Tag: philosophy

Ten Women

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Given my last post, it had me reflecting on some women who’ve influenced me—especially my thinking and worldview. Unlike Mitt Romney, I don’t have binders full of women.

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Positive

Simone de Beauvoir (Philosopher)

Simone de Beauvoir

Beauvoir is brilliant. I consider her to be the first feminist. The women before her, I rather consider being proto-feminists. I was immediately gripped when I read her book, The Second Sex, and her idea that women are not born that way, and it’s not even a simple ageing-maturity function. It’s a performative role.

Addendum: Perhaps not as famous, she’s at least as apt as Sartre as an Existentialist philosopher. I still have a fondness for Existentialism in the same way I like Pragmatism. Although life has no inherent meaning, if making one up gets you through your life, by all means, conjure up a meaning.

Judith Butler (Philosopher, Gender Theorist)

Judith Butler

Butler taught me the perspective of gender expression and performativism. Whilst Beauvoir was more describing gender as a role, Butler extends the notion to that of performative speech acts, which is to adopt the identity and declare, I am a woman.

Ruth Shore (English Professor)

This was my undergraduate Critical Writing professor. All but one of the assignments were by female authors. And the only male author was for an assignment to critique, compare, and contrast articles by Gloria Steinham and Thorstein Veblen. I don’t remember Steinham’s article (though I recall coming down hard on her for citing sources that did not tie back to her position). Veblen’s work was Conspicuous Consumption, an essay from The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, which is worth the read even today.

To be completely honest, I’m not sure I’ve quite remembered her name. I believe it’s her name, but I’m not great with names. As evidence, I turned in a final essay for one of my undergraduate English Literature courses. His trip was American fiction authors and interpreting literature by understanding the life and time and place of the author—clearly not into Barthes or Derrida. In this case, on the cover page, I had typed the course name and Professor David Grace (or some such). It was returned by post a week or so later with two remarks. The first: ‘I’ll miss your sardonic humour‘; the second: My name is whatever it was [sorry again], not David Grace. I’m pretty sure Professor was one of my maths professors, but don’t hold me to that. As far as I know, not-David doesn’t identify as a woman, but I do recall spending time on Edgar Allen Poe (also not a woman) and Donald Barthelme (still not a woman), the Postmodern Absurdist, who at fate would have it, died a couple of months after I graduated.

Hannah Arendt (Philosopher)

Hannah Arendt

Arendt’s concepts of the banality of evil and totalitarianism. My first exposure was through Eichmann in Jeruselum, where she discusses the banality of evil and how my postmodern roots become more ossified. Sadly, here Origins of Totalitarianism are too relevant for comfort these past few decades in the West.

Sunera Thobani (Sociologist, Feminist)

Sunera Thobani

Thobani’s post-colonial feminism is a newer influence, but she really drives home the point that the Western perspective is privileged and intervention in other cultures to ‘save the women’ from oppression is imposing the privileged perspective in a colonial manner.

Elinor Ostrom (Economist)

Elinor Ostrom

I was inspired by her work showcasing that coöperation prevails over tired competitive models. She was also the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize for economics just before her death.

Margaret Atwood (Author)

Margaret Atwood

Before Handmaid’s Tale was a Hulu series, it was a book. When I read this genre-establishing speculative fiction in the 1980s, I took notice. That it remains relevant is cause for trepidation.

Ursula K. Le Guin (Author)

Ursula K Le Guin

Le Guin’s story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, truly unveils the Utilitarian, Consequentialist narrative of the greater good. This is more speculative fiction in the domain of Margaret Atwood, but Le Guin’s domain is typically science fiction. As often as I’ve tried, science fiction narratives don’t typically resonate with me, so I haven’t engaged her longer works. But the impact this had and continues to have on me should suffice.

Herculine Adélaîde Barbin (Intersex Case Study)

I believe I was introduced to Alexina through Michel Foucault. It helps to shine a spotlight on how arbitrary identity really is. Perhaps not capricious, but definitely arbitrary. A few years back, I even created a short video that, as I recall, commenced my YouTube channel.

Negative

I had originally intended to make this a post on the positive influences of women, but as I was searching my memories, a couple of reprehensible influences came to mind. Thatcher topped that list.

