A Collection of Posts on Philosophy from An Anti-Philosophy Philosopher. 😉

. . .

Q: Curt; Who are your influences?

—“Every philosopher can point out influences of which he may call his teachers or derive his ideas from. Nietzsche for instance read Schopenhauer, Epicurus, Plato, and Heraclitus among his other influences. So let us hear yours. How many people have you read, and who do you derive your thoughts from? (Btw, wikipedia level understanding does not count. You can’t cite someone as an influence unless you have read his works)”—

Well, I answer this question a few times a year. And it might surprise you but I read science, economics and history and I think most philosophy by almost all philosophers is little more than simply semi-secular theology or empty verbalism for the purpose of middle-class criticism of the status quo.

So in general, except for a few cases, I view philosophy largely as a poor investment as likely to do one harm as good just as philosophers have done as much or more harm as good. I would go so far as to say most philosophers are seeking to be creative liars.

My reading list is pretty extensive and published on my site. And I’ve read everything on it I think. Ramsey keeps all of the works in digital form in our library. And recently he has added new works to it that are relevant but that I have only skimmed.

There is something in the content of the neutral point of view we find in encyclopedias.  And aside from those works, I found  the Germanic Fairy Tales, Pinnocchio, Johnny Tremain, Ivanhoe, Harlan Ellison, Heinlein, Ben Bova, and all the postwar science fiction authors fairly influential – they were all libertarian.

I came to philosophy from artificial intelligence by way of Hayek and Popper – who were the first thinkers to suggest that we must study man using information not norms – just as we study physics now as information not forces.

But Aristotle created a framework for the study of knowledge, and that framework has persisted throughout the centuries: existence, epistemology/truth, ethics, politics, aesthetics. This structure provides a hierarchy that as from the universe to the self to the interpersonal to the political to the universal.

So when I wanted to create a language for the unloaded analysis and comparison of competing political strategies, and in particular to allow western aristocratic conservatives to rationally argue their strategy, I chose the structure of philosophy to do it because it’s the established language for discourse.

The big change for me was popper and Hayek, and when I heard Hoppe lecture I knew something wasnt quite right but that the answer was in there somewhere.

It took me years to get it right. By 2009 or so I had everything but one very hard problem. And solving that problem was the watershed: how to demand warranty of due diligence in matters of the commons.

So while I write what we call philosophy, Propertarianism solves the Wilsonian Synthesis and united science, philosophy, morality, and law.

What I am writing is natural law.

The Only Possible Epistemology, Ethics and Politics of Sovereignty.

Q: Curt; What’s the most inspiring philosophical text you’ve read?

(a) Inspiration is something I don’t really need, which is why I don’t see philosophy as self-help but decidability.

(c) I don’t read philosophy except to understand how previous generations of thinkers have failed. (really). Instead, I read science and art history, both of which are *demonstrated*, not fantasized (as is philosophy). In fact, I still read philosophers and generally thing “OMG this is sh-t”.

(b) The only books I can recall inspiring me were those of history, particularly military history, and within that group ‘Strategy” by Liddel-Hart, and the history of the Mongols. I consider my study of the mongols my first really independent research program outside of arts and sciences.

(e) And whether you consider Sun Tsu, Alexander, Caesar, Machiavelli, Napoleon, Clausewitz, and Keegan philosophy or military strategy and history is a question of bias in categorization.

(d) I can only remember being affected heavily by Hayek’s two papers on knowledge, less so his work on law, and more so Popper and Kuhn’s work on scientific epistemology. In my understanding of history I have combined nietzsche’s aryanism, hayek’s knowledge and law, weber/mises/simmel’s calculation problem, completed popper’s epistemology, and Hoppe’s reduction of all social science to statements of property (tort).

(e) In aesthetics I was affected by rand’s romantic manifesto in no small part because my university’s art college was based upon it – and it stuck with me HARD.

(f) You might call Simmel’s “The Philosophy of Money” a book on philosophy or work of social science. I deem it the latter. And I read Weber, Durkhiem, and Pareto to understand economics for the same reason.

(g) You might call Nietzche’s Birth of Tragedy philosophy but I consider it social science. I respect nietzsche but I don’t read him for philosophy or inspiration (I find german literature ridiculous), but I did try to understand how he failed to produce a more scientific program for his insight into heroic ethics.

SO WHAT I HEAR FROM PEOPLE WHEN THEY ASK ME ABOUT PHILOSOPHY:

is there a literature in ordinary language that I can read as a shortcut to understanding? And the answer is I don’t think so. And I am pretty sure you will learn more from following me for two years than you will learn from any study of philosophy. Not because I”m particularly good, but because I’m actually a scientist, and most philosophers have been tragic.

I started with history, then science, then artificial intelligence, and then economics. And so my ‘route’ to wisdom was scientific not literary.

cheers

Apr 20, 2018 11:40am

Q: No, I don’t have respect for ‘philosophers’

(FB 1540566639 Timestamp)

REMINDER:

Honestly. I deal with history, law, economics, science, logic, mathematics and scientists.

I don’t have any respect for ‘philosophers’ in general, and none at all for continentals, who I see as idealist versions of abrahamic/islamist supernaturalists employing sentimental sophisms rather than sentimental supernatural fictionalisms.

Sophist, Pseudoscientific, and Supernatural Wisdom literature exists as a competitor to law and science by creating resistance movements against adaptation by enforced ignorance and conformity.

I write in what I undrestand is the LAW, which means testimony (measurements) in metaphysics, psychology, social science, which means the end of philosophy as anything other than choice of preference and good FROM the findings of LAW (Science and Testimony).

In other words, it is my intention to exterminate philosophy (from the public sphere) as a discipline with LAW just as we exterminated religious theology (from the public sphere) with Physical Science.

