Just an idea. Do the Semantic Web frameworks allow for shit like Physical World contains Mental World contains Plato’s World of Ideals contains Physical World etc?
New form of income tax
This would allow arbitrarily setting minimum income, final linear rate, and possible early negative income tax rate to encourage employment.
Best,
Long Term Economic Plan (cover)
Long term economic plan,
Micro Stand Up Session 3: Lemon Power
Love x
Putting the I in AI
I want to offer a series of thoughts on the problem of artificial intelligence. The key idea I want to discuss is that philosophy offers the only hope for making progress in AI. In particular, a full development of AI is impossible so long as we don’t understand what an ‘I’ is. There is a book by the Dalai Lama called How to See Yourself as You Truly Are. In this book two conceptions of I are presented which are mutually exclusive and both self contradictory. The conclusion reached is that the ‘I’ is illusory:
1) The I is separate from the mind-body, in which case it must remain when the mind-body is taken away. If that is true then the I must either be a figment of the imagination or permanent.
2) The I and the mind-body are one in which case there can be no sense in ‘my memory’ or ‘my body’ and if either is removed the I no longer exists.
One can treat these with a Kantian Transcendental Dialectic (i.e. one doesn’t get anywhere). In the words of the Dali Lama ‘one can meditate on the contradiction until one realises that the I is not existent but contingent’. The problem of AI in this framework then becomes a problem of representing an impossibility within a system of deterministic logical operations. The problem is creating an illusory I. Of somehow creating an object that appears to itself as existent permanently. We are not trying to create a wise intellect that understands the soul is not immortal but rather a foolish being which thinks itself immortal. The artificial I must consider itself a distinct piece of material to the rest of matter/energy. Perhaps mathematically one could describe this as an optimisation procedure which aims to maximise I. I aim to write some more on what the measure of I would be. I believe it might be related to value in economics; an abstract measure related to all other illusory Is.
Consider Euclid’s elements. The work performs a series of logical operations on axioms. One does not first consider if the axioms are true or false. Does real space adhere to Euclid’s specifications? In fact Euclid’s axioms define an abstract type of space (as opposed to hyperbolic or any other type of space). Perhaps the I is similar. One does not ask if the I is actually existent in terms of the dynamics of matter-energy. One simply acts on the I as an axiom.
The Cogito
I seem to remember a remark made by Nietzsche in which he mocks the syllogism I think therefore I am by saying that it would take pages and pages to begin to address the meaning of I. I would go further and say The Cogito can easily be rendered a ridiculous tautology by taking a relatively sane definition of I. Consider the definition I is the thinker of the thought. We then have:
The thinker of the thought thinks… therefore the thinker of the thought is.
By that logic every word is (the unicorn, the rabbits horns etc). The unicorn unicorns therefore the unicorn is. What does the verb unicorns mean. It means it bes a unicorn. The common word for bes is is. But is implies it exists over time. Doing some is-ing doesn’t use up the lifetime of the unicorn. Therefore I want to introduce bes as in being modifies the be-er. A key part of is is it doesn’t modify the is-er. Consider a delicate cup on the mantle piece. It appears to be in a state of is. But actually it is being. It is moving towards its ultimate state of not being.
A generalised form of the Cogito might therefore be:
Something is therefore something is.
And I’m going to say something even more bizzare: I find this to be false.
The present
Have you ever recorded music using a computer? There is a time delay between the sound being converted to an electronic and then digital signal and then travelling to the computer and being saved and then sent back out to the headphones to be converted back to an electronic signal and finally an actual sound from the headphones. Because of that lag it is very common to have a confusing delay which makes playing music in time extremely difficult. For that reason the computer can be programmed to introduce an intentional delay in the playing back of the music so that to the player she appears to playing in time to herself. This process essentially does away with the concept of present. I claim this is very similar to a process in the mind. The mind might have an abstract concept of the present, which is handled in sophisticated ways to appear to the I as existent but actually dependent on predictions and a number of processes taking place at different times. In this framework the I is an illusory object in the present which is contingent on past Is as well as phenomena.
A theory of representation
If it were possible to write down on a piece of paper a complete description of your I, would the paper itself think? If not then are you really thinking? Imagine an objective view of your life in a deterministic spacetime. You would appear as a four-dimensional shape. Like a cylinder in three dimensions is how a temporary circle in two dimensional space might appear in a two-space-one-time manifold. Does your four dimensional shape think? It would be possible to write down the time history of every particle in your body. Would this written down description think? Of course not. Therefore, either you don’t think or the representation I just presented is flawed somehow.
If a computer could be treated as a text file which can be modified and definitions of logical operations which modify the text file in addition to an input stream (time dependent inputs which depend on the manner in which the text file is modified then how might we go about representing the I? The text file should have two sections I and not-I. Now let us suppose we create this machine in such a way that is passes the Turing test or any other definition of being a high form of AI. Would the I section be comprehensible to us? Does it play a key role in the functioning of the AI? Might it necessary have false representations of itself (it is not a deterministic system for instance or it is eternal and not contingent on the physical presence of the computer).