Margaret Thatcher (Politician)

Margaret Thatcher

In the US, Liberals and we Leftists demonise Ronald Reagan for being the beginning of the end of cordial US politics. Whilst this is true to a point, Thatcher predates Reagan’s destructive national policies by a couple of years. If not for the path she paved, we may never have taken it. Granted, the Clintons made sure to drive nails into the bipartisan coffin to seal the pact, and perhaps Thatcher and Reagan were just symptoms, not causes, in the manner that Johnson, Trump, and Biden are more expressions and conduits than catalysts…or at least generators.

In any case, she’s left a lot of destruction in her wake.

Ayn Rand (‘Philosopher’)

Ayn Rand

Rand is another woman I love to hate. Her so-called Objectivism has given permission to so many looking for an excuse or justification for their assholery.

To be fair, when I read Atlas Shrugged as an impressionable youth, I was taken in. I decided to read it after having heard her speak in an interview. I fell into her storyline without critical examination. I even tried to adopt it as a frame or lens. And then I read Fountainhead, which added nothing.

Fast-forward to the late ’90s, I was reevaluating my vantage and perspectives, so I decided to re-engage Atlas Shrugged as an audiobook. It was embarrassingly bad writing with 1-dimensional characters, which is appropriate because 1-dimensional people adopt this worldview. Apologies for the ad hominem, but I include myself in this cohort. I hope I’ve actually come to evolve additional dimensions rather than simply swap them, but Rand is a hack writer who had helped make the world a more toxic place to live. Not a fan.

Honourable Mention

Sophie Germain (Mathematician)

I named my second daughter Sophie Germain Surname, hoping it would be aspirational. Although it wasn’t, she is still proud to point out her legacy.

Harriet Tubman (Abolitionist)

Rosa Parks (Civil Rights Activist)

Jane Austen (Author)

Tori Amos (Musician)

PJ Harvey (Musician)

Sarah MacLauchlan (Musician)

Fiona Apple (Musician)

Kate Bush (Musician)

Laurie Anderson (Musician, Performance Artist)

More Women, But No

I could laundry-list a bunch of women I am aware of, but I can’t really claim they influenced me in a way I can grasp, so I won’t bother.

What are women?

Posted in identity, language, philosophy, sexualityTagged , , , 2 Comments

I stumbled on Lily Alexandre’s What Are Women vid on YouTube. And despite already being in the midst of a dozen other things, I decided to watch it. Well, I’d been up all night and super tired, so after ten minutes I listened in bed until the end. After a few minutes, I felt compelled to respond on her channel. And then I was awake, so I figured I comment here as well—despite 2 or 3 of the dozen things I’ve got going on are draft posts here.

Lily presented her points well. And save for a few nits, I agreed fully. Getting the nits out of the way, I feel she took some shortcuts by (admittedly) overgeneralising the historical record of European gender history and anarcho-Communist hunter-gather or hunter-horticultural roots. I don’t disagree with the story point, but it’s a disservice to play the same game as the promoters of the primary narratives. Just say something along the lines that there is more about the historical record that we don’t know than we do, but there is evidence of X, Y, and Z. I recommended David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Moving on.

I recommend listening to her piece directly, as I am going to editorialise rather than fully recount it. Where she ended up is where I want to start. Adopting a Foucauldian perspective, the definition of woman is only important to those who want to employ it to control women, to gain power over them. Any definition of woman is going to exclude some who identify as women and include some who don’t.

A quick aside: When I was in my young twenties, I loathed being called sir, the polite title. It wasn’t the maleness that this suggested; rather I didn’t identify with the maturity aspect it conveyed. Whilst I identified as a male, neither did I identify as a boy nor a man. Sir tried to impose this on me. At least when someone attempted to label me a gentleman, I could retort that I wasn’t wearing a tophat and tails. Gentlemen, I viewed as Rich Uncle Milburn Pennybags, AKA Monopolyman—monocle and all. Did Mr Monopoly wear a monocle, or was that Mister Peanut? No matter.

Mr Monopoly

As anyone who’s read a few of my posts knows, I don’t really buy into the whole notion of identity. I’m not much of a fan of ranks and titles either, in case you wanted to know.

