It would not even be a game. It would be a pastime, like solitaire. Their words and ideas would have no truth value to you.

But no matter how you treated other people, you could not treat yourself the same way; you would not use your Mind Control Helmet to force yourself to think certain ideas, because the ideas would have no truth-value to you if you imposed them on yourself in that fashion. I am not saying the owner of such a machine might not want to lie to himself in his own thoughts, or bury an unhappy memory–but the utility of ideas qua ideas, the usefulness we seek from the process of reasoning, would be lost.

Ideas that are imposed on you by the helmet, if you knew they were imposed, would not persuade you that they were true. If you did not know they were imposed, but thought you had reasoned your way to their conclusion, you were merely be deceived and insane. You could no longer trust your own thoughts to be corresponding to reality. If you eliminated from yourself the desire to have trustworthy thoughts or to have them correspond to reality, or if you eliminate your awareness of what you had done to yourself, at that point you are a muppet. 

The reason why materialism is self-contradictory is that you are in effect telling me that your thoughts are controlled by a Mind Control Helmet that runs without an operator, merely Mother Nature blinding sending out unintentional thought-control-signals. But, if you actually believed that, you would conclude that your thoughts have no truth value.

Scientific ignorance has nothing to do with it. You would not be able to read the letters of the thought in someone else’s head unless an observer, you, were present.

Let me repeat:

We describe the material objects of the world seen with the eyes in mechanical terms because they cannot be understood in any other way. It does no good to pray to rocks or to sweet-talk them; there is no point in being angry with a stone or asking a stone what it was trying to accomplish. Objects react to forces, they don’t attempt actions.

We describe the mental objects of the word seen with the mind in purposive terms, because they cannot be understood in any other way. Men attempt actions.

The one limited exception is in those areas where men’s bodies act like rocks: an unconscious man in a sack thrown out of a plane falls due to the forces acting on him, not according to any intention of his. A mannequin of the same mass thrown in the same way and the same time would fall in the same spot.

Mechanical descriptions of inert matter can only describe reactions, not actions. Such descriptions cannot attribute intent or purpose, willpower, pain or pleasure, or any internal meaning to objects. When one billiard ball strikes another, it is a reaction to some previous force that set it in motion. The cause and effect runs from the past to the present.

When one soldier strikes another to save the life of a comrade, this is an action, not a reaction. It is an event the soldier sets in motion, and the event cannot be understood without reference to the final cause (purpose, intent, goal) which the solider willed. The soldier saw a friendly about to be hurt by a foe; he anticipated an outcome that would take place if he failed to act, and, preferring a different outcome, he set in motion a chain of cause and effect to achieve a desired end. No matter how you slice it, no matter what you say, any description of the soldier’s action which does not include his purposes for acting is incomplete: a lie, even.

The soldier throws himself on a foe, provoked by honor, preferring death to defeat, moved by the love for his brother in arms, he strikes the enemy with his spear where the jawbone meets the neck, and slays the foe. Got the picture?

Now, let us suppose the scientific revolution takes place, and the thought control helmet is invented. The thought control helmet has a little screen, to look inside the man’s brain, and see the little atoms whirring. By hypothesis, these atoms are merely a clockwork, like little wheels and gears moved by a mainspring, and the mainspring itself was wound up by another mechanical process.

The point is that each gear moves because it is determined to move. The spring unwinds at its determined rate, fixed and meaningless. There is no intent involved. There is no will involved. There is no praise and blame involved. 

Now we open the helmet and look at the soldier’s brain matter.

I ask, “Why did the soldier slay the foe?”

You peer into the helmet and say, “Spring A moved gear B and moved gear C. This set in motion the nerve impulses that trigger the muscle contraction. The spear struck the point of impact.”

Me: “I am not asking about what moved the spear. What moved the soldier? Why did he leap to the attack when the other soldiers were running away?”

You say: “But I told you! In his brain, spring a moved gear B and this moved gear C.”

Me: “Was his action praiseworthy or blameworthy? I need to make a report to the commission to recommend him for a medal.”

You: “Yes, well, in his brain, spring a moved gear B and this moved gear C.”

Me: “What does the spring mean? By the spring, do you mean his sense of honor, or perhaps his unspoken fear of seeming like a coward?”

You: “Well, the spring is the spring. In my world, objects only exist as facts. Meaning only exists in your world, where there are ideas. There are no ideas in my world, only gears, wheels, and springs.”

Me: “What words was he thinking when he did the act? What did it seem like to him?”

You: “There are no words. Words are symbols to represent ideas. There are no ideas and hence no symbols in my world. There was no ‘seems like’. To ‘seem like’ means to have an imagine or a symbol to represent a thought or a perception. But images and perceptions are merely specific types of ideas, and there are no ideas in my world, only gears and springs and wheels.”

Me: “Was he afraid or brave?”

You: “Don’t be silly. How can a gear or a spring be afraid or brave? Emotions are also things in the realm of ideas, and that is the realm I say is made up of nothing but wheels gears and springs.”

Me: “But surely all the little gears taken together as a whole set in motion in his mind a serious of symbols and thoughts, so that, from his point of view, he seems to himself to be thinking certain things….”

You: “I think not! One gear cannot think a thought. It is an inanimate object that is moved by necessity. It never decides anything. It merely moves according to forces acting on it. So two gears cannot think a thought. Neither can four, or eight, or sixteen.”

Me: “What about a thousand gears? Or a million?”

You: “What, do you think that by some magic number an inanimate process can suddenly become a deliberate human action? It is impossible. Add up as many horizontal lines, one to another, end to end for as long as you like, four or four million, you will never reach one inch of vertical line.”

Me: “What about emergent properties? One gas molecule does not have temperature or pressure, but a cubic foot of gas molecules has temperature and pressure. This is a property that is seen in the mass but not seen in the individual.”