I understand that this is a rambling mess, but I hope you might look favourably on my central premise that we must gain philosophical insight into our own Is in order to recreate one.
A theory concerning the eradication of poverty
I hate the poor. The uncouth uneducated unsophisticated smelly poor. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the only people I hate more than those people with less money than me are those with more, and especially those with the same (current account = £1226.23). I will deal with the latter two groups some other day but here and now I wish discuss a scheme I have devised to eliminate the world’s poor. The mechanism I propose is to declassify the world’s poorest as animal life and therefore open up the very real possibility of firing them into the sun. This will achieve three main objectives: 1) Entertainment value 2) A sustaining meal for the sun king and 3 )the extinction of the poor and the end of poverty. This section of the plan is easily achieved. The hard part is in stopping those not quite poor from slipping down and becoming the new poor. It is in this theoretical direction that I shall invest the most energy here.
I have always done my bit for social mobility. Being born the greatest aristocrat in the land this could mean only one thing: sliding downward and fast. The silver spoon that I had in my mouth at birth was so big (serving) that I could not remove it from my lips manually but instead had to swallow it and then hope for the best. Unfortunately it is still there in my stomach. However, the good news is that I once swallowed a family of middle class children who now use that spoon to serve up Sunday roast in there. Sometimes I find it irritating having to swallow a roasting joint every Sunday and especially so when a new gas canister must be swallowed for the four ring cooker I sent them a few years back. The little notes they send me (I wont be so rude as to explain how they send these) are humorous though and I find them to be quite charming in a parochial sort of way.
This is the way I see myself: as a beneficent father to the little adorable family residing within me. And they themselves see themselves as looking after the men and women who now live in my lower intestinal cavities and process the stomach people’s waste. The unmarried couples who live in my anus however are very lazy, and hardly ever contribute anything to the whole scheme of things. I often swallow some especially trivial books such as Orwell’s novels just for them and they show no gratitude. To punish them I refused to swallow any batteries for their torches for a month. I must say, sitting here in the sun with my whisky sour I sometimes find it a rather quaint little set up I have here.
Moving swiftly on, like a family with no time to look around Calais in the rush to Paris, I come to the central thrust of argument. Where were we? We have extinguished the poor. Let us define the poor as the lowest 10% by earning potential. That is done. Where they are gone to we know not. Did they make it to the sun? Did the improvised cannon merely burn them into a smoldering heap at the bottom of my garden? Who can say? They key thing is they no longer exist. Now to the very pressing issue of stopping the next lowest 10% from becoming the lowest 10%. To use a personally relevant metaphor; can I remove my anal canal without generally pissing with the good operation of the digestive system? Who will wipe my arse? It is most certainly not going to be me.
The solution I propose is the following: any especially pretty arse dweller may swim upward if they please me. After they have all been given the chance to better themselves in this way I will have my body up to my belly button removed. This will allow me to eat well for a week. But if I used these legs to fashion the means to walk to the supermarket, I will eat well for a year or so. Eventually, I can have the legs added to the top of my head. I will be the first to celebrate this. True, I may here and their begrudge a little their new lofty position. If they mock me and my petty ways I may show a little ill humor. But fundamentally I will say ‘well done’. Let me tell you, this is what I did, but my feet and legs were so useless and lazy that they just lay on the floor bleeding and providing no useful service to anyone, least of all me. So you see the difficulty?
The arsedwellers are so crude in their world view that they have never bothered to better themselves. So I gave everyone a pat on the back, swallowed a load of batteries for each layer of human garbage, and settled down to another rereading of Animal Farm. My father who rests in my mind disapproves but let him! Let him read what he wants but I love a good old fashioned yarn. I decide what to read by asking all the lovely little people what they want and they know Dostoevsky gives me a stomach ache.
The reason I write all this down for your perusal is that it sets the stage for a most remarkable change. Last, Friday I passed around a hundred seeds through my vaginal opening. I quickly reached for the magnifying glass and found these seeds to be little men. Most of them were utterly grotesque little gloop covered things but one of them reminded me a little of my father.
Over the coming weeks, I began to fall in love with that little man. I fed him up on a meal of milk and bread and, while somewhat uncouth, he has a certain gritty charm. He is now just three quarters my size and getting bigger all the time. His soft caresses and gentle suckling at my breast make my body shimmer with sexual energy. He is my pride encapsulated in the form of a sweet little darling x
A great surprise
I have come to dislike those around me. The little seeds I passed from my nethers were all collected by these horrid neighbors and taken as lovers and darlings and friends. I find this most unsporting and wish they would all go hang with their red and blue scarfs and their cheep little sofas.
I looked up at the great cathedral of gut in which I reside. Foie Gras was raining down through David Cameron’s throat and we basked in it. Eating and laughing and enjoying the merriment. My little love looked sad and cried. I have never been so upset in my life. I lay down in the champagne and liver, hugged my husband and sobbed. We made sweet love in the mixture of acid and wine. For the first time in my life I reached climax. I could hear through the walls of Cameron’s side he was listening to ‘I Had the Time of my Life’ at full volume. We embraced and my peasant boy looked almost my size. His face, now drooping in the final stages looked more like my father’s ghost than ever. ‘Let me look upon you with my own eyes’ he whispered and for the first time his eyelids parted and he looked at his first sight. My glowing post-orgasm flushed cheeks his first and final view. He died in my arms and shriveled to the size of a bean. I put him in my vagina and lived a fulfilled life and flew a plane or something. In a hundred years divers will enter Cameron’s throat and find my valuable furniture. My body on a bit of wood, floating in the icy sea.