So I write in law, science, and logic in the structure (outline) of aristotelian philosophy for the purpose of destroying the (continental) cancer of ‘philosophy’ that is nothing but a set of sophomoric and pseudoscientific and in some cases (Evola) occult, drivel preventing us from taking action to impose LAW upon those who would use the same techniques as philosophers and theologians and pseudoscientists, to return us to the Abrahamic Dark Ages of delusionary ignorance.

Q: But yes. There are a few philosophers I’d recommend.

OK. SO PHILOSOPHERS? THERE ARE SOME.

Aristotle (almost-science)(structure of philosophy)

Bacon (empiricism)

Locke (property as unit of commensurability)

Smith(econimics)

Hume (epistemology)

Jefferson(constitutional construction),

Darwin(evolutionary processes),

Durkheim(sociology), Haidt (social psychology)

Pareto(economic sociology),

Spencer (operationalism),

Hayek(law is our social science) and

Nietzsche(aesthetics)

These men create a pretty good corpus. But they didn’t solve the problem of truth, and didn’t unite science philosophy law morality and politics (social science). And except for Hayek did not grasp that empirical, discovered, non-conflated, common law was the origin of our civilization’s achievements.

Q: Who is the most influential living philosopher?

Interesting question. Good answers. Let’s look at how we can ask this question. 😉

Technical Innovation <-> Practical Utility <------> Popular Influence

Successful Technical
Hard to argue that the Russel-Frege-Kripke chain didn’t provide answers but it’s also hard to argue that they weren’t wasting their time. Because Babbage-Cantor-Goedel-Turing produced superior methods and answers.

Failed Technical
The failure of Brouwer(Physics), Bridgman(mathematics), Mises (economics), Hayek(Law), and Popper(Philosophy) to understand that the ‘ideal’ disciplines had failed to include operations as a test of possibility, operational grammar to prevent pretense of knowledge,

Influential and Contributory:
Searle(cognition), Jonathan Haidt(morality), Daniel Kahneman(cognition), Nassim Taleb (probability and cognitive biases). Unfortunately we can’t list Popper(via negativa), Hayek(Social Science = Law), Keynes(Monetary Marxism), Turing, and Rawls who are demonstrably more influential but not living.

Popular Influence But Otherwise Meaningless:
Dennet et all.

1. Categorical Construction:
2. Scientific <----------------> Ideal <-----------------> Experiential
3. Descriptive Causality Experiential Causality
4. Scientific Categories Normative Categories Arbitrary Categories
5. Operational Analytic Literary Conflationary Continental
6. Aristotle Plato (many)
7. 
8. Tends to Result In:
9. Truth Utility Preference
10. Markets, Regulation Command
11. Nash Equality Pareto Equality Command Equality
12. Natural Hierarchy Political Hierarchy Bureaucratic Hierarchy
13. Classical Liberalism Social Democracy Socialism
14. Rapid Adaptation Windfall Consumption Redirected Consumption
15. Hyper Competitive Competitive in Windfalls Competitive when Behind

I would make the following observations:

1. The continental (German) program has been a failed attempt, since the time of Kant (through Heidegger), to produce a secular, rational, version of Christianity. The French program (Rousseau through Derrida) has been a demonstrably successful program but a devastatingly destructive one. The Abrahamic program’s second revision (Marx, Freud, Boaz, Cantor, Mises, Rothbard, Strauss) has been catastrophic. And between the French Literary, Continental Rational, and Abrahamic Pseudoscientific movements, the attempt to restore the Aristotelian(scientific)/ Stoic(Mindfulness) / Roman(Law) / Heroic(Truth, Excellence, Beauty) program responsible for human progress in the ancient and modern world has been nearly defeated.

2. The analytic program was exhausted with Kripke, and in retrospect the analytic attempt to produce both formal logic of language, and a science of language will be considered a failure. For example, there is nothing in analytic philosophy that is not better provided by Turing.

3. The principle function of academic philosophy today appears consist of the self correction of existing errors prior to exhaustion of the philosophical program (termination of the discipline) in the same way that the analytic program exhausted itself. (If you list philosophers and their innovations this is what appears to be occurring. The discipline is exhausting itself as a dead end).

4. The principal influences on intellectual history are being provided by the sciences. In particular they are eliminating the last refuge of philosophy: the mind. And science is doing so via-negativa: through the incremental definition and measurement of cognitive biases (errors).

5. Science, if understood as an organized attempt to produce deflationary truthful (descriptive) speech, and the use of scientific categories (necessary and universal), will continue to displace the discipline of philosophy, and the use of philosophical categories, terminology and concepts. And (assuming I am correct), what remains of the discipline of philosophy will be reducible to the continuous refinements of the scientific method’s production of constant descriptive categories, terminology, and operational grammar. And the cross disciplinary adaptation of local categories into universal categories.

6. Science is less vulnerable to error , bias, suggestion and deceit, in no small part because the common problems of philosophy: suggestion, loading, framing, obscurantism, overloading, and the Fictionalisms (pseudoscience, pseudo-rationalism, and pseudo-mythology(theology)) are prohibited by the demand for Operational language, declared limits, and full accounting of consequences. It certainly appears that since the beginning of the 20th century we have been far busier eliminating errors of philosophy than philosophers have been busy discovering innovations.

7. Greek philosophy arose out of the common law of torts. Roman philosophy explicitly functioned on the common law of Torts. The Abrahamic Dark Age (conflating idealism, law, and religion) followed, but we were rescued by the reconstruction of north sea trade and the English common law of Torts (Bacon). And as far as I can determine,

8. As we have seen with continental and political philosophy, just as we saw with theology, and especially Abrahamic theology, the principle purpose of unscientific speech has been deception, propaganda, the propagation of ignorance, and the conduct of rule, and the expansion of warfare. With theologians and philosophers responsible for more deaths than generals and plagues. Between Zoroaster, Muhammed, and Marx, we have more deaths than all but the great diseases including malaria and the black plague. Philosophers and theologians have done more harm than good, largely functioning as a middle class opposition to the current form of rule.