You: “That is because temperature and pressure a qualities that are related to the properties of the atoms of gas involved. Temperature is an aggregate of the motions of the atoms, and atoms have the property motion. If you had the eyes of a dragon and the brain of an angel, you could see the atoms in motion like a billion billiard balls, and deduce the emergent temperature from the average rate of motion. Pressure likewise is an attribute of motion. But if you take an entity that has no motion, either by itself or as a group, such as, for example, the points on a number line, or the seconds in a day, you cannot deduce the temperature of the number line or the pressure of a Wednesday. Adding more seconds, all the seconds in January, all the seconds in 1987, will still never make those seconds have a temperature. These words make no sense together. Likewise, you cannot deduce the thoughts and intentions of aggregates of gears and wheels, that are entities move only as forces acting on them determine.”

Me: “Well, in any case, I would like to know what happened with the soldier struck the foe. What was he trying to accomplish? Was he trying to save his friend?”

You: “There is no such thing as ‘trying to accomplish.’ There are only wheels and gears and springs. Cause and effect only works from past to present. You are asking me what event in the future the soldier foresaw, and willed to act to avoid! But the future does not exist. Photons cannot fly back in time and strike the soldier’s photoreceptors and set in motion the mainspring in his brain!”

Me: “Then tell me what happened? If I said ‘the soldier bravely leaped to save his friend and struck the foe a killing blow’ is this a true statement or a false one?”

You: “I have told you what happened. Spring A moved gear B which moved gear C.”

I now take up the Mind Helmet myself and turn it on you. I say, “I need to look in your brain to see if you believe what you are saying. You say the brain is nothing but wheels and gears! I need to know two things: first, is it a statement you believe to be true, whether it is actually true or false? Second, a true statement, whether you believe it or not?”

You say: “Here look in my brain, and you shall be answered! See! Spring D moved gear E which moved gear F.”

Me: “Is that statement true? Do you believe it to be true?”

You: “Spring D moved gear E moved gear F. Gear F also moved gear G, if that helps.”

* * *

There you have it. These two speakers know everything there is to know about how the brain works. There is no scientific ignorance covering them; there is no black box. Nonetheless, the description of wheels and gears in motion only tells me the extrinsic properties of the action, and it leaves out everything that makes the action understandable. Instead of seeing a man fighting to save his friend, you see a meaningless ripple of forces setting inert matter in motion. When asked if indeed that is what you see and what you believe, you cannot answer the question merely by repeating extrinsic measurements of external properties. Facts without meaning are meaningless.

In case you think I am putting words in your mouth, please note that this is exactly what I am NOT doing. The “you” in my little hypothetical conversation here does not an cannot make any statements about mental events, like perceiving, thinking, deducing, anticipating, preferring, attempting, wishing, desiring, nor does he use any categories related to symbols, such as true and false, logical and illogical.
Why does he not? Because you can’t. Adding more gears into the sentence, ” Spring A moved gear B which moved gear C moved gear D moved gear E….” does not tell us the first thing about any mental event.

Back when I was an atheist, I was not a materialist, because there seemed (to me, at least) to be insurmountable philosophical difficulties with the proposition that matter-in-motion was a complete explanation, or even an incomplete but satisfying one, for the mental life of men and animals.

Materialism is an idea, is it not? If materialism is true, at least one idea must be true, and I am aware of it. But if materialism is true, then the material brain-particles of which I am not aware, but which I hypothesize exist, are the real components of the thought, the only reality the thought has: and the thought itself, and my thoughts about the thought (such as my conclusion that it is true) have no necessary truth value.

In other words, by accepting materialism, I am accepting that the things I know directly and without reasonable doubt, without any interposing medium of sense impressions, i.e. my thoughts and my self-awareness, are an illusion or an epiphenomenon whose reality is open to question; but I am also accepting that theoretical particles that I have never seen, i.e. my brain-electrons, are the only reality whose reality I can firmly affirm.

It seems like I am giving up something I know for certain in exchange for a highly doubtful theory based on not a single fact or single bit of evidence about a group of entities whose existence I know only through deduction — and yet deduction is a type of thinking.

Keep in mind, in our current state of technology, we can make people drunk, we can erase their short-term memory, we can perform electroshock or introduce other traumas that clearly affect the person’s ability to think. But we have not one experiment which has shown any control of any kind over the content of thought. A sober Republican can be made into a drunk Republican by injecting his veins with alcohol; but a sober Republican cannot be made into a sober Monarchist by injecting his veins with the theory of kingship. We can put mind-altering drugs into a hypo; we cannot put a theory into a hypo.

The theory of materialism says, in effect, that even though we cannot in fact put a theory into a hypo, we should in theory be able to put a theory in a hypo. As best I can tell, this assertion is a speculation without a single fact to support it. (If we could put a theory into a hypo, materialism is one of the theories we could put in the hypo: in which case, you do not know if you believe materialism because materialism is true, or if you believe materialism merely because you’ve been injected.)

There are more sightings of UFO’s from more credible witnesses than there are sightings of theories being put into hypodermics. Not a single eyewitness, reliable or not, claims that he saw Titania fall in love with Bottom because she drank a love-potion.

So my question is, if you will be so kind as to contemplate it, on what material grounds do you believe materialism? I am not asking you if you have a philosophical argument to support a belief in materialism: I am asking if you have a scientific observation that supports it?

According to materialism, all my thoughts about any topic (including the topic of materialism)

1. can be completely explained with nothing left over,

2. can be completely predicted with no indeterminacy left over (aside from what quantum uncertainties inhere in matter itself), and

3. can be completely understood with no additional explanation or interpretation needed

merely by an examination of the position and vector of my brain-particles.