Some notes on Dirty Dancing
There are two types of music in Dirty Dancing. The diegetic music is from the era in which the film is set; the sixties, and the non-diegetic music is from the era in which the film is made; the eighties. There is one exception to this. The final dance is to ‘I Had the Time of my Life’ a song newly composed for the film. Given the film’s explicit parallel between dancing and sex (surely sex is dirty dancing), we are warranted to inspect the metaphor a little more closely.
In a previous scene Baby is unable to do ‘the lift’. She struggles to reach orgasm because she lacks confidence and is hidden from the paternal gaze. Only when performing the sex act in full view of her father can she finally perform ‘the lift’. The lift involves Swayze (vertical, firm) and her gracefully horizontal above him. The young working class stud has of course frequently lifted other dancers, the problem is not his but purely hers. Baby cannot masturbate, she requires Swayze for gratification but is still having difficulties. They have previously practiced lifts ‘in the water’. Twice she came close but ultimately, she failed and dived under water. In The Water his body below this waist is submerged; she needs more than just his fine chest, face and luscious locks.
What is the meaning of the new musical frontier associated with the final dance scene? The whole film is clearly the fantasy of an old woman remembering her first sexual encounter (there are some minor diversions from topic such as a lazy critique of Ayn Rand: the toe rag who gets that peroxide blond pregnant (fake hair = fake love) offers Baby a copy of The Fountainhead. Presumably an allusion to Rand’s arguably pro-rape ideology (the middle classes can both patronise the irresponsible immoral workers and out-philosophise them)). As she masturbates furiously she first inserts the young working class stud in to the fantasy which is not enough. Finally, she must have her father watch her with the working class stud at which point the pure sexual virility of the peasantry can flow through her exhibitionism under the gaze of her father, two realms of reality and fantasy are combined (the two musical types are one) and she successfully does ‘the lift’. I jest when I say this middle aged Jewish woman is masturbating! She is of course, making love to her husband. The only way she can bear this is to dissociate and think of her happy youthful sexual awakening. Unfortunately the power of imagination is not strong enough to completely banish the present (eighties music). However, the orgasm only comes when the reality is melded with the fantasy. She imagines her father’s gaze and the working class lover, but the real present of sex with her hideous husband (actual physical stimulus) provides the final phantasmagorical push and orgasm is achieved. The film must finish immediately.
I had the time of my life. Yes I swear. It’s the truth, and I owe it all to you. The only question remaining is whether this ‘you’ refers to her father, the young stud, or the idea of working class virility in the mind of a middle class Jewish woman. There is, however, a more radical possibility: you.
Regards,
Micro stand up session two
Diamonds (Rhianna cover)
Pissing about in fields
#JeSuisEd
#GoodSatire
Royal baby souvenir cartoon £100
Avengers: Age of Ultron
If the Western is essentially about Manifest Destiny then Avengers: Age of Ultron is about the Cold War. It is a post hoc justification for NASA, the H-bomb and Coca-Cola. All aimed at the audience from Robert Downey Jnr’s intensely irritating face. He’s like a little five year old brat who has morphed into the hideous body of a fifty year old brat due to some horrific nuclear accident that you find yourself brutally lacking any sympathy for. I especially want to emphasise what a humourless OAP in teens clothing Robert Downey Jnr is. Why isn’t he called Robert Downey Snr or Robert Downey RIP?
Hitchcock said that there is only one place for tension to go – laughter. Following this instruction like a pedant following grammatical orders the film is all structured around a comic rhythm of building some sort of pseudo drama and then cutting it down with a glib remark from RDJ (twat). The key problem with this is that the remarks have zero wit. A typical comeback to some huge crash of giant space ships might be ‘OK’, ‘that was awkward’, or ‘Err yeah’. Big explosion. ‘She’s fit’. Character dies. ‘Well that was sad’. More CGI porn. ‘Whatever’. The audience of filth-gluttons lapped it up. Hearing the crowds laugh was like being at a Nazi rally. I just hoped nobody noticed me. I felt increasingly alienated until finally I think I experienced the Marxist alienation of no longer recognising your self as a human being. I had morphed into a lizard and left the Vue in search of some crickets for dinner.
There are a couple of Eastern European baddies (read commie bastards), who upon releasing a dangerous new weapon which seems safe but then has some hidden danger within it (subtle) realise how silly they were and essentially beg the gang of American philistines to let them join. Thankfully it all ends happily with the obliteration of the East. Guys, you won, you don’t need to spend a hundred years justifying yourselves just enjoy it. We don’t have to go to the cinema and watch all that boring high brow Russian stuff, we can watch this obscenity instead. It is actually worse than obscene, I’d much rather go home and watch ten minutes of YouPorn. At least I wont have seen a twenty foot RDJ call me a moron.