9. Philosophical language then is a dead language, and perhaps an immoral one – and rationalism a dead technology. And they will be incrementally combined institutionally and normatively into theology, with Literary Philosophy(Plato and his heirs), merely representing it’s position on the spectrum of Aristotelian/Stoic/Roman/English Law (science), Confucian Reason, French Literary Idealism, Platonic Rational Idealism, Continental and Augustinian Fictionalism, and Abrahamic and Zoroastrian Fictionalism.

10. The use of non philosophical categories to construct *moral literature* in the French and Italian model will persist forever. Although largely as a means of resistance against the sciences, and the status social, economic, and political status quo.

In this context we have to ask what we mean by Influential, or Great Philosophers, because:
(a) Unless we are talking scientists who function as public intellectuals, philosophers, or Social Critics (practitioners of critique), or Moral Fictionalists (wishful thinkers), it really doesn’t appear that philosophy is a living or useful language or discipline.
(b) it’s hard to argue there are any currently living and working rationalists of any substance. They are largely Moral Fictionalists.

Let’s look at the list:

Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins. The atheists. It’s worth noting that Dawkins was correct and Gould was wrong – about almost everything. (Surprisingly). Harris and Hitches practice critique but nothing else.

Zizek practices Critique and has nothing to offer – and is honest about it. I mean, what solutions does Zizek provide? None. And he says so.

Chomsky practices Critique, has nothing to offer – and is dishonest about it. He is an interesting example of how people with high intelligence and verbal acumen can construct elaborate deceptions. Between Chomsky and Paul Krugman, a half dozen people could spend their entire careers demonstrating their use of cherry picking, loading, framing, overloading with incommensurables, straw men, and heaping of undue praise. His insight into ‘universal grammar’ but categories of increasing complexity is largely correct and we can see that in brain structure today. However, he speaks about world affairs by constantly making the error (intentionally), that rational choice is scalable – just as did Marx. And he has no concept of economics whatsoever, and no political statement can be made any longer independently of economics – especially once we understand that the term economics has nothing to do with money and everything to do with the voluntary organization of individuals through the use of incentives provided by money.

Hofstadter is a good example as any, but again, he is a public intellectual and a literary aesthete. Did he really provide any insight that was not visible in the literature of the time?

So in closing, I would say, that:

1. There are no influential rationalists, because the program is complete and it’s been a dead end. The reasons for this would require I write a tome.
2. That there are many scientists that serve as public intellectuals, and this will continue.
3. There remain and always will be a market for moral literature.
4. That scientific philosophy, if completed, as ‘the discipline of due diligence against ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, overloading, and deceit, will replace the discipline of philosophy.

But that won’t stop people over invested in a dead frame of reference from attempting to practice it. Why? It’s cheap and science is expensive.

https://www.quora.com/Who-is-the-most-influential-living-philosopher-1

Q: Who are the best current right wing (Western) thinkers?

I’ll bite anytime, any place, anywhere – as long as you’re intellectually honest, and have more than trivial grasp of economics. (The problem is finding a leftist that’s intellectually honest, and has any understanding whatsoever of economics.)

CONSERVATISM UNDERSTOOD

1. A conservative questions the overestimation of reason, and above all questions consensus. Conservatism is familial, stoic, pragmatic, and empirical. In other words risk averse to capital.

2. As a means of questioning, a conservative requires reciprocity (tort): american < british < anglo saxon < germanic < european < norther indo european in law. That law evolved from the oath (tell the truth, never steal, never flee, in combat).

3. A Conservative requires ‘empirical’ results – and where empirical fails, the ‘traditional’ is adequate, since traditional survived empirical tests in competition in reality.

4. A Conservative accumulates genetic, cultural, normative, institutional, physical, and territorial capital – attempting to pass on to future generations of his family, more than he himself inherited.

5. Conservatism is a eugenic group evolutionary strategy that increases accumulated capital through intergenerational transfer, using intergeneration lending, in order to produce increasingly ‘noble’ families.

6. Ergo successful individuals in the market for craftsmanship, successful purchase of the franchise through military service, successful individuals in the market for marriage and child rearing, successful individuals in the market for industry, successful families in the market for noble (intergenerational) families.

7. In other words, conservatism(aristocracy) is a eugenic group evolutionary strategy. And while bipartite manorialism was practiced from 700, and aggressive hanging of up to 1% of the population every year after 1000, and an attempt to escape church-state nobility, and create an entrepreneurial nobility (meritocracy), succeeded by 1600, there was a great reaction to the english revolution, and a greater reaction to the french revolution. Thus while Locke,smith,hume,adams, and jefferson promised an aristocracy available to everyone, Burke, after the french revolution, and germans after that, recognized that the peasantry was even worse at rule (see russia) than the nobility.

The problem with today’s conservatism is that darwin and spencer were famous before the war, after the second world war, conservatism and eugenics were effectively banned from discourse, academy, and science.

As such conservatives never (until perhaps 2000) restored empirical discourse to conservatism, because eugenics are antithetical to the experiment with democracy. This changed incrementally beginning in 76, through the 80s, and aggressively since 2000, and more aggressively since 2008.

1 – Soveriengty requires reciprocity

2 – Reciprocity requires rule of law (tort), jury(thang, senate, house of lords, supreme court), and an independent judiciary.

3 – Rule of law forces markets, since it incrementally suppresses each innovation in parasitism.

4 – Markets cause hierarchies, because they are necessary to voluntarily organize production.

5 – Markets are eugenic, because they are empirical means of testing industry and impulse.

6 – But they make possible liberty for those with property, freedom for those who labor, and subsidy for those who impose no costs on sovereignty, liberty, freedom, or property.**

DOMESTICATION
Man domesticated the human animal after he had learned to domesticate the non-human animal. And he did so by the same means. And the result in both domestication of the human and non human animal is the same: eugenics.