Now, at first glance, this seems a reasonable proposition. If the brain is like a book, the position of the ink-particles that make up the letters and words in the book completely determine the contents of the book. By understanding where all the letters are, we understand the contents of the book, its meanings and messages. The book is in motion, because the letters change according to outside stimuli, so the analogy is not exact, but  analogy is close enough to be helpful as an image.

Perhaps a better analogy would be a series of letters written on a row of dominoes that stand or fall according to the toppling motion of other dominoes: and as the dominoes topple, different letters are visible to the viewer, spelling out different words with different meanings at different times. The dominoes here represent the material or efficient causes of one thought or one sense impression forcing the next thought in the sequence into existence.

The analogy is more complex if we consider that the apperception (the internal mechanism by which we are aware of our own thoughts) and the viewer who does the reading (the numenal self) and the act of reading and of understanding, are also made of rows of dominoes that topple or stand according to the impact of other rows of falling dominoes set in motion by the act of thinking or perceiving. Nonetheless, even the most complex computer basically is like a row of toppling dominoes, except with electrons flowing or not flowing across circuits.

On second thought, we find something mysterious, even paradoxical, in this description: because the analogy leaves something out. It leaves out the fact that no such thing as a “letter” exists in the material world. Because point number 3 — that the motion of brain atoms can completely explain the thoughts and conclusions on any topic — is manifestly false and absurd.

The letter L is not a letter in the material world, it is merely a right-angle make of ink. The letter 0 is a circle of ink, and the letter T is two right angles bisecting a line. No matter how closely you examined the position of each and every atom in those molecules of ink, you would not discover anything other than the material properties of the ink. The material properties include thinks like their mass, position, motion, and duration. Qualities like the temperature and color of the ink are visible in the aggregate, but ultimately can be reduced to a description of the mass and position and motion of light-waves or the density and aggregate motions of the air and paper to which the ink is exposed.

Nowhere can the meaning of the letters be found. The letters have no meaning without an observer. Worse yet, the letters in certain combination, such as TLO, have no meaning (at least none known to me), whereas the same letters, occupying the same mass and duration of ink-molecules, when spelled out in a different order, such as LOT, can mean a lot to me.

Here we come to the gulf the theory of materialism has to cross. On the one side of the gulf, we have entities like thoughts and intentions, and we use the language of human action to speak of them: thoughts have qualities like “meaningful” & “meaningless” and “true” & “false” and “purposeful” & “futile.”

On the other hand, on the far side of the gulf, matter either gross or fine has qualities like “mass” and “volume” and “density” and “position” and “duration”.

This division is inescapable. Neither you nor I can speak of human action in terms of merely mechanical motions; we introduce concepts like free will, choice, intention, truth, logic, meaning, purpose, final cause, efficiency, desire, conscience, right and wrong each time we speak about what humans are doing and why they are doing it. The only exception is cases where we are limiting our discussion to a bodily motion over which the person has no awareness or control: a man in a sack thrown out of an airplane has a parabolic fall-path that can be defined with scientific precision. A mannequin with the same mass would fall in the same way. A man in a jeweler’s shop trying to decide what ring to buy for his fiancee does not have any path that can be defined except in reference to the man’s will and preferences. We cannot even speak of a mannequin having a desire to impress a girl or save money except by analogy: we do not even say a sentencein a book is false except when we mean the author of the book wrote down a falsehood. The only time we attribute intentions to inanimate objects is when they are tools or symbols.

On this side of the gulf are our internal awareness: thoughts and ideas. On the far side of the gulf is our external awareness: the world we believe exists because we trust our senses are accurate. On this side of the gulf is the world composed of symbols and ideas and intentions. On the far side of the gulf is the world composed of phenomena, composed, as best we can tell, of atoms and energies. A person who says that he believes or concludes that everything in the world is gathered on the far side of the gulf utters a paradox: because the act of believing or concluding is something that can only be done on this side of the gulf, in the world of symbols.

Well, the one cannot be turned into or reduced into the other by any operation. Adding lengths to a given length will not make a line true or false. Lines do not admit of true and false, only sentences or statements can be true or false. Speeding up the acceleration of a falling stone will not make a meaningless falling stone meaningful: falling stones do not have meaning, only symbols have meaning. Increasing the volume of a sphere will not make it logical or illogical: logic describes a relation between the meaning of statements and parts of statements.  

Now then, if my brain atoms are merely like rows of dominoes with letters written on them, some random particle of cosmic rays passing through my front lobe could flip my thought, let us call it LOT, and make it LOL or TOT or LIT. The rest of the dominoes, before and after, would remain the same, including the domino in the position of the check-digit which is T when the statement is held to be true. My awareness of the my thoughts, since that thought is still marked T, would seem to me in my self-awareness, still to be true, even though the composition and (we must assume, if materialism is true, the meaning of thoughts is based on their material composition) the meaning of the thought is now changed. Instead of the statement: “I believe in materialism because it explains a lot.” I now believe: “I believe materialism because it explains LOL.”

So, if I am a materialist, how am I to be sure that my belief in materialism is not caused by and only caused by a stray cosmic ray striking through my cortex and flipping one brain-electron out of place that composes the thought I used to belief in materialism? How do I know that thought should not actually be LOL instead of LOT, or how do I know that the truth-checker digit for that thought, the electron that registers my conclusion, is supposed to be T rather than F?

So much for the analogy. The absurdity of the third proposition is evident the moment it is spoken or written: because it is spoken or written in a particular set of meanings without reference to any material measurements such as mass, length or duration. The sentence itself that says any topic can be understood as brain-atom positions is not itself an mechanism to adjust brain atom positions. In order for that sentence to be true, it would have to be a theory composed of atoms held in a fluid I could inject into my arm that would alter my nerve-motions so as to make me aware of it. Merely by speaking or writing in symbols, the statement refers to ideas that cannot be reduced to descriptions of brain-atom motions.

