John C. Wright's Journal

A new branch of an ongoing conversation.

One reader (who does not read very carefully, alas) writes in saying “I know that our host is advocating a Ghost in the Machine.”

Oddly enough, that is not what I am advocating, nor even remotely close to it. During this conversation, and all previous conversations I can recall on like topics, no materialist has been curious enough to discover what my position was, preferring instead to rely on telepathy to intuit what I thought, and then inform me what I thought whether or not I was aware of it — which is, ironically, in keeping with their metaphysics. The only drawback is telepathy is a bit of a hit-or-miss proposition.

As far as I can assess, my position is closer to Kant or Aristotle than it is to Descartes, but contains nuances differentiating me from them.

I would state my position in four conclusions: Methodological Dualism, Conceptual Objectivity, Immaterialism, Legality.

Read the remainder of this entry »

In a recent discussion in this space, which I, unfortunately, am finding I have insufficient time to spend discussing in proper and thorough detail, I issued the following challenge to not just the materialist I was debating, but to any any all materialists reading these word who might care to comment:

Is there ANYTHING ANYWHERE that ANYONE uses empiricism for other than ARGUMENTS ABOUT EMPIRICAL FACTS? Is there anyone anywhere who can even imagine, even as a joke, what proving a non-empirical fact about law, or ethics, or mathematics, or economics, or theology, or any other nonempirical discipline using only empirical arguments would even mean?

My question in other words asks whether radical materialism holds any non-empirical statements to be true or knowable or both? I assume the answer would be a simple negative: Hume says only empirical statements can be known and confirmed.

Read the remainder of this entry »

The recent movie (which I have not seen, and which does not sound like the type of movie anyone could beguile me to see, even if I were bribed with shiny yellow gold) called SEX IN THE CITY II apparently had a scene in it where one of the sex-crazed comediennes strolling the streets in the Middle East in Daisy Duke short pants (or something like that–absolutely no attempt will be made in this screed to be accurate) is accosted, or menaced, by a throng of Muslims or their garbage-bag wearing wives; whereupon the sex-crazed comedienne makes a St. Crispin’s Day style speech in favor of sexual liberation, flourishing condoms.

The impression I got is that this offended and shocked the Leftist elite.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Part of an ongoing discussion.

In recent days in this space, we have been discussing radical materialism, which is the metaphysical theory that the ultimate grounds of being are nothing but matter in motion. Let us ponder the following hypothetical question.

If the cosmos is a machine and nothing put a machine, something like a clockwork but on an immense scales, and if everything, including all non-empirical statements, is merely the outcome of the actions of the mainsprings, wheels, gears and cogs of the cosmic clockwork, then a sufficiently cunning workingman could move certain gears and wheels and change the outcome, with the ease with which a watchmaker could loosen a spring or add a gear and make his clock run slow, or make his clock count an extra hour every day. If the workingman can change the outcome of this cosmic clockwork we all inhabit, and if the truth-value of all non-empirical and metaphysical statements is merely one outcome of the cosmic clockwork, then the workingman can change the truth-value of all non-empirical and metaphysical statements by changing the clockwork.

Somewhere there is a set of atoms in a certain configuration that makes it the case that materialism is true. Could in theory a workingman move one group of atoms from the positive to the negative so that it was no longer the case that materialism was true?

In order for this question to make sense, we must put it in context. To put it in context, let us review the arguments for and against radical materialism.

(I am not using the word “radical” here to mean the materialists kill like Che and wear a red beret. I mean that the proposition that all things all the way to their roots are merely matter in motion is radical, whereas a theory that most but not all things not all the way to their roots are matter in motion is materialism that is not radical.)

Read the remainder of this entry »

Part of an ongoing discussion of final versus mechanical causes:

Dr. Andreassen says:  “Mr Wright’s contention, if I understand it correctly, is that we can directly perceive that these things are not atoms; it is, to coin a phrase, obvious.”

That is not my contention. My contention is this:

There are two kinds of statements.

1. Empirical statements are statements of physical fact, without any interpretation. They are statements about objects.
2. Rational or ideal statements are statements about conceptual fact, and include concepts that describe the relation of thoughts or symbols to objects.

For example, a billiard can be heavy or light, round or oblate, but a billiard ball cannot be true or false, moral or immoral, efficient or inefficient, logical or illogical, because these terms all describe the relationship between thoughts, words, symbols and human actions to objects. A word can be false if it does not refer to the object to which it pretends to refer; a sentence can be illogical if the symbols do not follow the pattern of coherence and consistency that objects and concepts follow, and so on.

In physics, all apparently complex empirical phenomena can be reduced to simple statements of Mass, Length, Time, Temperature, Amount, Current, Candlepower. They can be completely described in empirical statements.

Further, all empirical phenomena can be described completely in terms of mechanical causation, that is to say, a description of the external forces moving an inanimate object.

No statement which contains only measurements of Mass, Length, Time, Temperature, Amount, Current, Candlepower can (without slyly or overtly introducing another statement concerning the meaning of these things) convey any information about meaning or purpose or final cause of an event.

Statements about meaning, rational or ideal statements, cannot be described completely without some reference, direct or indirect, to final cause, that is to say, the purpose or the “for the sake of which” of an object or event.

Ergo, since statements of the first type must contain no reference to final causes, and statements of the second type must contain reference to final causes, statements of the first type cannot be reduced to statement of the second type.

Expressed as a syllogism:

1. Statements of physics are only empirical, defining mechanical causes and quantities.
2. Statements of meaning are non-empirical, defining final causes and qualities.
3. Therefore statements of the second type are not statements of the first type.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Mechanical cause, which is sometimes called efficient cause or historical cause, is the description of an event, an object being moved, in terms of pressures and magnitudes of physical motions and forces acting on the event. Final cause is a description of an event, an actor acting, in terms of the end, purpose, intention, or that for the sake of which the event is done. A mechanical cause looks to the past, and asking what bumped into what to make the event; a final cause looks to the future, and asks what the actor feared or desired or anticipated.

In a recent discussion in this space, the question arose concerning final cause versus mechanical cause, and two objections were raised. The first, if I understood it, was that final cause, properly so called, did not exist because all final causes could be reduced to a recitation of mechanical causes. The other was that final causes are prescientific.

Read the remainder of this entry »

In my essay on Sophomoronology, I offered that the ideals, or the view of life, or the sophistry collage (I cannot call it a philosophy) I there called ‘Intellectualism’ included an emotional allure or intellectual addiction to death and images of death.

Here, as an exhibit in my argument, let me present this article by animal-rights advocate and pro-infanticide Carthegenian anti-ethics Ethicist Peter Singer, entitled Should This Be the Last Generation? In which he asks the question that only seems a conundrum worth pondering to sensitive, pallid, sickly, and trembling minds which must have some intellectual equivalent to addiction to laudanum:

Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species — that’s a different issue. Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all. And assume, too — here we have to get fictitious, as philosophers often do — that if we choose to bring about the world with no sentient beings at all, everyone will agree to do that. No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?

Wow! What an interesting question! Oh, wait, no, excuse me. I mean stupid. What a stupid question. The question is stupid both on a logical and a emotional level.

Read the remainder of this entry »