As I was listening, Lily got to where woman is defined in three words: adult human female. In my head, I’m already arguing against it. Like when watching a horror suspense movie—Don’t go in there! Alas, then so did Lily shoot it down as well. Each of these words is arbitrary. Admittedly, all words are arbitrary by definition, but these words have their own challenges

Adult

In turn, adulthood is defined differently depending on time and cultural place. Nowadays, in the West, 18 is probably the arbitrary cutoff most used. This is the age of majority as far as entering into legal contracts are involved—though people can’t drink alcohol or buy cigarettes until they are 21. And the brain continues to develop past 30. It may actually never stop, though it does shrink after 45, so there’s that. We could opt for a less legalistic litmus in favour of a naturalistic approach. As she points out, we could argue this happens at the onset of menses—but that’s a slippery slope on several accounts. Firstly, some females are precocious and might commence their cycle as early as 12 or 10 or even 8. We’re going to need to return to this litmus for the definition of female, so let’s continue.

Human

As she points out, human is ill-defined, and we’ve got a history of dehumanising people. Don’t get me started on negroes and indigenous Americans. This allows legal systems to simply rescind one’s human card. That’s no woman; she’s an animal—blah, blah

Female

And we arrive as female—the synonym we’ve managed so far to kick down the kerb. Lily didn’t spend too much time here, but this is attempting to tee up a CIS defence—a genetics double-X defence. We’ve already touched on the arbitrary categorisation. The intent here is to exclude. This is Beauvoir’s otherness. Derrida’s subordinate pair to the dominant male term. But we’re not discussing intent at the moment. Let’s regard the definition:

Female / ‘fi meÉŞl / noun

  1. a person bearing two X chromosomes in the cell nuclei and normally having a vagina, a uterus and ovaries, and developing at puberty a relatively rounded body and enlarged breasts, and retaining a beardless face; a girl or woman.
  2. an organism of the sex or sexual phase that normally produces egg cells.

Here, we see the double-X defence, but what about XXY and so on?

We get stuck in a circular logic loop at some point because the definition of female concedes that it is synonymous to girl or woman. A woman is a female who is a woman who is a female who is a woman who is a female who is a woman who is a female who is a woman who is a female who is a…

Normally having a vagina, a uterus and ovaries may not intentionally be trying to exclude transgender females. Rather, some XX females may have some genetic anomaly, and more probably, some women have their uterus and/or ovaries removed due to medical reasons.

In closing

Words have use, but if the intent of object words is to do more than describe, beware an agenda. As for gender words, I have no use for them. As for sex terms, I don’t really have a use for them either. Detouring to Saussure for a moment, we’d got female, the signifier noun, and the signified.

Parental Advisory

There is one and only one situation where I have any concern about the genital manifest, and that’s when I am performing some sex act—talking Crying Game here. I even admit that this is my own shortcoming, but I live with it. Your mileage may vary. Other than this extremely limited scope* of events, it really doesn’t matter.

Anyhoo, this impromptu post has run its course. Watch the vid yourself, and tell me or Lily or both of us what you feel—perhaps even what you think.

* Limited scope of events: Come on now. Don’t be judgy. It’s not that limited.

Trustwise

Posted in perception, philosophy, politics, power, religion, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The lamb spends all its time worrying about the wolf and ends up being eaten by the shepherd.

— Unknown

I think one could look at this from several perspectives or through different lenses.

We worry about the wrong things.

At some level, this is about trust.

We trust the wrong people. Those whom we most entrust do us in. But I feel this is contextual.

One might feel this shepherd is Capitalism or the State or organised religion. Perhaps it’s culture or identity cohorts. Or all or these or none of these.

On another level, it recalls the inevitability of death. This shepherd reaper is always waiting in the wings whether or not one worries.

In the words of RATM, Know Your Enemy.

Cultural Relativity

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That culture is a social construct is by now a meme. Those who disagree with the notion believe there is some objective measure—who disagree with the notion of cultural relativism—, almost invariable to their own belief systems. My goal is not to convince them otherwise. I’m sure their teacups are full. However, I’ve recently become aware of some data I find interesting. These data consider dimensional pairs of data. For example, do parents of certain cultures foster the message of imagination or hard work.