Occam’s razor cuts against assuming entities not necessary to explain the phenomenon. A similar principle requires us not to reduce entities that are necessary: any philosophy that concludes the instrument we use to do philosophy (the faculty of reason) is powerless or meaningless is a self-contradictory philosophy and a self-refuting conclusion. 

On the one hand, we have evil semi-fascist theocrat scientist babe Kidman.

On the other hand, we have Lapland witch good-girl hottie Eva Green, who played a Bond Girl.

This presents a difficult choice for a man like me, devoted (as I am) to the approach as shallow as possible to any difficult issue. I only selected my political philosophy based on how good looking the young partisanesses of each camp are! It was for this reason I supported the pro-democracy movement in Lebanon.

See! No need to read difficult authors like John Locke and Thomas Paine! Just look to see how pretty the representative of one side or the other might be! See? The method is simple, yet flexible.

Let us see how well this wonder method works in a number of scenarios!

Jackson’s Middle Earth — Good! no she-orc could tempt my deeply-rooted and carefully thought-out loyalties away from Arxenawen the Warrior Princess, or whatever her name was!

The Planet Mongo — not so good. I would be perfectly willing to fight Flash Gordon to the death in the Space-Arena, and push him onto a bed of radium-knives to win but a smile from the cruel and beautiful Princess Aura. It is hard to be ardent about Dale Arden.

Evil Space Princess

Wholesome All-American Earth-Girl.

Star Trek – Good. I don’t care how Hawt those Klingon women are, they got those funny brow ridges. On the side of the Good Guys, we have the longest tradition of the fairest demoiselles in space, from Uhura in a miniskirt to Jadzia Dax, who is perhaps my favorite spacewoman of all time, being a rare combination of smart, confident, kind, wise and beautiful. And she used to be a guy, so you can talk to her about baseball! What’s not to like?

My Ideal for a Space Girl. Even if She is Actually a Guy. Or a Worm Thing.

Uhura! Disguised as Evil Uhura!

Of course, the whole system of picking loyalties by looks breaks down if you have an evil twin.

And matters get confusing if your really good-looking hottie historian Marla McGivers switches loyalties because she thinks Khan Noonien Singh  is all sorts of Latin Beefcake Zoom, plus he’s got that whole space-tyrant genetic superman rebel-plays-by-his-own-rules thing going for him. If you want to be on her side because she is cute, and she is on his side because he is cute, where does that leave you?

The system also has trouble with evil babes from cyborg-techno mass-minds who are now working on the side of goodness and prime directivity for some reason.

(a digression: the exact moment when the Star Trek franchise jumped the shark was when they introduced the toothsome Miss Ryan here as an evil borg. Until that moment, the Borg were an enemy to be as dreaded as the Boskonians, or Skynet or the Humanoids of Jack Williamson: an enemy who could not be reasoned with, threatened, outfought, or stopped, merely a faceless system of implacable cube-shaped bio-machinery. Then, pfft! All that goodwill in a dread enemy evaporated in one season of Voyager.)

Weapon Shops of Isher By A.E. van Vogt – Not so good. Second Amendment fan that I am, I cannot help but notice that the Weapon Shops have no hot chicks aside from the bland Lucy Rall, whereas the Bad Guys are led by the fascinating and beautiful Empress Innelda Isher: and the dame is IN CHARGE on the baddie side, whereas she is just a flunkie on the goodie side.

Star Wars — Good. I never really cared for Carrie Fisher, even in a metal slavegirl bikini, but Natalie Portman is prettier looking than Palpatine, Vader, or Grand Moff Tarkin. Star Wars adheres closely to the rule that Good is Fair and Bad is Ugly.

Freely Elected Space Monarch / Senator!

Chronicles of Riddick – Not so Good. On the bad girl side, we have Thandie Newton. On the good girl side, Alexa Davalos. But the architecture of the Necromongers, the huge art-deco gothic monoliths they drop from orbit when conquering a planet has to tilt this contest in favor of the Dark Gods of Evil, even though, clearly, Alexa Davalos is as cute as a button.

Lady Macbeth … in SPACE!!

Alexa Davalos

Necromongers as Goth Art-Deco Space-Conquerors

Gotham City— Toss up. Catwoman, played by any actress except Halle Barrie, is a looker, and even more so as a cartoon drawn by Bruce Timm, and she is the baddest of bad girls. But Batgirl, played by any actress except Alicia Silverstone, is also adorable, and even more so as a cartoon drawn by Bruce Timm, and she is good … and unlike millionaire Bruce Wayne, Babs fights crime on a librarian’s salary! Criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot, so the best way to fight crime is to squeeze a young nubile body into a skintight black outfit that shows off your showgirl legs and hourglass figure, but don a scalloped black cape. Murderers and thugs are terrified of girls in purple catsuits and heels. On the other hand, Julie Newmar. In a catsuit. Michelle Pfiffer. In a catsuit.

World War II – Good. We had Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth on our side. Even in their spiffy black sadomasch uniforms, the Nazi gals did not stand a chance.

Oz — A slum-dunk. Only bad witches are ugly. Good witches are beautiful, and the John R. Neill drawings of Ozma make her look all kinds of cute. Who would want to work for the Nome King, who is shaped like an egg with hair? I am not even going to talk about Polychrome the Rainbow’s daughter, who delights every fatherly instinct in me. None of the little girls in Oz say anything rude, or get in anyone’s face, or spit, or swear, or lie, or steal.

At this point, you may be wondering why, if Ozma is an absolute monarch of a moneyless kingdom, the beauty contest method can be used to solve political disputes, since Ozma does not rule a democracy or anything like it.

The answer to your question is, of course, to support only the pretty democracies and in all other cases to support the pretty monarchies. As soon as the monarchs get old and ugly, switch your support immediately to a younger and more fertile, what we call a ‘trophy regime’.

Queen Rania of Jordan

Yes, Your Majesty!