CONSERVATIVES
Most conservatives do not write philosophy, they run businesses, or write history, economics, science, and law. (I write because I was successful enough in multiple businesses to spend my time writing full time.) Conservatives also are actively suppressed in academy and media.

This has been true since the end of the war and teh rise of the Frankfurt School, and the Postmodern school, both of which were necessary after the failure of marxist pseudoscience. (a pseudoscience marx died knowing, since he stopped writing as soon as he read the Mengerians, and kept silent only to keep the checks coming in from Engels.)

AUTHORS TO READ
Burke, Hayek, Burnham, Sowell, Buchanan, Murray, and maybe Nietzsche. Veblen.
(The essayists are nonsense)
Anyone in Hoover or Heritage institutions.

READING LIST
Propertarianism’s Reading List (https://naturallawinstitute.com/reading-list/).

My reading list (above) contains most of the science we’ve been looking for, while the pseudosciences dominated the mid to late 20th century under the marxist-postmodernists.

Cheers

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine.

https://www.quora.com/Currently-who-are-the-best-right-wing-philosophers-thinkers-I’m-a-leftist-and-I-believe-that-it’s-important-to-challenge-the-beliefs-you-hold-so-I’m-mostly-looking-for-authors-public-speakers-that’ll-give-me-something-worthwhile-to-engage-with

Q: Are there any serious contemporary fascist philosophers (No, other than the chinese communist party)

Fascism is a ‘military’ strategy for Marshaling all economic, political, and cultural resources for the purpose of opposing Bolshevism, Communism, Socialism, and totalitarianism by the conduct of military, economic and cultural warfare.

Just as Napoleonic Total War is a strategy for marshaling all national resources for the conduct of military warfare prior to the industrial revolution, when economic warfare was relatively ineffective.

Just as today we use economic warfare almost exclusively to contain Russian expansion into southern Europe, eastern Europe and the Baltic, and as we did use to constrain Iran into constraining its expansion into Iraq, Syria and Israel.

Ergo:

1. MILITARY: Nationalization of resources for military war: Napoleon Total War (State Credit under Nation States), Physical warfare was appropriate for the era.
2. ECONOMIC: Nationalization of resource for military, economic and cultural war: Fascism, or Economic Warfare, by the construction of an autarkic (self dependent) economy. The combination of physical, economic and cultural warfare was appropriate for the era.
3. FINANCIAL: Nationalization of federal trade policy to cause economic collapse: I don’t have a word for it but operationally it would be called “Financial Warfare”., by depriving competitors of access to the world markets and financial system. (which destroys economic velocity, political authority, and social stability). Financial warfare is appropriate for the era.
4. CULTURAL : the Frankfurt school of Marxism was perhaps the most effective form of warfare developed in the twentieth century. The objective is to destroy a civilization from within by sewing discord and internal conflict. It has taken many decades but combined with vast underclass immigration it has been almost successful in destroying the American Rule of Law experiment.

PHILOSOPHERS?
In this sense, it is no longer necessary for us to develop philosophers for the purpose of Military Total War (state credit), Economic Total War (Fiat Money), or Financial Total War (International Financial System)

It is however necessary (and I am one of them) to develop philosophers to counter the combination of false history, pseudo-rationalism, pseudoscience, and propaganda, using academy, state, media complex, to conduct cultural warfare.

So no. There are no Fascist philosophers per se, for the same reason there are no philosophers of napoleonic warfare.

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute

https://www.quora.com/Are-there-serious-contemporary-Fascist-philosophers

Q: How do I learn Philosophy?

(really good piece)

Q: “CURT, HOW DO I LEARN PHILOSOPHY?” A: WELL THAT REQUIRES DEFINING PHILOSOPHY AND CHOOSING WHAT YOU WANT TO LEARN FROM IT.

QUESTION

—“Hey curt, since you mentioned newbies. If an individual was beginning planning a self taught curriculum in philosophy, what would you recommend for sources? And does eastern philosophy like the teachings of the Tao hold any significance in your paradigm?”—

ANSWER

First, we need to define Philosophy. Which I think I can successfully do by stating it’s a set of ideas that assist us in forming a framework of understanding, whether by imitation of others – whether real or mythical (virtue), rules of conduct and decision making(deontological), or understanding of the mechanics of the universe(teleological), with which we can use limited human knowledge and reason for the purposes of acting to achieve needs, satisfactions, and fulfillments, by cooperating successfully in a world of others doing the same.

THE OPTIONS

This hierarchy of philosophies is important: imitation of virtue, dedication to rules, and understanding of cause and effect producing outcomes, place different demands on the individual.

-One’s Experience-

i – children and primitive cultures rely on virtue (religion)

ii – adults in developing cultures rely on rules (law)

iii – the wise in mature cultures rely on outcomes (science)

This is the usual progression of one’s personal philosophy through life. As children, adults and at our maturity we make use of virtue, rule, and outcome ethics because that is the best we can manage at every stage of our development.

This progression also remains useful, and is why wise me resort to “what would jesus do” or “what would such and such a great man do?”. Because that virtuous wisdom is, at times, the only possible means of decision making with sparse information. Just as we fall back upon rules when we are unsure of outcomes. Just as we rely upon our knowledge of outcomes to make decisions when we have accumulated the knowledge and experience to do so.

So it is not a matter of choosing virtue, rule, or outcome ethics. It is a matter of acquiring each so that one can apply each in the circumstances where one possesses the information to do so – and conversely: one can judge the ethics of others by the rules they apply in each circumstance. A child who errs by virtue ethics is forgivable. An adult who errs by rules is forgivable. An wise man who errs despite his vast knowledge of a subject is forgivable. Yet the inverse is not true: a wise man who relies upon rules when he is masterful is suspect, an adult who relies upon virtue is suspect. A child who relies upon anything other than virtue is suspect.