Which Values Children Should Be Encouraged to Learn, By Country

Hard Work vs Imagination

The caveat here is that no culture is monolithic. In practice, no two people are precisely redundant. People are effectively snowflakes—not the pejorative sort. Just insomuch that even identical twins are not, in fact, identical. What we are examining are generalised stereotypes. For example, the United States finds hard work over-indexing imagination. This comes as no surprise to anyone who takes even a cursory view will note that both political persuasions buy into and propagate this mythos. On the Right, imagination is something that can be explored. In fact, it needs to be propagated if only to buy into supported narratives. Imagination is over-indexed in Left-leaning countries. On the Left, a little more latitude is afforded, but in the end, someone needs to pay for the Volvos and Teslas. Given that the Left basically doesn’t exist in the professional politics of the US, imagination is more lip service than manifest.

Imagination need not apply. Britain, Australia, and Canada are more balanced, but they still favour hard work over imagination. Interesting to me is that the Nordic / Scandanavian countries push imagination more than their peers. I’ve never ‘imagined’ them to be imaginative. Perhaps it’s more an absence of Calvinism. Perhaps I’m judging. The piece suggests that Anime is evidence of Japan’s imagination. Firstly, this feels like a stretch. Secondly, this doesn’t resonate with my experience living in Japan. Perhaps I’m just conflating cultural obsequiousness.

Independence vs Obedience

Another pairing is independence versus obedience. Whilst I focus on the UK, US, and Canada, you may find represented your own country or culture of interest. Across these dimensions, the US, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand all favour independence over obedience, though I find this a strange dichotomy. Fundamental attribution bias is evident in full force and effect.

I just came across a meme that lauded the Japanese for fostering independence, but cultural obedience is a given. Honour, shame, and shunning are ubiquitous in Japanese, so I’m not sure how this manifests. Cognitive dissonance is strong here. I’m having a difficult time reconciling. Perhaps I need to evaluate the semantics.

Independence versus Obedience

Unselfishness vs Religious Faith

I debated including this dimensional paring. First, it’s an odd dichotomy. Are we trying to claim that the religious are selfish or that unselfish people are areligious? No matter. Let’s keep going.

Unselfishness versus Religious Faith

I suppose this just shows that one can compare anything on a graph and someone can read something into it—like a Rorschach test or tea leaves. Here the US rides the fence. Great Britain and France self-assess as promoting selflessness, and Bangladesh is off the charts with its need for faith. Well, clearly not off the charts because it’s literally on the chart, but it’s trying.

Anyhoo, I feel I need to investigate the raw data and evaluate more parings. For now, I think it’s safe to say that cultural preferences are all over the map. And, even though these preferences have no objective centre, I can admit to having preferences of my own. On these dimensions, I favour imaginative, selfless independence, but that’s just me. Where do you stand?

Nicomachean Ethics

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Someone will have to try very hard to convince me that the classical Greek philosophers were not strictly satirists. I believe I’ve commented on Plato in the past. I try to be well-rounded and not just cherry-pick material that supports my worldview—even though that competes for my available time and creates opportunity costs.

Listen on Spotify

This time, I decided to pick up Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. If there is anything I needed to read to drive another nail into the coffin of Virtue ethics, this does the trick.

Nails in a coffin

Reading Classical philosophical texts feels like reading the Bible or any other religious works. It feels like it is only meant for disciples. It’s just choir preaching. If one agrees with the foundational position, it all works. Otherwise, it all falls apart.

I am not going to deconstruct the text. That would quite literally take several posts. What I want to point out is that within the frame he attempts to establish, his position is entirely heuristic. In this case, if one believes in virtue and honour and how these may or may not connect to happiness, then this is right up your street in much the same way as a Christian knows that s/he will be forgiven because Jesus loves them.

In some ways, it feels that the philosophy underlying Western Civilisation is more insidious than Abrahamic religions. They act in a similar way, attempting to convey an underpinning that simply doesn’t exist. Both are aspirational, but they claim to be foundational.

Like Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics comes across (to me) as mental masturbation—some free-association thought experiment. I’m about 60 per cent through and tempted to quit, but on some level, I want to be able to defend that I have read it. Like the Bible, the I Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Qur’an, and other such canon, I want to have read the source material and not just references to it.

So, I’ll take one for the team and see whatever gems I can find.