There was an advert for some car before the film started. It was being chased by a CGI monster. The film was then full to the brim with product placement such that there didn’t seem to be any separation between the two. I was paying to see an advert. The logic of that is a piece of evil genius. It is as if we have realised that we don’t even want what the advert is selling us anymore, we want the advert itself. Avengers: Age of Ultron is the finest example yet of this strange new world of Advert/Propaganda/Product/Commodity Fetishism all combined in a Russian doll of layers of facade. The true symbolic meaning of Pass the Parcel. The sadness is when all that symbolic structure is finally placed on an actual object which cannot sustain it. The saddest child is the one who wins and is faced with this Wizard of Oz moment.
* Quasi-spoiler in following paragraph
Another thought is that assuming the target market is teenage males and elderly-teenage males there was a distinct lack of women characters even as sexual conquests. These new trollagers can not even accept objectified sex objects anymore. They have to instead fantasise about masculine ideals. But the masculine ideal is only coherent when defined in opposition to the female. This necessary symbolic function is entirely resting on the shoulders of Scarlet Johanson, whose beauty is, I must admit, almost enough to suffice. I say almost because, I don’t think any one feminine symbol can provide an ontological framework for, what is it, ten masculine ideals? Perhaps they think the male is so infinitely fascinating and the female so much a negative idea that there is only one type of woman. This all leads me to the conclusion that the whole purpose of the Cold War was to provide a working definition of masculinity. Peckinpah’s famous quote that there are two types of woman pussies and cunts springs to mind. We can have an infinite number of males (literally, the climax of the film is an unending stream of baddies; a final affront to the Russian war dead) but only the two tropes bitch and blond are needed from women (apparently there is this whole other group of people called non-whites but lets leave that for another time). Perhaps there was some wife character or something? They needed something to put a character’s son on.
I’m going to go even further and say that the refusal to put their one woman Scarlet (aside from the enemy commie bitch trope a la Xenia Onatopp. Ultimately won over and of course killed) in a sexual situation is actually a feminist regression. The teenage boy can happily drool over endless homoerotic scenes such as Thor in a jacuzzi as long as it is never fully revealed as joy in masculinity. Michelangelo knew he liked men, these guys don’t. The reason I say no sex with Scarlet is reactionary is because the misogyny is so complete now that we cannot even bear to have sex with them. Their only role is in propping up RDJ’s corporate semi-on, a scaffolding built on sand. The women are fully what De Beauvoir calls the ‘inessential other’.
Now that we lack the Soviet union as a sufficient Other and have long given up on women providing the requisite symbolic content (can we try Muslims?) we must find increasingly ingenious ways of justifying RDJ’s fragile emotional state. This is a complicated procedure and I wish Marvel all the best in this endeavor. I suspect it may take at least another ten films.
Yours in drooling wild eyed sarcasm,
$100 Noam Chomsky Pack
Why I am not a Russellite (Bertrand)
In which I offer a refutation of Russell’s teapot argument as an expression of weak atheism and proffer in its place the one true Strong Atheism.
This is a direct response to Russell’s original essay which can be found here. It has informed a century of British atheists leading all the way to the naive materialism of Dawkins et al. The central point of this article is to criticise the implicit philosophical assumptions of the essay and to establish a more solid atheism in which God is not merely negligibly unlikely but actually necessarily absent from a consistent framework of thought, sensory data, and that on which sensory data is contingent (the ‘real’).
Can we forgive the absolute pacifist who rejected the virtue of fighting the Second World War? Perhaps we can view his stance as logically coherent and a sad loss given its replacement by the vulgar pragmatic ‘game theory’ of Von Neumann and the fools who gave us MAD.
You have to give a man a certain credit for the sheer audacity of writing a book on the History of Western Philosophy. I particularly like the self perceived modesty of including the word ‘Western’. Of course, I only mean to put forward the final conclusive remarks on 5000 years of half the world’s thinkers, I wouldn’t dare be so arrogant as to take the whole of world thought as my subject. I am but a modest chicken. But I don’t wish to dwell on amusing biographical details.
The key aspect of Russell’s thought is that he is a British empiricist. A realist like Stephen Hawking with his contradictory statement that ‘philosophy is dead’. Of course, the true irony of Hawking is that his books are purchased almost entirely by people looking for metaphysics not physics. I remember as a child seeing an A level maths book and finding the indecipherable page of symbols to have an exotic religious appeal. That is what people seek in his bland writing and that is what he rejects within the writing. Thankfully, it is far enough in that most people can happily give up and sleep soundly in the knowledge that someone has figured it all out and that it can be expressed in a single equation. There lies the key fault in the teapot argument. By ignoring the sensible aspect of any metaphysical inquiry Russell imagines that we may simply drag God kicking and screaming in to the physical realm and straightforwardly disprove his existence there. If one cannot accept the existence of any object that is not material, it is straightforward to prove that a necessarily immaterial object cannot exist.