Princess Grace of Monaco. Real Princess of a Real Country.

Queen Christiana of One of Those Cold Countries Where it is Night all the Time

Once a Queen in Narnia, Always a Queen in Narnia … until she wears lipstick and goes to parties.

The Laws of Men will never be just until they are Sane

Two 

Gosseyn stepped toward the door, but the shouted command had been merely perfunctory: the lock glowed red, then white, and shattered, while Gosseyn spun and dove back through the study door. Closed to a crack, the armored door offered both cover and concealment.

Through the door crack, he saw two men enter the room. In the gloom, both men had a similar silhouette. Both men were light-haired, medium height, physically fit. Both were dressed in formal, somber suits. Behind them, he could a glimpse a third man, a technician, bent over a projector. The projector maneuvered a portable energy curtain that flickered as it advanced into the room before the two men.

The man on the left had a drawn pistol, still whining from the heat of the bolt that had shattered the door. “Where is he?”

The man on the right was holding up a detector: tiny cherry-red electron tubes protruded from the reader face. He spoke: “Behind that door. Don’t shoot, Commissar Veeds! The readings are consistent with those of an unarmed man. At this stage, to assume him to be the murderer would be unsupported, given the murder weapon involved, and the evidence that this was a crime of passion.”

“Let’s have some light!”

The technician said “Yes, sir.” It must have been a police procedure not to touch any circuits in a crime scene, for no one stepped toward the wall-switch. Instead, the electric curtain stopped advancing, and grew bright in the visible spectrum range. Light flooded the dim room.

Now the difference between the two men was clear. The man on the left, dressed in the long coat of a Nireni, was blinking and scowling, and he had the nervous, fierce look of a human adult raised without the benefit of Null-A training: a human, in other words, still governed by the infantile emotional system as his killer-ape ancestors.

 The man addressed as Veeds said, “Don’t tell me when not to shoot. You’re not the one in charge here, Mr. Mahren!” But he holstered his weapon.

Impossible that the other man, Mahren, would literally have been unaware of the first man’s rank. Gosseyn regarded the comment as a non-message, meant only to convey dominance-symbolism, affirming Veeds’ sense of self-importance. 

Mahren was not blinking. His eyes had adjusted instantly to the change in light levels. He had the lightness of posture, the deep calm of expression, natural to a man in total control of his nervous system. He was half an inch taller than Gosseyn, with broad shoulders and muscular arms. He was dressed in the suit and tie of an Earthman.   

Gosseyn recognized him. Karl Mahren was the Null-A representative on the planet, sent from Venus to help establish a General Semantics Institute here.

Gilbert Gosseyn called out to the men in the other room, and came out with his hands up.

Mahren said to Veeds. “This is the man who forced Emperor Enro to abdicate.”

Veeds said, “The famous Gilbert Gosseyn. The living distorter. The man who dies and springs to life again.”

Gosseyn heard mingled resentment and awe in the man’s voice. Veeds came from a culture, despite its technological accomplishments, deeply superstitious: the look on his face was that of a man confronting a thing out of myth.

“The phenomenon is more complex than that,” said Gosseyn. “My memories are transferred at death to a prepared new body; he will think and act as I do, and recall what I know. But this “me” still dies at death, even if my memory-chain lives on in another man. It’s not real immortality.”

Veeds said sardonically: “Perhaps not, but the rest of us just die at death, memory-chains and all.”  

Gosseyn made as if to step forward and shake hands, but the energy curtain between them grew stiff. Gosseyn stepped back.  “Am I a suspect in this? There is a lie detector in the other room that will confirm my innocence.”

Mahren said, “I will vouch for him.”

Commissar Veeds glanced sidelong at the tall Null-A man. “You don’t know him. Not personally.”

Mahren said, “There are psychological rules involved in murder situations that Null-A science has studied. Gosseyn is a sane man: there would be signs evident in his behavior if he were not.”

Veeds turned to the wall screen, turned it on. “Security log, please.”

The robot voice answered. “The last person to enter this apartment was the owner, Eldred Crang, at 2500 Imperial City Time. He was alone for two hours, nineteen minutes. At 2720, circuits detected his vital signs were abnormal, and the hospital annex was called; at 2722, a voice matching Eldred Crang’s uttered one of the key phrases that triggers an automatic call to the Commissar of Police. At 2730, the record is blank—I was unaware of events and cannot account for the time. At 2735, I resumed function, did a system check, and detected a second man in the room. At that time, vital signs from the owner Eldred Crang were null: he was dead. There is no record of entry by the second man.”

“Is this the second man?”

“Yes. He stepped from this room through the sunroom to the bedchamber, turned on the window, entered the closet, returned, went into the study, and returned again to this room. At that point, you entered. Imperial City Time was 2741.”

Gosseyn said, “Where’s Mrs. Crang?”

The robot did not answer until Veeds repeated the question. It said: “She and Mr. Crang left at the same time this morning, 0250. She was dressed in a beige jacket and slacks. The door circuits detected she was armed. I cannot report whether the weapon is properly registered with the Police Control Board: records on members of the Imperial family are not available to me.”

“There is no more Imperial family!” said Veeds. “The members of the Divine House of Gorgzid are private citizens: you will refer to them as such.”

“So noted. Nonetheless, no records are available.”

Veeds turned back to Gosseyn: “Let’s hear your testimony.” He put his hand casually back on the butt of his holstered gun.

Gosseyn briefly described his experience. He added: “The Captain or crew of the ship I arrived aboard can vouch for my presence up to a point.”

Veeds said, “Meaningless, Mr. Gosseyn. You could step into a stateroom, step across the galaxy in an instant, and step back in time to be seen coming out of the stateroom. I don’t even know why you came aboard a ship at all.”

Gosseyn explained that he could not memorize an area of space he had never seen before.