First page of a 1566 edition of the Nicomachean Ethics in Greek and Latin

UPDATE: I’ve finished the book. It doesn’t get any better. He drifts off into politics as he sets up his sequel. My biggest criticism is that he casts his elitist worldview as reality based on assertions based solely on his opinions and appeals to tradition and authority. Read this if only to understand where certain people derive this moralistic, virtue-laden worldview. I was surprised by the foreshadowing of Descartes’ Cogito—though given how that further led to popularise Dualism, I’m not saying that’s a good thing.

Atheism Defence

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Curse YouTube and Drew—but in a good way. Drew created a video titled I took a Christian class about atheism. It was worse than I expected. Although I don’t find I need to engage with anyone to defend my atheism, I sometimes do. Perhaps, the devil made me do it. I’ve been an atheist for decades—literally for at least half a century. (Man, that’s revealing.)

Spotify Link

The magic gods of social media tossed this gem in my face, and I was fated to watch it—a 45-minute video nonetheless. Who posts long-format content on YouTube these days? Honestly, I didn’t think I was going to watch the entire thing—at least without skipping ahead.

I jotted down my thoughts—on paper no less—as I engaged the content. But before delving into that, I want to say that Greg Koukl is a formidable communicator. He knows how to engage his audience. Drew, the Genetically Modified Skeptic, is a strong communicator himself, employing cogent logic in defence of atheism—well-considered and articulated. Although I was watching the clock—cuz 45-minutes; plus I was stopping to take notes. Capturing a couple dozen bullet points, I’d comment here instead of in situ. I’ll link from there to here when I’ve published my reaction.

Drew responds so well that, generally, I avoid stepping on his responses, with which I am in agreement. Instead, I share my own observations either on topics Drew did not address or that I have a nuanced take on.

Below are the points I make with a time reference to the clip. In some cases, the link starts earlier than the point I am addressing if only to provide a reader with context.

3:25 Greg points out that he is going to focus on areas where Christianity can make sense but atheism cannot.

Response: Things do not have to make sense. This is a belief humans impose on the world. Even if one believes in a world of causes and effects, it does not follow that we have a privileged perspective into these causes. Some effects may be caused by any number of correlated and covariant factors, and to claim that A causes Z, because it’s expedient and somewhat linear over some more complex multifactor causal model, is weak tea. As humans, we want things to make sense. It’s effectively in our nature, but it doesn’t follow that the universe needs to comply with this need. Human psychology compensates knowledge and perception gaps with any number of tricks from Gestalt to apophenia. It may be comforting for some to use gods as putty to fill the cracks, though, in my mind, it’s rather Silly Putty.

3:35 Greg defines the terms theism and atheism. Drew points out the reduced, self-serving definitions Greg tries to slide by.

4:44 Greg tries to frame atheism as an assertion rather than an absence, so he can fabricate a strawman to attack.

Response: As Drew points out, this is sometimes, but not always, true. Here my thoughts (or soul, as the case might be—orthogonal, or otherwise) wandered to the Dawkins Scale, which parses atheism and agnosticism into a spectrum rather than a binary pair. Idiomatically, it’s a non-assertion. If you claim there’s a dog in my yard, it’s incumbent for you to provide evidence. If I claim, there is no dog in my yard, I am under no such obligation. Besides, my looking for evidence of a non-dog in my yard would require additional scrutiny. Perhaps it’s hidden.

Moreover, Greg attempts to make this a semantic issue. Drew points this out. For me, I reflected on the political situation where some cohorts within the US public decried Obamacare (AKA the Affordable Care Act or ACA) and yet were substantially supportive of its features. Obamacare acted as a pejorative to taint the act with negative connotations for Obama detractors. People’s cognitive faculties as deficient as they are, this was super easy—barely an inconvenience. Anarchism triggers the same sort of reaction. I attribute this to an unceasing negative propaganda/indoctrination campaign.

9:00 We have reality on our side.

Response: Translation: We have subjective experience, and we are going to pose this as some objective reality.

9:40 Greg asks: Where did everything come from? What caused the beginning of the universe.

Response: Where is thy stuff? I don’t even need to engage this question directly because the chestnut of an argument he is presenting has a recursion problem. If everything needs a beginning, then God needs a beginning. This argument just kicks the can down the kerb. And ‘He just is‘ works just as well as ‘It just is‘. Nuff said.

11:25 Greg recounts a scenario where he purportedly asks a recently converted atheist, Do things exist? to which the subject responded affirmatively.