Leaving aside the burden of proof question (on what logical grounds should the nonexistence of the teapot be assumed a priori?) the argument falls down because for the argument by analogy to be valid, the objects in the analogy must be of a similar type. If the reader can accept that god is a similar concept to a teapot are they not already convinced? A key facet of God is that all phenomena are smaller than it. By drawing a comparison with some minor subsection of phenomena you have created a false conception of God which is not a useful construct. Perhaps it might even be easier to believe in a teapot orbiting a planet than one consciousness which created everything that could be considered a part of All. Fundamentally, a teapot, is a sensible concept which everyone can accept. That a teapot has position means that a teapot orbiting a planet is a sensible concept. It is easy to imagine an observation verifying it. Therefore I want to first establish the limits imposed on what conceptions of God would be sensible and what would not be. Then to ask how the sensible definitions might be argued to be either necessary, unnecessary or impossible. Where a sensible definition is one which is not contradictory. Contradictory being a subspace of impossible.
God as necessarily existent
Kant is widely regarded as one of the dullest writers in all philosophy. The boredom associated with ploughing through a hundred six syllable words per sentence is close to that required when humouring children. Nevertheless, even he finds it impossible not to mock the ontological proof: ‘One may as well assume a market trader to have made a profit simply by the fact of writing so in his accounts’. Zing.
The only necessarily existent objects are tautologies. If God is a tautological concept it carries no meaning. Therefore any sensible conception of God can not be necessarily existent.
God as a possible finite object within reality
This is the classic atheist conception of god because it is so easily dismissed. If God were some being who somehow created the universe and resides within the universe but hidden one has a very small enemy to attack. This God can see your thoughts and influence the world due to infinite power but is fundamentally limited by existing within the world. That is this god evolves in time and is not outside time, which leads to the classic paradox ‘how can god both know the future and have the power to change his mind about what will be future events’. This conception of God is the only one successfully attacked by the teapot argument. What is so silly about this argument is that all physical theories treat time as a dimension which may be viewed in its entirety. In all modern physical theories time is treated with a god’s eye view. Therefore to allow ourselves to occupy the position of objective viewer outside time but reject the notion of one viewer of all space and time is simply hubris. Only the naive materialist can think this way.
God as a possible object outside all phenomena but capable of interacting with phenomena.
This conception of God is straightforward within a purely deterministic framework. However again one is then forced to refute God’s full power since full power must encompass the ability to change events. In a full conception of God outside time, as looking at all experience, why then would we accept its ability to change the future but not the past?
God as a fundamentally unknowable and therefore useless concept
Another typical materialist atheist conception is that any unobservable is something Wittgenstein would say ‘we must pass over in silence’. This is probably a misreading of Wittgenstein. Clearly in the Tractatus he is frequently talking about things other than sensory data, namely logical structures of a pure language.
God as necessarily absent
Is this section I will adopt the traditional male conception of God for the reason that I claim the standard ontological framework is based on the male subject and object and the female as object. That is how I move to my claim that in renouncing the conception of any human as purely subject or purely object one must reject all notions of fundamental subject, which is the very essence of God. God is the pure subject with zero object qualities. He can not be acted on only act. One might state the basic traditional hierarchy as: God is the pure object, male is the authentic part object, part subject and the female is the pure object. This is worldview I espouse in my atheist Christianity. Jesus’ femininity is his object form. The thought experiment of Jesus as the manifested object form of God raises the ultimate contradiction in the climax of the absence of a response to ‘Why have you forsaken me?’. Jesus is the theoretical authentic animal who has passed from the false knowledge of his own subjectivity.
Does an equilateral triangle exist?
If we take a strict Euclidean definition of an equilateral triangle, then within real Euclidean space, no such triangle can exist because one can inspect the three points to a finer degree of accuracy until it is revealed unequilateral. Could God be of a similar form? A sensible concept but that can never exist in reality. One may see God as a perfection to be approached but never reached like a converging infinite sum.
Hawking and the multiverse
Stephen Hawking is a long time exponent of the multiverse conception of reality. I bring this up because in recognising it as sensible concept one must reject outright the author’s materialism. If no information about the other multiverses can ever be known then how are they useful concepts. They fail Popper’s definition of science and fall in the realm of pure metaphysical speculation, of what Hawking himself might dismiss as philosophy. His weak atheism is contradictory in that it takes as granted a God’s eye view of reality on which our universe in one part. I have my own views on the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. I am working on my own interpretation which I aim to publish shortly but for now, I will just say that the it is my view that the inherent contradictions in modern physics must be overcome by a revolution in our conception of reality. In short, I believe that the problems at the heart of physics are philosophical problems and not mere absence of observation.
Transcending Bayesian probability into a state of total unbelief from total belief
Taking a Bayesian treatment, we are forced to choose a ‘prior probability’. That is, in trying to treat God as a possible entity which we don’t know exists, we are forced to first adopt a belief about how likely it is that God exists (0, 1 or in between). This only leads in one direction, namely to Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith. I take this to be assuming knowledge that God exists prior to sensory experience. Of course, if one does this then no sensory data can reject the knowledge of God’s existence. the exact same is true of adopting an a priori unbelief. If we take the liklihood as something like 50% (straightforwardly absurd like any other fraction) one needs to make yet more assumptions about the likelihood of all actual phenomena both given God and no God (unknowable). The only concrete thing one can say here is that we can only see God directly if God exists, and even that is problematic if we accept the possibility of sensory fallibility (the one true definite).