-One’s Abilities-

There is a reason why women and people of lower IQ favor religion, why people in the liberal arts favor philosophy and pseudoscience, and why men and people of higher IQ favor history and science. That is because they possess the means by which to acquire and use those systems of of thought given their experience and ability.

Furthermore, the acquisition of virtue, rule and outcome knowledge is costly to the individual. Not all can afford the investment, and not all have access to the literature or teachers from whom they can learn it. We do not expect feral children to demonstrate any of the ethical frameworks, and it is very difficult not to expect a first world child not to posses at least virtue ethics, if not rule ethics, and we attempt (possibly, if not probably, foolishly) to teach our children outcome ethics in the present era.

-One’s control over one’s actions in life-

Different philosophies whether virtuous, rational, or scientific are more or less use in different circumstances. We can break philosophies into:

1-religions,

2-disciplines

3-rationalisms(philosophies),

4-laws, and

5-sciences.

It is very hard to classify any one of the bodies of thought below because all philosophical systems contain attributes of each category. I’ve organized them the best that I can.

-Religions- (faith) —

Christianity provides a body of myth and ritual with but one purpose: the extension of kinship love to non kin, as a means of generating universal inclusiveness. It is a religion of benevolent pacification cured only by it’s opposite in the martial nobility.

Islam provides rules and virtues for people with limited intelligence to observe and daily rituals to enforce them – although this is a false promise since it achieves the opposite.

I am uncomfortable commending on Hinduism since I am not sure I really understand it sufficiently (I see it through buddha’s eyes, as needing reformation), and all other ‘religions’ that I know of have been unsuccessful, or are obviously detrimental.

Japan’s Shintoism combines both monarchy, ancestor worship and buddhism to produce fealty to family, clan, tribe and nation, as well as self control. For an homogenous people the combination of history, nature worship, and self control is hard to criticize other than the people are often frustrated and emotionally repressed.

–Disciplines– (training) —

Buddhism provides a means of achieving personal satisfaction for those who live in worlds where they have few resources, few options, little control over their circumstances. It focuses on the self. Combined with Yoga it is extremely attractive to women.

Stoicism provides a means of achieving personal happiness for those who live in civilized worlds but who have little control over their environments. Stoicism is the opposite of buddhism in that buddhism achieves satisfaction by escapism and internal discipline, while stoicism achieves satisfaction by means of creating many small successes in daily life, accumulating in your achievement of virtue independent of the opinions of others. Combined with Sport it is extremely attractive to men.

I tend to have a favorable view of both buddhism and stoicism.

–Rationalisms— (reasoning) —

Confucianism provides a means of obtaining satisfaction by conformity to fixed roles in society and providing us with wisdom for operating within those roles. Unfortunately Confucianism is paired with Sun Tzu: the philosophy of deception, and Lao Tzu: the philosophy of the poor within a hierarchical system. Together they advocate submission to authority as a means of avoiding conflict.

Ancient Greco-Roman Philosophy – prior to Aristotle is interesting for the breadth of experiment that occurred in seeking a solution. I recommend The Ethics and the Politics. That’s all.

Christian Natural Law Philosophy – Aquinas is interesting, but I would recommend skipping him, reading the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on Natural Law instead.

Anglo Empirical (Moral) Philosophy – Locke, Smith and Hume constitute the enlightenment philosophers of necessity.

Continental Philosophy – is reactionary in order to compensate for the disorder produced by the errors in anglo empirical philosophy’s assumption of an aristocracy of everyone. So Continental is little more than an attempt to create a rational rather than supernatural justification of existing moral orders. There is plenty of wisdom in that philosophy, and great aspiration to it. Especially Nietzsche, who is the point of demarcation between christian mysticism and naturalistic philosophy. but it is also the source pseudoscience and lies.

Cosmopolitan Philosophy (Pseudoscience, Loading, framing and overloading) Marx, Freud, Cantor, Mises, Rothbard. The only cosmopolitan I recommend is Popper and while he is most definitely a cosmopolitan, he adopted Hayek’s information theory.

(When I criticize rationalism it is the incremental development of pseudoscience and deceit by justificationism, loading, framing, and overloading that I am trying to reverse with Testimonialism. The anglos philosophers were wrong in their assumptions of man, but right in their method of argument. The continentals were right in their assumptions of man but wrong in their method of argument. The cosmopolitans were dishonest in their articulation of man, and dishonest in their method of argument.)

Anglo Ratio-Scientific (Legal) Philosophy – Anglo Common Law, Machiavelli, Jefferson, Pareto, Durkheim, (Popper), Hayek, (Doolittle).

Science: The discovery of general rules by repeated observation resulting in accumulated wisdom. Virtue, Rules, Wisdom, where wisdom feeds back to virtue and rules. This is an inter-generational process of empirical refinement.

–Laws– (captured rules) —

Judaism provides a means for not only exiting their incompetent classes but an entire body of law to master, and overwhelming pressure to remain within the polity which is ensured by the hostility to outsiders and therefore outsider hostility to insiders. Judaism is perhaps the ultimate synthesis of rule based systems and history even if it is a failed system because it lacks the moral content necessary to hold land. It originated with pastoralists and remains a pastorialist (unlanded) doctrine. It lacks intertemporal moral content. That is why the jews cannot hold land.

Anglo Constitutionalism expresses philosophy as law and very much under natural law, presumably as logically and scientifically constructed as is possible. Most americans are legalists – the law as religious order. Legalism can be thought of as the struggle to understand the laws of cooperation, just as we understand the laws of the physical universe. All anglo legal theory is an empirical attempt to discover and codify natural law in the absence of human discretion. This is a scientific experiment unique to anglo civilization. It is flawed only by the assumption that it is in the interests of the lower classes to compete meritocratic-ally. The fact is that only with eugenic manorialism or a substitute can such a system function. This is why no other groups use it. They are too weighted down with the lower classes who are incapable of competition and cooperation by moral means.