Response: The nature of existence and reality is not resolved science. ‘“Things” are perceived‘ is about the best we can get to at this moment in time, and this doesn’t even define things very precisely.

11:30 Have things always existed? is the question posed next.

Response: I like Drew’s response here. Instead, I went to the definition of time because the notion of time is a social construct. It could be that there was a Biblical void from which the universe sprang whole cloth as depicted in the Genesis version or a Big Bang version. It could as well be that at some point time was invented. An imperfect analogy is the BCE-CE split. CE simply starts at year 1 and we’ve run with it. The universe doesn’t have an equivalent notion of BCE, but perhaps it’s similar to spinning up the universe as a virtual machine. There was a literal void of bits awaiting a cue to instantiate a VM universe. For all intents and purposes, this is the beginning of time for that virtual machine. In this example, we could extend the metaphor to a multiverse, or we could stay with a physical machine and virtual machine metaphor. Sure, the physical machine might be a god or another meta-universe—I refuse to say metaverse—, but the virtual machine has no insights earlier than its own time-zero.

The other things Greg’s approach misses are the notions of quantum mechanics and emergent properties. I won’t spend any time elaborating here.

16:50 A big bang needs a big banger!

I addressed this regressive Big Banger point earlier. Moving on.

20:00 Explanatory power of intuitions

Response: Without getting into the weeds of Kahneman and Tversky’s Systems 1 and 2, intuition and heuristics have a place, but they are very fallible for all but the most mundane of tasks. They are not very precise and are a poor foundation for any theory. I can feel it in my bones just doesn’t go very far—and that includes intuitions about reality

22:15 The problem of evil is apparently the most common objection to the existence of God.

Response: This is a sophomoric position to adopt. Greg tries to frame this as an out-there objective reality affair as opposed to an in-there subjective, emotional problem. He posits that things in the world—including people—are inherently bad or evil. Again, Drew reframes this as a uniquely Christian problem. As for me, I don’t even believe in the existence of evil. Good and bad are functional yet still social constructs. Evil is just trebled bad with a metaphysical twist. The problem with evil is more of a problem with bad narrative than anything more substantive. Somebody created a storyline and didn’t run it by strong editors or continuity reviewers.

26:15 Lawmaker Transcendence: In order for there to be laws to be broken, there have to be laws…

Response: Knowing his intended audience, Greg keeps hammering on the objective reality nail. Whilst this may play well to the choir, as Drew points out, it’s not likely to score any points in a debate with atheists. Morals, as well as laws, are social constructs. And as universals, they don’t map as closely across cultures except at the most abstract of levels.

It should go without saying that even if there were a god passing out commandments, there would be no way to validate the authenticity of this exchange.

32:30 All people have souls… You are not just a piece of meat in motion

Response: Just rambling. I’m not even going to waste my time on this one except to redirect you to my previous response relative to human psychology and apophenia.

34:00 A soul is not a brain

Response: This bit is juvenile, too. Here Greg explains that the soul is not the brain, that you can’t disassemble your brain to find thought. But, he doesn’t mind ignoring that your soul is nowhere to be found either. This feels quite similar to the need for a creator, but these evidentiary needs don’t apply to their positions. Drew’s computer analogy is apt here.

39:10 Existential crisis is a problem for Greg and other Christians.

Response: Because Christians are wired the way they seem to be, any modality that severs the connection to meaning sets them off. Greg confuses hubris and ego for something more substantial, attributing meaning to it. As it happens, people also cherish their pets more than some random squirrel.

40:30 Humans feel guilty because humans are guilty.

Interestingly, there is a school of belief, psychologically speaking, that the default state of humans is one of anxiety, but given that I don’t give psychology any more credibility than religion, I’ll just leave that here. People feel guilty because they are indoctrinated to feel guilt. A hypothetical person raised on a desert island or in the woods, like Victor, the feral child of Aveyron, or in the jungle, like Tarzan or Mowgli, would not know guilt, empathy, shame, or any of a host of other social “emotional” responses.

All told, Greg raised nothing new nor offered any new support for Christian belief, let alone a broader theistic defence. Ostensibly, the approach he takes is more akin to choir preaching than any other rhetorical purpose. In the end, he’s promoting a smug superiority complex in believers. He understands that although people will accept blind faith rationale for religious belief—especially those indoctrinated from birth—that people do have a mild penchant for rationality. I don’t think most humans operate beyond a cursory level of reasoning, but it’s enough to exploit and construct social reflection mechanisms as part of personal image-building. This allows Greg to propose a homoeopathic logical, rational framework and have it uncritically adopted as being rational.