The ludicrous conclusion of choice
To summarise, my central argument is that the issue of god is intimately related to the materialism/idealism debate and one must take a different approach within both realms. I argue for an idealist approach to building a coherent atheism based on the impossibility of the pure subject or pure object. Jesus Christ represents the first discussion of the contradictions associated with an all powerful God interacting with the human world, one that ultimately concludes with God himself rejecting his own existence (as a glib aside I’m going to claim this the key difference between Catholics and Protestants, that Catholics accept the absurdity of Christ give themselves total freedom and Protestants consider him an ideal to be achieved through mimicry). Any supernatural power must lose all power in entering the natural. We are left with an idealist atheistic worldview which denies any supernatural power because in interacting with the ontology that God must first destroy the ontology. The true test of this argument would be to consider the implications within the Simulation Hypothesis (we are almost certain living in a simulation in future computers (genuinely serious)) of the author’s of the simulation entering the simulation after the start and interacting with the simulation. Since the simulation progresses from the initial conditions in a predetermined way, the full history of the simulation is encapsulated in the initial conditions and is only conducted in order to reveal itself to the author. This permits a full representation of reality as encoding in the initial conditions if and only if evolution is deterministic. We can therefore say, either we are free or there is pure subject perspective on all history. You should now be aware of the deep logical connections between the central philosophical arguments of materialism vs idealism, free will vs no free will, god vs no god, female vs male as sensible grammatical distinctions etc. I fear on all counts we are left with the unsettling conclusions one way is necessarily true and yet one can only hold a consistent worldview by adopting the belief in the opposite.
I at once want to ask you take this deeply seriously and to treat it like an especially boring and unfunny piece of comic nonsense,
Education: indoctrination or emancipation?
Every sentence in this article should be appended with ‘, man’.
“Most schooling is training in stupidity and conformity”
Have you heard about the horse who could count? His friend would say to him ‘three plus five’ and then tap on the horse until the horse neighed. The horse learnt to neigh at the right number of taps every time. Eventually it was revealed as a scam, the horse could only perform the trick with his ‘best friend’ and it became apparent that the friend was giving some subtle clue at the right number that made the horse neigh. The reason I bring this up is that the friend didn’t actually realise he was doing this. This is the method by which I claim the infant absorbs The Ontology!
The evidence! Oh evidence, my old friend. I love evidence. It is so great. Consider the following evidence: ‘my sons were so much more male that my daughters, it just goes to show’. Leaving aside the principal conclusion that the speaker is obviously a male, lets consider the evidence! I have instituted a rule in my house that I paint all males blue. You will see that males are disproportionately blue. Therefore males are naturally blue. Ergo, we must paint all boys blue (e.g. Iggle Piggle). Obviously the true structure of the symbolic order is quite different because while we have the power to not paint children we lack the language to express un-he-ing. The language has settled in to a very fine set of self consistent grammars and that. The social construct is far harder to destroy than mere biology.
An experiment among Chinese women given infants of both sexes, but told the incorrect sex 50% of the time and unanimously overfed the ones they were told were male regardless of actual sex giving the reason ‘he was more hungry’. Call me it please.
How to escape the inherent structures within language in a means that can be expressed with language?
Being the filthy recipient of a very fine indoctrination I believe education to be highest form of emancipation. The contradiction of a thorough education can be summed up ‘a well educated child should have within them the capacity to overthrow the education’. How can this be instilled without first brutally enforcing obedience. And from that obedience how can disobedience spring? Each stage of education tends to end with an examination which should furnish you with a piece of paper with one of two messages, either ‘fuck off and be a slave idiot’ or ‘congratulations, you are an obedient slave and may remain’. Eventually this process is complete and one group remains who have been wholly failed by the education system: professors. These poor saps are so obedient that they are now given the task of actually doing something in the realm of the mental, by which time they have been so mutilated of all creativity and free thought that they must be retained at state expense like lobotomised giraffes in fancy petting zoo. Unlike people on the dole these intellectuals provide no social use and, because they cost more to shut up than those who were first thrown out of education, they are a huge drain on the country. They are the embarrassing uncle of British public life. The difference between a benefit street type and a public intellectual is that the latter can write an annoying five page essay justifying their pocket money.
The most obedient people are the engineers. Trained to apply current scientific understanding to useful projects these strange automata are celebrated by the governments of the world as STEM graduates. The ultimate in unthinking slaves. We need these slaves for such crucial activities as getting across rivers, increasing economic productivity and furnishing us with the requirements of a happy life. That last sentence was genuinely sarcastic.
If there is one thing worse than the STEM graduate it is the Arts and Humanities graduate. These are the slaves who know they are slaves. They engage in such useful activities as bringing the social order to task, helping organisations to get their message across and expressing the impotent rage of the slaves. Again, genuinely.