(I tend to view law as the ultimate expression of any philosophy (which as an anglo american I would). But then I am action oriented, from the martial and commercial class, and arguably a member of the lesser aristocracy.)

–Science– (investigation) —

Aristotelianism (what we call science) is demanding and at times forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, but at least when large numbers of us adopt it, we are able to master reality better than all other philosophies combined. The problem is that it is an aristocratic philosophy because it requires great effort and ability to learn and apply. Which is why we invest so heavily in education: we must.

Secondly, science is the study of cause and effect. But scientific analysis implies the ability to act with discretion. At the same time, rule of law exists to prevent discretion, and thereby create rules that prevent others from using discretion to manipulate us.

Third, it is contentious open question whether at any scale discretionary action does more harm than good, or whether rule based action prohibits discretion when it may be beneficial.

To no small degree this debate between the purpose of social science being the development of rules (conservatism) or the development of discretion (progressivism) is the cause of the political conflict of visions. Hence Sowell’s criticism of the progressive “vision of the anointed’.

And it is the source of conflict between the Austrian (do nothing or naturalistic/german), Freshwater (develop rules/anglo) and Saltwater(discretionary/jewish) schools of economics – which is the discipline has evolved into our only social science.

RECOMMENDATIONS

So when you ask me “Where should I start in philosophy” the above understanding provides us with a framework for answering that question. You can seek to learn virtue, seek to learn wisdom, seek to learn scientific laws.

You can seek personal fulfillment independent of the world at the lower end of the spectrum, or you can seek personal fulfillment within the rich competition of the world. Or you can seek comprehension of all – politics – even if you choose to pursue only personal of familial happiness.

If you cause no harm by externality then I suppose that I don’t care which you choose. I would recommend that you know the truth first, and then read the ancient texts for insight into the wisdom of each age. But this is mere entertainment. These were old technologies that have been replaced with new technologies. it is sometimes entertaining to study watchmaking in an era of computer science, but it is merely entertainment, not necessary information.

I cannot give counsel on that choice. I can give you counsel if you choose law and science. This is partly because I was born naturally analytical and less affected by signals and emotions than most. If you are, as are many women, the opposite, then you may need to choose a different method of achieving happiness.

But, if by some chance, if you want to know the truth, regardless of the burden it places upon you then I will recommend that you start here:

START WITH THE GOAL

1. The Meditations of Aurelius. Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics. In that order.

THEN THE THEORY

1. Popper’s Knowledge and Ignorance and Hayek’s Use of Knowledge in Society. and Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson which will teach you the basic principle of costs in equilibrium. A brief introduction to Popper’s Critical Rationalism online, even if it is the few paragraphs on my site, In which you will be introduced to the darwinian approach to the evolution of knowledge. At which point you will understand that in the physical, social, and cognitive sciences, we speak in terms of information causing changes in state. Which is, as far as I know, the present, if not final, model of all human understanding about any domain.

NEXT THE EVOLUTION OF THE LAWS

2. The Magna Carta, The Declaration, Constitution, Bill of rights. The Milsom’s history of the common law. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty, and Law, Legislation and Liberty.

THEN GO FOR WISDOM : THE SHORT LIST

Ricardo Duchesne: The Uniqueness of Western Civilization

JP Mallory: In Search of Indo Europeans

John Keegan: A History Of Warfare

Joseph Campbell : The Hero’s Journey

Karen Armstrong : The Great Transformation

Bryan Ward-Perkins: The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

William Tucker: Marriage and Civilization

Emmanuel Todd: The Explanation of Ideology

Emmanuel Todd: The Invention of Europe

David Hackett Fischer: Albion‘s Seed: Four British Folkways in America

Daniel Hannan: Inventing Freedom

Alan MacFarlane : Origins of English Individualism

Gregory Clark: A Farewell to Alms

Matt Ridley: The Red Queen

Dale Petersen: Demonic Males

Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Francis Fukuyama: Trust

Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind

Stephen Hicks : Explaining Postmodernism

Hans Hoppe: Democracy The God That Failed

Doolittle: Propertarianism.

THE LONGER LIST

If you read those works you will be able to both (a) understand testimonialism, propertarianism, and (b) work through the rest of my reading list at www.propertarianism.com/reading-list/ which is, as far as I know, the sum of works worth investment given our current knowledge of the technology of cooperation.

And after that it’s just experience and wisdom. And in gaining it, sorting the scarce kernels of wisdom from the vast chaff of human intellectual history.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine (Tallinn, Estonia)

Q What’s The Criteria for A Philosopher: What Disambiguates a Philosopher from Philosophizing?

Technically speaking to be considered a philosopher in history you need to compose, write, and publish, a system of thought. A minor philosophy addresses a topic or problem. A logician is a different thing altogether.

Q: What does a philosopher do?

What’s it mean to be a philosopher? What is this thing we call philosophy?

We could say that it is a discipline by which we learn the craft of reasoning. So, many of us philosophize just as many of us repair machines, or do housework, or use mathematics.

But using these tools is different from demonstrating a mastery of them, or demonstrating one’s ability of surviving a competition with others who may do it better. Or creating innovative ideas using reason.

We could say that philosophy is a discipline in which we attempt to master the criteria for decision making in any field of interest. Or rather, the process of creating a set of internally consistent general rules (theories) of decidability in a domain of inquiry.

We could say that philosophy is a discipline in which we attempt to discover fundamental truths – but I would suggest that this is the same as determining the means of decision making – a network of interdependent, internally consistent theories – in any field of interest.

I’m going to provide a narrow definition of the discipline of philosophy. Because while many people philosophize, just as many people work with wood, few people succeed in mastery of it.

A philosopher’s job is to take new knowledge and understanding, and to reorganize the causes, values, decisions, and narratives of the current network of causes, values, decisions, and explanatory narratives to make use of the new knowledge, providing us with greater explanatory power, greater power of action, and greater parsimony between our model of the world we live in and objective reality. This is a better way of saying that a philosopher’s job is to increase the precision of model we use to determine courses of action in the world.