As for otherwise rational Christians, they likely see through the charlatanism, but since emotion proceeds reason, they are allowed to check out and compartmentalise this nonsense whilst otherwise simultaneously retaining the ability to process the most challenging and tortuous logical conundrum.

Checkmate Stalemate

Posted in equality, philosophy, politics, psychology, societyTagged , , , , Leave a comment

Capitalism and apathy in the United States are leading factors in driving homelessness. Employing Capitalism and apathy is somewhat redundant as a major component of Capitalism is apathy and creating otherness—us and them; haves and have nots. People reaching retirement age—Boomers in the parlance—are finding themselves homeless—or as the sage, George Carlin reminds us, houseless.

An article titled America’s homeless ranks graying as more retire on streets was posted elsewhere with a comment, If they voted for Reagan, fuck ’em!

If they voted for Reagan, fuck ’em!

Facebook Poster

The feeling behind this sentiment is that this cohort did this to themselves. They shot themselves in the foot—or the face, as the case might be. They bought into the Darwinist mythos and envisaged themselves as coming out on top—except they didn’t and the music stopped and someone else had all the chairs. In fact, a few people had many more chairs than a person could ever need, leaving more people out of the game than strictly necessary. Illusory superiority is a cognitive fallacy that keeps things like Capitalism alive. And cognitive dissonance masquing mechanisms assuage the delta between perception and reality. And like lottery players, they convince themselves that one day their ship will come in. Yet at some point during the backside of midlife—however one defines that—, comes the foreboding that this is probably not in the cards. You’d gone all in and there was no payoff.

Whilst viscerally, I agree with the sentiment—as I sometimes feel schadenfreude for the people who vote for any major party candidates in election after election and are surprised that their candidate doesn’t move the needle because of [insert excuses here]. When the other party wins, nothing material happens because they don’t understand or don’t have it right. When their party wins and nothing material happens it’s because of entrenched opposition—perhaps, rather, controlled opposition.

Controlled Opposition

But what’s entrenched is not the other party. As I’ve noted before, there is no other party. There are no material choices. I don’t believe the image below is to scale because it makes it appear that they are less alike than they actually are. The image illustrates how the Democratic and Republican parties share the same foundation. I am fairly certain one could swap our Democrats and Republicans for Labour and Conservative, but I won’t speak out of school.

Twin Peaks

Almost nothing anyone can do in the near term can have any effect. In the long run, any real threat will be eliminated, neutralised, or assimilated. They may even allow an independent voice remain, but that is only for the sake of performance. It’s more like improv than scripted, but the impact will be negligible, in the manner of throwing a pillow at an aircraft carrier—even a firm foam pillow.

The most obvious connexion is that both parties—in practice all participating factions—are constitutionalists. Interestingly enough, my spellchecker autocorrected ‘institutionalist’ as ‘constitutionalist’, and that’s another commonality. As for foreign policy, the two are virtually indistinguishable. On domestic affairs, aside from vapid rhetorical and stylistic differences that might amount to some inconsequential veneer of a different tint, but their biggest differences above the water are hot-button items that spawn more words than action—especially from the Democrats.

In the US, there’s a notion of two Santa Clauses. Ostensibly, Republicans run roughshod and spend like drunken sailors when they are in power, but when Democrats are in power, Republican messaging accuses timid Democrats—and let’s be honest here; that’s most of them—of being free-spending liberals. Both parties are unrepentant spendaholics. The only difference is which people get the leftovers. I say ‘leftovers’, because their sponsors are first on queue to get paid.

The meter’s about to run out, so I’ll end my rant here. This is just one of two topics I wanted to get off of my chest. The other relates to racism—and otherness more generally, but that will have to wait for another day.

Tilting Bodies Politic

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Does digital technology make students stupid? That’s what a 2019 BigThink article asks. I like to read Big Think, but it seems like PopScience in a negative way—like Pop Psychology. It’s not necessarily directionally wrong. It’s just oversimplified and seeks the lowest common denominator.

