YES I’M WRITING A LOT RIGHT NOW. SORRY IF I’M SPAMMING. IT WILL END SOON. 🙂 (FB

YES I’M WRITING A LOT RIGHT NOW. SORRY IF I’M SPAMMING. IT WILL END SOON. 🙂

(FB is such an awesome substitute for a classroom.) 🙂

I’m trying to finish my work on reforming Austrianism in the context of libertarianism. And I have only one problem left, and that is this damned point of demarcation between the scientific and real, and the logical and platonic. (And I don’t find it interesting really. I actually find it ridiculous. )

But I’m close enough that I need only follow bibliographies and read a bit in order to understand the current state of the argument. And as such undermine the attack on skepticism as psychological and moral rather than a description about the universe.

Mathematical and logical platonism being a substitute for scriptural wonder isn’t actually good for anyone. Because it certainly looks like Hayek was right: The twentieth century was an era of mysticism. He said it was created by Marx and Freud. But at this point I’m going to have to throw in Cantor and Chomsky. With the opposition provided by Nietzsche, and Hayek and any number of finitists. And the absurdity is that this certainly looks like a conflict between the Jewish cultural predisposition for magianism and opposition to land holding norms, and the germanic cultural predisposition for mechanism and the necessity of land holding norms.

I hate it when these big ideas turn out to be complex silly fantasies that we and our cultures bring with us. The world is quite simple. Even the physics of the universe appears quite simple when we understand it. The complex mystical nonsense, as always, involves some sort of magical anthropomorphization or deification of simple processes, whether they be Religion, Philosophy, Logic or Mathematics. The reality is that the world is not very complicate. We make it complicated. If you go SEARCHING for a way to make numbers and sets infinite you will find it, because any ratio is an infinite expression. But measurements are REAL and finite even if RATIOS can be infinite. Sets are a simplistic function once you separate them from the universe of human knowledge. Of COURSE you can create infinite sets that way. But in human REASON using LANGUAGE that’s not possible. Look at the tricks Godel had to come up with – a variation on Cantor, to make his mystical game come true. But he went LOOKING for it in a platonic universe. Science looks for phenomenon using measurements in the real universe.

Why we desire the world to seem mystically complex, I think, is so that we can, like every mystic in history, use that pretense to take control over others – power from the presumption of knowledge to invalidate normative statements, even if one cannot provide a replacement answer to it. If instead, we admitted that the world was indeed as simple as it is, then most people who are public intellectuals would have very little to do.

The world is very simple really. The problem isn’t in collecting the 1500 or so ideas that constitute the entire human conceptual vocabulary. It’s in distinguishing them from the extraordinary number of permutations of error.

Mysticism is mysticism. Nothing real is infinite. Zero is a symbol that exists when we want to represent the idea of nothing countable. The infinity symbol is a shorthand for ‘I have no idea’: when we want to represent more than is countable. That’s it.

Platonism is silly.