Conversely, it is possible to use reasoning to create errors, to create justifications and rationalizations, to create cunning but empty circumventions, and develop elaborate deceits. And it appears that many philosophers use the verbal craft of philosophy, not to create greater correspondence, but to advocate for a deception. And that is what most if all prophets do.

So reasoning, or philosophizing, can be used for good – meaning greater correspondence with reality, giving us grater control of reality. Or it can be used for ill – meaning non-correspondence with reality, giving others more control of us.

A philosopher reorganizes a network of theories in response to, by including, knew knowledge and understanding.

A logician is not a philosopher.

Q: Defining Philosophy

DEFINING “PHILOSOPHY”

I define philosophy as the search for decidability given an objective or set of objectives. (preferences and goods)

I define truth as the search for decidability independent of objective or set of objectives. (truth)

I define science as the use of instrumentation both logical and physical to create measurements and systems of measurement, that reduce reality to that which we can perceive, compare, decide, and act upon: reduce the imperceptible to to analogy to experience.

In practice philosophers have done as much bad (marx, plato, buddha, kant, Abraham, Muhammed) as they have done good (Confucius, Aristotle, bacon, newton, smith, hume).

So it is possible to separate the techniques of those philosophers who have caused harm from those who have created good. And that difference is in conflationary prose(fiction) vs deflationary prose (measurement). Or put differently, those people who write literature, and those people who write religion(conflating law and wisdom lit), from those people who and those people who write science – that which is simply true whether we like it or not.

If we launder philosophy of fictions and deceits, then philosophy and science differ only in that science via negative tells us what can and cannot be done, and philosophy via positive suggests how to integrate new knowledge into the current network of truths, goods, preferences, and the decidability of each, by reorganization of categories (Names), relations, and values to take advantage of that new knowledge.

Unfortunately, truth is beneficial for all indirectly, but falsehood is beneficial for many directly. In other words, we all love our comforting fallacies. (90% of people think they are in the top 10% of employees for example.) We all love to think we are good people but the truth is that a very large percentage of people are detrimental to the society that they live in regardless of their genetic, social, and economic classes.

So there will always exist a demand for religion (comforting lies), and literary philosophy (comforting fiction), as well as for scientific truth (decidability whether comfortable or not).

Because there will always be a market demand for self deception, merely comforting utility, and decidability in matters of conflict.

One of the most disturbing behaviors I find among all of us who are interested in philosophy, is the attempt to find a substitute for the deceits of religion – but in rational (kantian) instead of supernatural (abrahamic) prose.

So I suspect that while religion (mythology/abrahamism-zoroastrianism), literary philosophy (reasoning/plato), logic(justificationism/law), and science (measurement/decidability) are all included under the blanket of ‘philosophy’ (portfolio of decidability), that philosophy will forever forward be the subject of intellectual ridicule just as religion has now become the subject of intellectual ridicule. (And has become categorized with theology and unfunded by universities).

But this is because philosophers have not defended the term or the discipline from religion and literature, and preserved it as a domain of logic, science, and law.

So how does one define Philosophy? The use of a set of inflationary, ordinary, and deflationary vocabularies and grammars (I combine them into ‘grammars’) including magic, myth, literature, law(rationalism), science, logic, and mathematics, to provide decidability in the satisfaction of preferences, goods, and truths, such that we may act in furtherance of our wants and needs in a universe the causal density of which is beyond our intuition’s abilities to provide us with choice.

The Functions of a Philosopher

THE FUNCTIONS OF A PHILOSOPHER

SCIENCE (Existence) (Sources of facts, theories, and laws)

Science(investigation) = Beginning with man, his senses, perceptions, reasoning, memory, and physical abilities as the first unit of measure, the search for greater precision in measurement, understanding and therefore greater agency by the incremental removal of ignorance, error, bias, and deceit, using increasingly precise instrumentation both physical and logical that permits increasingly precise measurement both physical, logical, and experiential, at sub human, human, and superhuman scales, across increasingly small, increasingly vast, and increasingly numerous phenomenon.

PHILOSOPHY (Existential Goods) (Sources of Knowledge)

Philosophy(synthesis) (truthful/existential) = given new information, the search for decidability within a context under the assumption of some set of goals or preferences, given new knowledge and information, by reorganizing the objects, relations, and values to correspond with the findings

TRUTH (Judgement)

Truth (parsimony)(decidability) = the search for decidability, given all available knowledge, across all contexts, regardless of the assumptions of goals or preferences.

HOPE (Psychological goods) (Sources of Ignorance)(values-by-chanting)

Ideal Philosophy(imaginary/hypothetical): the search for attributions of value despite the truth, philosophy, and science, so that we may rally our efforts in spite of them – – or escape reality by placing hope in the unachievable that we cannot perceive and sense.

DECEPTION (psychological goods) (Sources of Ignorance) (religion, pseudorationalism, pseudoscience, propaganda)

Fictional Philosophy (deceptive): the search for false authority that will coerce individuals to value that which is contrary to their value judgements, despite truth, philosophy, science, and ideals, so that we may rally our efforts in spite of them – or escape reality by placing hope in the unachievable that we cannot perceive and sense.

The Measure of A Philosopher: Beneficially Novel, Good, Bad(wrong), And Dangerous

(Discussion on Bleeding Heart Libertarians: The Measure of an Economist or a Philosopher)

All,

A good economists provides us with insights into the state of affairs we live in. A novel economists provides us with new general rules (a theory). A good philosopher explains or re-explains the changes in the world to us in current language. A novel philosopher provides us with a new general rule (a theory).

It is not better to be good or novel. It is most important that one not be dangerous.

Freud, Marx and Cantor reintroduced mysticism in the form of obscurantism. Russell compounded that new mysticism. The postmoderns have been terribly damaging to institutions, morality and language. Rothbard did more damage than good. Most of his history is quite good. His ethics were a catastrophe and set us back by decades. A disaster I have been struggling to correct.