Gosseyn addressed Mahren: “This murder was committed by distorter: Crang was placed out of attunement with normal reality, and it killed him. A distorter also could have been used to interrupt the electronic thought patterns of the room’s robot brain. I don’t recognize why an image of another world appeared in this room, a dark oceanic world beneath two suns: a red giant and a white dwarf.” He turned to Veeds, for the Commissar had stiffened in surprise.

Mahren said, “There is no need for a complex theory when a simple one will do. The other owner registered to this apartment could have turned off the security brain, committed the murder, and erased her record from the brain before turning it back on. Notice that the murderess was particularly vengeful about destroying symbols of Crang’s marriage. Imperial law does not allow for divorce.”

Gosseyn felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. “You don’t suspect Patricia? She–”

Mahren’s eyes narrowed. “Mr. Gosseyn, the psychological file on you maintained by the Games Machine mentioned that you had false memories of being in love with, and married to, Patricia Hardie, as she was known at that time. Perhaps the reintegration of your thought was less successful than appeared.”

Gosseyn closed his eyes, and paused in his thoughts. He was aware that his awareness was hierarchical: sensations were interpreted by his thalamus and hypothalamus before reaching his cortex, and it required a brief moment of trained awareness to separate the emotional context of his thoughts from the unfiltered reality. This cortical-thalamic pause in his thoughts instantly and effortlessly restored his calm. 

He opened his eyes to see that Veeds was drawing his pistol. Gosseyn stared at it quizzically.

Veeds said ruefully, “Sorry. I thought you were going to disappear.” He lowered the weapon, and said to Mahren, “I have known the Divine Empress Reesha, whom you call Patricia Crang, for many years: she loved peace as her brother loved war, serene where he was wrathful. Her hand is not in this. Her people might act on her behalf without her consent: those who want to restore the Royal House of Gorgzid are dangerous men. The Interim Government forbids me to arrest Reesha’s people.” The contempt in his voice was plain.

Her people! Gosseyn took a moment to adjust his mind to that concept: fanatics who regarded Patricia Crang as a divine being, who wanted her to resume the throne of her defeated brother.

It was odd, for his training should have reminded him of the falsehood of this train of thought, but Gosseyn had a momentary picture, sharp and clear, from his memory: his young wife, dressed in plain and inexpensive clothes, coming in the front door of their little cottage, books of neuropsychology and linguistic philosophy tucked on her arm, an automatic basket filled with vegetables from the local greengrocer floating behind her. She was outlined against the light. He remembered how the brown hair, escaping her kerchief, was tossed in the autumn breeze; he remembered the clear look in her bright eyes; he remembered the joy in her light, quick footsteps. Strange to think of this simple wife of a poor student as the Empress of fourteen hundred worlds!

But the oddness grew on him: for the image and the associated emotion were false-to-facts. They were based on an emotional ‘set’ that Gosseyn’s training long ago dismissed.

Gosseyn realized that he must act as if he were suffering a continuing mental attack. Some unknown force had imprinted, or was imprinting, false-to-facts emotive reactions into his hypothalamus. He resolved to have his brain photographed at the earliest opportunity.

Could Patricia or her people be trying to influence Gosseyn’s thinking, to win her an ally? It did not seem likely—but Gosseyn realized how little he knew about this fascinating, capable woman.

Gosseyn said, “Why did she return here?”

Mahren stared at Gosseyn carefully a moment. It was not clear what he was thinking: Gosseyn detected no interruptions in the smooth, strong flow of the man’s neural energies.

Mahren answered the question: “Mrs. Crang came to this planet at my request. I thought it would quell the pro-Gorgzid faction to have her publicly renounce the throne, and repudiate the cult of the Sleeping God.”

Gosseyn asked, “That didn’t work?”

Mahren said, “The announcement was scheduled for today. She was going to swear fealty to the Ashargin sovereign in a public ceremony. Obviously, that’s been canceled.” He turned to Veeds. “Notice that the murder weapon was used to destroy marriage symbols long after the victim was dead: as if the symbols were real independently of the husband. This indicates neurotic symbol confusion. Therefore this was a crime of passion.” 

Veeds said, “Not the passion of the Empress! You come from a world without government, so they say. You don’t know that symbols drive politics. You think this was not a political crime? There are still pro-Gorgzid Royalists active on our world: the Interim Government, the League powers, will not allow us to abolish the party, arrest the known members. The laws of Gorgzid require the Divine Emperor to marry his sister: the Royalists regard Mr. Crang’s marriage to the Emperor’s rightful bride as an outrage. Worse: a blasphemy.”

Mahren now examined Gosseyn with a calculating look, saying thoughtfully, “The passions of a private man whose wife marries another can run just as strong. Even a man who merely thinks the woman was once his wife.”

Gosseyn said impatiently, “Mr. Mahren, you were willing to vouch for my sanity just a moment ago. Why this change?”

Mahren said, “You flinch every time we say her name. You have a subconscious neurotic rage toward her—one you are unaware of. I did not see evidence of it, a moment ago. But it is peculiar. A split personality cannot have one personality perfectly sane, by definition. Yet that is what I’m seeing.”

This was ridiculous. Gosseyn was of sound mind, incapable of rage. But Mahren was a Null-A. The man would neither lie, nor could he be mistaken about such a simple observation. Gosseyn nodded thoughtfully. The belief that he was free of rage did not make it so: beliefs were abstractions from events, not the events themselves.

“A lie detector will clear this up in a moment. There is one in the other room, in a case beneath the bed.” Gosseyn pointed at the wall.

 Gosseyn saw a look of fear so stark and plain on Commissar Veeds’ face that Gosseyn whirled to see what the threat might be. There was nothing behind him but wall.

He turned back. The pistol in Veeds’ hand was trembling. The Commissar was afraid of him, of Gosseyn.