On this topic, Plato quipped, voicing Socrates, in his Phædrus 14 dialogue except that his quip was relative to writing and memory. Some historians and Classicists have suggested that modern readers may be missing the satire. I’m no defender of human intelligence, but this is the demise of society because of change—whether due to writing, radio, television, computers, video games, mobile devices, and whatever comes up next.

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

Plato – Dialogue Phædrus 14

Whether or not this claim has merit, my claim is that computers have trebled manufactured consent, so it allows people to be passively active, to have to specious notion of participation in the body politic, and yet are virtually tilting windmills.

It seems that some people have such nostalgia for their apparent way of life that any deviation is considered to be an affront and possible disruption. Perhaps, it’s because I feel there’s possibly as much to shed than to keep in my book, so for me, it’s more good riddance than oh heavens.

Which Laws of Nature are Fundamental?

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Reading Dennett has gotten me down a rabbit hole. I decided to take a break from book-reading and spend the day reading essays and blogs and watching YouTube vids such as this one. The question posed by the title is Which Laws of Nature are Fundamental? The topic I find curious is an established dichotomy where intelligent design or multiverses are the only possible reasons why we as humans are here to question our existence.

Full disclosure: I don’t pretend to be a physicist, so although I have tried to keep current on, let’s call it, lay physics, there is much I don’t know. But that doesn’t make me stop questioning propositions.

In the case of intelligent design versus multiverses, I feel that both go overboard. I don’t particularly cherish Occam’s Razor, but I do find it apt here. As David Deutsch states in this piece, intelligent design only manages to kick the can down the kerb.

In a nutshell, intelligent design arrives at a place with a claim that all of this can’t have been the result of chance and random events, so [insert the entity of your choosing] had to have designed and constructed it, leaving open the question of how that entity came to be. This is a spin on the age-old issue that many defenders of intelligent design-like theories seem to cling to: The universe cannot have spawned from nowhere, so its genesis must have been due to an intelligent (read: divine) entity without recognising or admitting the circular reasoning involved.

On the other hand, the multiverse solution—which I don’t entirely rule out—also seems unnecessary. In another nutshell—or perhaps repurposing the first—, the main idea is that there are many if not infinite parallel universes. Given the large number—in the manner of the infinite monkeys typing Shakespeare’s sonnets, at least one is bound to be configured just so to enable life and humans in particular.

Typing Monkeys

I don’t subscribe to intelligent design in the least. I dismiss it as implausible. And whilst multiverses may exist, I fail to see why there can’t be a single universe—this one—that just so happens to be configured. If it had been configured any other way, there would have been no life as we know it—and certainly no human life and no life to question how it get there and why.

In my mind, just because we can ask why doesn’t mean there is an answer or that we can find it. More to the point, even in a world of cause and effect, the results can be emergent on one hand and multlivariant on the other. So whilst we want to discover a causal chain of A ⇒ B ⇒ C ⇒ n, it is not likely so linear. Humans do understand the notions of stochsticism and chaos, but we don’t necessarily know how to deal with them causally. Moreover—and Deutsch has specialised in the quantum space—, our understanding of quantum processes is extremely primative. We are probably operating more from conjecture than knowledge, but one needs to start someplace. The trick is not to believe you’ve reached India when you’ve only just departed Spain.

If a lion could speak

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If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

As much as I love Wittgenstein’s quote on language, I find it vastly more amusing aside the lion of Gripsholm Castle in Sweden. Because as talking lions come, this one is certainly more unintelligible than most.

If a lion could speak (Gripsholm Remix)

I also appreciate Daniel Dennett’s retort that if we could manage to communicate with this one talking lion—not, of course, this lion in particular—that it could not speak for the rest of lionity. (Just what is the equivalent of humanity for lions?)

If a lion could speak (traditional)

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” ( [Philosophical Investigations] 1958, p. 223) That’s one possibility, no doubt, but it diverts our attention from another possibility: if a lion could talk, we could understand him just fine—with the usual sorts of effort required for translation between different languages—but our conversations with him would tell us next to nothing about the minds of ordinary lions, since his language-equipped mind would be so different. It might be that adding language to a lion’s “mind” would be giving him a mind for the first time! Or it might not. In either case, we should investigate the prospect and not just assume, with tradition, that the minds of nonspeaking animals are really rather like ours.

Daniel Dennet — Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness (p.18)