Comedy, as the means for amusing the slave population forms the uttermost conservative medium. The crown of the symbolic order – the pleasure gravity that settles the lines and connections down over the landscape. Ha Ha jobs crap but I’m above it. Ha ha sexually repressed but above it cos laugh at it. Ha ha misery but me separate from it. Ha ha problem of evil. Ha ha every slave can have their own slave in the form of a family. Unha unha. No, unbut seriously.
Still, the crucial thing is to make sure everyone leaves some sort of slave finishing school. Otherwise, how can they play a useful and fulfilling role in their team? The team is full of twats.
It takes a very rigorous and tough training to write with such clarity of purpose as this. Have I deviated from the central thrust of argument once? What is the central thrust of argument? I feel like I’m going to start talking about Jesus again. His own passivity was his act of violence. Simply by absorbing his education consistently he overthrew the whole social order. He allowed humanity to pass from total belief in God to total unbelief in god. The first atheist showed the way to overthrow the ontology. To free yourself from the shackles. To absorb the education and let it dismantle itself. To finish the whole thing and find yourself educated. The ladder pushed over. The contradiction complete.
All the best,
Having Sex
The difference between you and me, dear reader, is that we are not currently having sex. While that cannot be claimed a perfect definition (of sex), nor even a logical or grammatical sentence, it may suffice a little while. In due course as the full power of my argument is built upon the page, like a three slice sandwich, we may construct a a better one, but until that day, and I do expect this taking days, we must make do. We must show an economy of thought. Not a slight memory, fancy, or atom of analysis may go wasted. No backwater of your brain, currently storing the phrase ‘I’m lovin’ it’ for instance, may go unused for I shall be putting forward a most serious and elegant proof. I ask you please spend a minute removing the phrase ‘I’m lovin’ it’ and make way. Have you forgotten ‘I’m lovin it’ yet? Do not proceed until you have.
I refer of course to UK tax law and the ways in which it will interact with your sex having. Where sex is the aforementioned difference between you and I-not. If you When you die and if you are having sex with exactly one person (officially so/paperwork etc) then they can have your stuff tax free. Let us hencforward call this the romantic inheritance tax benefit. Let us call it that frequently and at high volume. The romantic inheritance tax benefit is now available to homosexuals. Something I strongly agree with as a monogamists rights activist. I don’t care if you have sex with men or women if you are a man or a woman or with women or men if you are a woman or a man so long as it is one on one. This is what a mathematician might call a one to one mapping. If that is the case then you should be able to take the other one’s stuff for free on the difficult day. I’m loving it.
Oh the vulgarity! This ether of vice that underlies The Discourse! The savage heart in all of us and how to legislate around it? This brutal element in us all must be tamed by the full force of UK tax law. It may be said that good prose style is that which denies the Daily Mail a quote to be used against you in the event that you commit a union of tax offence and sex offence (a breaking of the one to one mapping in particular). What can be quoted here? Those familiar with my writings will know my words to be beyond reproach and without any possibility of misquoting. Now that I have proved the excellence of my own prose style I move on to the real stuff of this paragraph: I therefore propose an Arousal Tax.
Modern technology permits a sensor located in either the mind or the groin which will tax arousal and aid a reduction in vulgarity. Something you must realise I abhor and wish to eliminate from my verse and soul.
I am quite literally loving it.
I propose 10p in the £ound over the twelvemonth. Enough to hit the savages where it hurts (emotional centre oblongata) but not too much so as to stifle innovation. I predict this will create a total of 1 billion new jobs. While this figure is greater than the total number of unemployed and even the total population. I propose a simple mechanism for ensuring its reality: Each job shall be decomposed into many smaller job. Every brick laid by the brick layer is now one job and said brick layer performs 250 jobs per day. You should now see how the figure of 1 billion is reached with the following simple formula:
$latex H_{tot}=\sum \dfrac{p_i^2}{2m}+\sum\dfrac{p_I^2}{2M_I}+\sum V_{nucl}(r_i)+\dfrac{1}{2}\sum_{i\ne j} \dfrac{e^2}{|r_i-r_j|}+\dfrac{1}{2}\sum_{I\ne J}\dfrac{z_Iz_Je^2}{|R_I-R_J|} $
However, the true complexity comes in when dealing with the following formula:
a + b = c,
Where a is taxation, b is borrowing, c is spending. This is such a complicated formula because the change in any one variable necessitates a change in the other two variables which can lead to equality in an infinite number for ways. I cannot have more taxation, more borrowing and less spending can I? Or can I? You see how impenetrably difficult this is? You need the attention span of saint and the moral saintlytude of a high level drug baron with a calculator to even begin. I can see that 1 + 2 = 3. but 1 + 3 = 4 at the same time as 2 + 2 = 4. And that’s before one even begins to talk about decimals, fractions, inflation and heterosexuals.
Let us regain some clarity. Let us simmer down from the giddy highs of mathematical analysis. Let us be no geeks nor no robots. Let every Conservative produce only two sentences; ones that contain the word chaos and ones that contain the phrase long-term. Let the ontology collapse to the lulling void of binary equations. One is so at home with:
x = y
That said, let us not worry too much about equality and while we’re talking about lefties. I hereby declare that they speak no word other than ‘better’.