Gosseyn said, “I cannot see through walls. I am not your Emperor.” Gosseyn kept his eyes on the gun, and carefully memorized it, speaking calmly during the moment it took to do so. “Listen: Enro is currently in comfortable but lonely exile inside a remote asteroid near the edge of the galaxy. Cut off from the distorter circuits webbing the galaxy, it would be years, maybe decades, for any ship crossing normal space at sublight speed to reach him. I was the one who sent him there; there was no distorter machine on the other end.”

The technician standing in the corridor spoke up: “Sir! He’s attuning himself to your gun.”

Veeds tensed but the weapon blurred and vanished out of Veeds’ hand before Veeds could pull the trigger. It appeared in Gosseyn’s hand. He engaged the safety and slid it into his pocket.

“You’d shoot an unarmed man!” said Gosseyn.

Veeds snarled, “For a Null-A, you seem to use your words in a sloppy fashion. Unarmed, indeed!” Veeds said over his shoulder to the technician: “Can you detect the distorter that killed Mr. Crang in this room, hidden in the walls, anything?”

The technicians said, “Whatever distorter circuit was used to commit this crime is not within range of these instruments, sir. Even if it were shielded, I’d detect it.”

Veeds turned to Gosseyn, “Except we have a living distorter right here.”

Mahren, by then, had returned with the lie detector. Veeds put his hand in his coat pocket. If he had a second weapon there, he did not draw it out.

Mahren said to the lie detector, “This man claims he is innocent of the murder that just took place here. Well?”

The dozens of tiny electronic tubes in it glowed serenely. “He has the rage and jealousy present in his mind to have committed the crime, but these emotions are not part of his primary brain. I would hypothesize we are seeing a malfunction of his unique brain structure: the second brain may be operating without the primary brain’s awareness.”

Veeds said, “Give us facts, not hypothesis.”

“The subject has no memory of having committed any crime…”

Gosseyn allowed himself a sigh of relief. “There! That’s settled. Now if we can find out what that image of the twin-sun world means…”

The lie detector said, “He is not consciously aware of the killing. Nonetheless, he committed the murder…”

Veeds said, “You are under arrest for the murder of Eldred Crang, Mr. Gosseyn. Could you hand me my gun, please?”

M Francis writes and tells me this:

“…the Church always recognized something called “Baptism by Desire.” The neo-Platonists like Augustine were much taken by the life and death of Socrates and saw in it a pagan parallel to the life of Christ – both unjustly executed by authorities for preaching virtue. Hence: the “naturally Christian man,” Homo christianis naturalis, iirc. They supposed that, not having known Christ, the “virtuous pagans” would not receive the beatific vision complete but, being virtuous, a “limb” of heaven was reserved for them: a place of perfect natural happiness. This became “limbo” in common speech.

The Roman Catholic position can be summed up in Art. 1260 of the Catechism:”Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery.”

I also came across this quote by Billy Graham (actually, I came across John Derbyshire quoting David Aikman’s biography of the great preacher):

“I used to think that pagans in far-off countries were lost — were going to hell — if they did not have the gospel of Jesus Christ preached to them. I no longer believe that. I believe there are other ways of recognizing the existence of God — through nature for instance — and plenty of other opportunities, therefore, of saying yes to God.”

Now, keep in mind, I knew that Dante placed both Trajan and Ripheus in heaven, pagans who did not or could not have known Christ; but I had assumed the poet merely to be indulging in a flight of fancy, wishful thinking, but that this was actually heretical to the doctrines his Church taught. I am amazed and pleased to find out that Dante was being strictly orthodox and correct. It was my uninformed opinion about Christian teachings that was wrong.

Ever since my conversion, I found the same thing over and over again: that the illogical or unfair parts of the Christian Dogma I was being asked to accept on faith, upon closer inspection, turn out to say, not what the world told me the Church said, but something more like what natural reason and supernatural love would be likely to say. If the Roman Catholics and the Southern Baptist Billy Graham agree on a point, it is safe to say it is a mainstream Christian teaching.

For those of you who think faith is some sort of willful blindness or deliberate affection for absurdity, please consider instead the cases like this: imagine that, more that once, you found your unaided opinion, the act of resting only on what you know yourself turned out, upon inspection, to be nothing more than finding a popular prejudice lodged in your mouth, something “everyone knows” but no one, not even you, actually checked.

Everyone knows the Church is the enemy of science, right? Look at the trial of Galileo! But then you read a history book or two, and it turns out that the Galileo affair was not about geocentrism, it was about Galileo insulting the Pope.

Everyone knows the Church is the enemy of law and justice! Look at the Spanish Inquisition! But it turns out the Inquisition was smaller than reported, handled with more legal safeguards, and was the actions of a national church operating independently, and sometimes in opposition to, the ecumenical episcopate. Suppose you study law, and all the concepts that do not appear in Oriental law-codes, the Sharia of the Mohammedans, the legalism of the Confucians, all the concepts you adore for their beauty and fairness, were either Greek learning preserved by the Church and adopting into her by Aquinas, or Jewish concepts refined and civilized by Roman respect for law and family, or by English respect for individual rights. You find your so-called modern notions of justice are Christian, and found nowhere outside Christendom, and which, to be frank make little sense outside of a Christian world view.

In Robert Heinlein’s oh-so-manly universe where all races struggle to survive, why should the strong protect the weak? Why should a Starship Trooper spare the life of a Bug from Klendathu? In Ayn Rand’s oh-so-rational universe, why should anyone contribute to charity? Why should the rich help the unproductive, the widow, the orphan, the stranger? (Excuse me for using science fiction stories as example, but I am a science fiction fellow first and foremost. You can find parallel examples in your own field.)