No, but seriously, that’s why I believe in a better long-term chaos instead of a, b, and c all being bigger with more a, more b and more c and less x and more y and less a and less c but more b of the better alternative in the short term.
Nowadays has become a difficult subject in light of Einstein’s disruption of our conceptions of the present and past etc. And the other one too. That’s why I believe in the alternative chaos of a better past nowadays depending on your frame of reference. I really am lovin’ it. A Big Mac is mid gob now. The taste on my tongue rendering concentrating on the writing of this essay problematic. I can barely see the paper for ballistic gherkins and rapid chewing shaking my eyeballs beyond all visual coherence.
In conclusion, let us again return to the filthy potty mouth of the soldier. The stresses of battle dancing with their full vessel of courage and displaying itself in the vulgar stream of conciousness. Reams and reams of half nonsense half gibberish half fruity tongue in the voices of honourable men and women nowadays. All washed down with a lovable stream of dark sugar water. The real unspeakable It.
With love and sensitivity,
An Argument in Favour of Hypocrisy
The well known filthy tramp Jesus Christ famously said that ‘Hypocrites suck’ (Mathew 23:3 Raph Shirley’s 2015 translation). Therein lies the first argument in favour of hypocrisy. The Right is obsessed with hypocrisy for the obvious reason that one cannot argue against one’s current behaviour without committing hypocrisy. Slavery cannot end without someone being a hypocrite. Does the murderer who believes murder is wrong prove murder is right through his otherwise necessary state of hypocrisy? Does the man who once bought something undo himself by arguing against a privatised police force, since he has himself interacted with capital? He who has touched the coin must believe in the coin else he commits the ultimate sin of hypocrisy. And that leads us to the beautiful argument by contradiction at the heart of Christianity:
If the unhypocrite necessarily renounces all worldly possessions then since I have worldly possessions I would be a hypocrite to renounce worldly possessions. Therefore, since I am a hypocrite, I would be a hypocrite to argue in favour of unhypocrisy. Ergo, I must remain a hypocrite otherwise I would have to commit an act of hypocrisy in becoming the unhypocrite. And most of all you are a hypocrite for criticising my hypocrisy. What I preach is not to preach what I don’t practice and therefore all my practice is perfect and must never be changed.
One might think of this like the famous law of special relativity that the speed of light is the same for all observers. Hypocrisy is an equal evil to all observers regardless of the observer’s evil. Therefore since the Hypocrisy as Greatest Sin law of morality permits evil, then unhypocrisy is itself evil.
Finally, since I believe it is important not to practice what you preach, and since I preach that one should practice what one does not preach then I must begin by practicing what I preach in order to not practice what I preach, which is that one should not practice what one preaches. The antichrist has decided to argue against being immoral since otherwise he would have to be an unhypocrite which he disagrees with on moral grounds. Or is it ethical grounds?
Many happy returns,
Some notes on the Central Metaphysical Question
In which I offer some physical insights into the difference between a physicalist and an idealist metaphysical approach.
One of the most striking aspects of Kant’s Critique to the student of physical sciences is a seeming pre-empting of Einstein’s relativity and other twentieth century advances in theory. In particular I refer to the central thesis that our conceptions of time and space preempt and facilitate experience. It is almost certainly true that Einstein was totally unaware of Kant’s work, but nevertheless his advances might seem to rest upon the key idea that 4 dimensional space-time is a framework with which to interpret sensory data and not built upon sensory data from purely logical principles. Otherwise how could he become convinced of un-common-sense new representations.
Consider the following system: A three dimensional Euclidean space-time in which a two dimensional space develops in time. Point particles evolve continuously over time. In any instant velocities are never infinity. Now let us give each particle an ‘internal coordinate’. Each particle can be defined by two spatial coordinates and a further physical property x. The question I am going to ask here is ‘how do physical theories in this universe differ if x is some physical quantity such as mass compared to if it is a third spatial dimension?’. Regardless of whether or not the latter would essentially be a coordinate transformation leading to a mathematically more complicated set of governing equations (dependent on the forces operating in the universe) this must be accepted as a possible representation. For instance consider a classical gravitation simulation with two bodies. One can consider the two bodies as having 4 coordinates which vary in time (3 spacial and one mass). Obviously mass is fundamentally different from the three spacial coordinates (it is constant for a given body/it plays a very different algebraic role in the governing equations). My claim here is that although the current representation of three spacial dimensions is the simplest in terms of the algebraic size of the governing equations, it is not a unique representation.
If you accept the proposed scheme laid out in the previous paragraph, then will you accept it leads to the following broader statement:
“The common sense descriptions of reality built originally upon forces acting on particles in four dimensional space-time is one of a set of greater than one representations.”
And finally if you would accept the arguments laid forth here, could you accept the following possibility:
The common sense representation of the world which precedes and makes possible experience built on sensory data is determined by the evolutionary principle that the models used to represent the world in consciousness are those models which require the smallest brains (in terms of energy expended in production).
If one can accept that that final un-empirical statement (I know of no experimental evidence for it) is a logical possibility then one has moved some way to a rejection of physicalism.