Socrates mentions a paradox, where a man has a choice between, on the one hand, doing an injustice while appearing just, and being rewarded for it, or, on the other hand, doing the just thing while appearing unjust, and being punished for it; and there is no third option. Since Socrates himself died in prison because he did the just thing (pursuing the truth) that the world saw as unjust (corrupting the youth), the Socratic paradox has more than a merely academic interest.  If we are all products of unintentional evolution, merely matter in motion, why should I avoid the situation Socrates mentions? You cannot answer in terms of incentive or long-term rational self-interest or utilitarianism: the Socratic paradox is one where you get all the reward and applause of being a just man for being unjust. Suppose you found out that the figures you thought had all the answers could not offer a fair and clear answer to that one, but that the primitive superstitions of your hated enemies, the Christians, could do?

But let us say you answer this question to your own satisfaction; and then you discover, reading history, that it is only by the grace of what the Church preserved from her Greek and Jewish roots, and taught, and kept alive (despite ferocious opposition) in European culture that you learned the ideas and concepts you used to make your answer. Suppose you cannot explain to your own satisfaction how an institution, a way of thinking, that seems to you to be little better than a psychological defect is the source, and the only source, the values you value. In the periods of history where other values, openly pagan or outrageously progressive but in any case notable only for their opposition to the Christian world view, where embraced by societies like Germany or Russia, unimaginable cruelty, tyranny and bloodshed erupted, poisoning the whole world. Suppose further that being an ungrateful ignoramus is not appealing to you.

Everyone knows the Christians are bigots and know-nothings! But even Southern Baptist preachers quote the original Latin, Greek and Aramaic in their sermons; the Pope is the only public figure talking about the role of Reason in modern philosophy; and in contrast the Brights who mock them say boneheaded things like that no one supports religion who was not brainwashed to it in his youth, or they say religion is evolved as a “meme” merely a mental version of a computer virus. Who is the scholar and who is the obscurantist then?

Suppose you read more history, and discover the central role of Christianity in everything you admire and support in Western literature, law, ethics, and civilization.

Suppose everything worldly and pagan, slavery and polygamy and vaunting pride, the strong oppressing the weak, the state oppressing the individual, the abuse of women, the passive indifference to worldly ills, the sheer inequality between high and low, appears or reappears everywhere Christianity is not, and loses power everywhere Christianity is practiced. Every nation, including Christian nations, have kings; but only Christian kings are said not to be above the law. No nation, except for Christian nations, and nations conquered by Christians, have parliaments, democracies, or limited governments. Every nation keeps slaves; only Christian nations abolished slavery, and that for specifically Christian reasons, acting against their worldly and economic interests. Only Christian nations abolished polygamy, or the practice of making eunuchs. Only Christianity keeps alive the respect the ancient Romans had for family and household, without submerging the individual into caste or clan or ancestor-worship, and without atomizing the individual into disconnected and disinherited autochthons, those mythical men who arise from the Earth without mothers.

Suppose you find that only Christianity has the moral atmosphere you can tolerate.  Suppose everywhere else was chlorine and ammonia to you.

Suppose all this. What “everybody knows” turns out to be false, merely echoes in an echo chamber, things said because your neighbor said it, your neighbor said it because you said it, and you both heard it on TV.

Suppose after all this you find out that your Mother, who told you over and over what the truth of it was, turns out to be right once again.

Now imagine, instead of your Mother, it is the Mother Church.

Now imagine that the Mother Church turns out to be right, and you to have been wrong, not just in little things, but in great things, topics you spent your whole life investigating. Suppose you found out you were wrong about the sexual revolution, or about the origin of the universe, the mind-body relationship, or about the possibility of miracles, and suppose your Mother was right.

After a while, you begin to feel like Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard. Sherlock Holmes is always right. You would begin to have faith in him. You would begin to assume he knows what he is talking about: when he claims the miraculous ability to know the composition of the mud of every street in every part of London, or the ability to detect which tobacco shop blended the pipe-ash found in the grate, after a while you’d believe him.

So you would start to have faith in the Church for the simple reason, no more no less, that any man has faith in leaders in any field shown by experience to lead correctly; it is the same faith you have in a busdriver when you board a bus, or in your wife when you marry her and forswear all others.

I have faith in the Gospels for the same reason, O ye men of little faith, that I have faith in the Constitution, or, for that matter, in the Boyscout’s Handbook. I have read the documents, and found that, where applied, they function as advertised. You can actually set up camp according to the instructions in the Boy Scout’s handbook, or set up a functioning government according to the rules in the Constitution. More importantly, I have found that where they are ignored or abridged, the evil outcomes those books were written specifically to avoid come indeed to pass.

The alternative philosophies to Christianity seem to me to be either dependent upon it without acknowledging that dependency (as most modern Progressivism), or an independent yet incomplete attempt at a similar thing (as the Oriental religions), or something nakedly vile and insane (as Marxism, Nihilism), or something noble in its root but leading inevitably to a vile fruition (as Objectivism, or Neopaganism). The philosophies that satisfy the reason leave the human condition in a hopeless state, innately without worth in an indifferent cosmos: men doomed to die, members of a race doomed to extinction, trapped in a universe-sized mausoleum, doomed to be extinguished by entropy. The philosophies that promise something more mystical and wonderful turn out not to satisfy the needs of daily life, or give proper instruction as to human conduct; as my witch friends seem to have a minor interest in moderation, patience, justice, fortitude, but none at all in chastity, decency, hope, charity. Their absurdly self-indulgent and obviously self-created little gods, taken from no living tradition, inspire neither terror nor awe, nor loyalty, nor does their vague belief that perhaps reincarnation is possible leave the reason satisfied as to the theodicy of the supernatural. One is reminded of “The Force” in Star Wars — the mystic life-force indifferent alike to human suffering and human salvation, merely a tool for warlocks. This is an idea remarkably without depth or ramifications. Only Christianity seems to fulfill both the needs of the spiritual and of the rational nature.