So one can be novel, one can be good, one can be wrong and one can be destructive. I don’t care much about the first three. The fourth quadrant is what I worry about most. Because bad and dangerous philosophy turns out to spread far faster than good and beneficially novel philosophy. Just like bad news spreads faster than good.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute.

Kiev.

We Can Judge the Good and Bad Philosophers

(suggestions wanted)

If we acknowledge that democracy is a failure, and all philosophers who attempted to justify democracy failures, and all philosophers who attempted to expand democracy into socialism and postmodernism failures, we are left with instrumentalists (empiricists) and reactionaries of various fields.

Philosophy as a discipline, must face the uncomfortable fact, that (a) the metaphysical program failed and was solved by cognitive science, and (b) the democratic program failed and was solved by economists (c) therefore the political program failed, and was solved by heterodox philosophers (d) the ethical problem failed and was solved by economists and heterodox philosophers. The reason for this is obvious: the incentives in Academia to attempt to replace the church’s mysticism with some sort of collectivist democratic rationalism, had it’s predictable influence.

Philosophers can produce good neutral and bad influences. Unfortunately, the greater body of philosophers that have been influential since the american revolution, have been more destructive than beneficial. We can never forgive Marx and Freud, any more than we can forgive Kant and Rousseau.

“Thou Shalt Not Harm” not only applies to doctors, but to philosophers, and to all of us.

I give great weight to computer science because unlike the logic of language and unlike abstract and mathematical logic, computer science does not drop the property of operationalism in real time from its reasoning. As such it has higher correspondence with actionable reality than mathematics, and farm more so than formal logic. And if we seek to make informal logic of any value we must learn from computer science and return the property of operationalism to philosophical discourse. Because without it, it certainly appears to consist almost entirely of nonsense built upon linguistic deception.

==

99. Aristotle

100. Niccolo Machiavelli

101. Adam Smith

102. Max Weber

103. Emile Durkheim

104. David Hume

105. John Locke

106. G.W.F. Hegel

107. Friedrich Nietzsche

(lesser candidates)

99. Robert Michels

100. Steven Pinker

101. Jonathan Haidt

==

99. Rene Descartes

100. Alan Turing

101. Karl Popper

102. Gottlob Frege

103. W.V.O. Quine

104. Saul Kripke

THE BAD PHILOSOPHERS

99. Immanuel Kant

100. Ludwig Wittgenstein

101. Karl Marx

102. Soren Kierkegaard

103. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

104. John Rawls

105. Martin Heidegger

106. Jacques Derrida

107. Michelle Foucault

108. Jean-François Lyotard

109. Jean Baudrillard

110. Murray Rothbard

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL’S BAD PHILOSOPHERS

Max Horkheimer

Theodor W. Adorno

Herbert Marcuse

Friedrich Pollock

Erich Fromm

Otto Kirchheimer

Leo Löwenthal

Franz Leopold Neumann

Siegfried Kracauer

Alfred Sohn-Rethel

Walter Benjamin

Jürgen Habermas

Claus Offe

Axel Honneth

Oskar Negt

Alfred Schmidt

Albrecht Wellmer

The 20th Century Philosophers Were Seeking Power, Not Truth

Operationalism constructs rigid correspondence, eliminates the problem of imprecise language, even non-existent language, by creating names for operations rather than allegories, normative usage, or worst of all, relying upon names of experiences rather than the actions that cause them.

It has become increasingly frustrating, if not dismissive, to read the philosophical arguments of the 20th century, which seek to find truth in language through a variant of set operations – which of course, must be nothing more than circular. When the answer was just sitting there for everyone to pick up and run with.

But It was apparently much better to seek truth as a means of persuasion of others, rather than to seek truth as a means of testing the content of one’s testimony. And I think the psychologists and intellectual historians could spend a lot of time analyzing that particular bit of 20th century mysticism. Or perhaps pseudoscience. Or more graciously ‘error’.

What vanity, or error would lead a body of people to seek authority rather than duty?

I hope the depth of that question comes across.

We all seek power. But the truth is just as likely to impede our ambitions as assist in them. But the academy, sought to take power from the church. Moral power. Reason and Science were the first blow. Darwin was the second. The Universalist State the third. It was all in pursuit of power.

Philosophers of the 20th century, knowingly or not, were seeking power, not truth.

Good Philosophers Matter – If you can find one.

GOOD PHILOSOPHERS MATTER

So, as evidence of the importance of philosophers – at least the scientific kind – the failure of the western culture in the 20th century was due to the failure of the western thinkers to solve the problem of truthfulness that would have ended the combination of democracy and pseudoscience in the present era, just as philosophers failed to defeat the combination of immigration of third worlders, ignorance of women, transportation, writing, and mysticism in the ancient world.

WE MATTER. GOOD AND BAD. WE MATTER

Why Doesn’t Philosophy Get Respect?

Science consists of a network of externally testable hypotheses.Scientific statements are testable because the physical universe is internally consistent, and because of that consistency, subject to fixed categories that are reducible to numbers which can be manipulated by the process of ratios we call mathematics.

As such, the physical universe is extremely simple compared to the conceptual universe. In the conceptual universe, the entire purpose of philosophy is to construct, reconstruct, and deconstruct plastic categories for the purpose of determining actions, so that we may establish cooperative norms, for human beings existing within that material universe consisting of pervasive but reducible material scarcity caused by the permanent scarcity of time. The purpose of thought its action, and the purpose of action is to outwit and therefore alter, the current course of events so that we may consume the difference within the time frames necessary to perpetuate our survival.

Philosophy consists of a series of traditions which attempt to solve the conflict of our desire for perpetuating our norms — no matter how ludicrous they may be — while allowing us to adapt to changes in our material world. It took until Aristototle to develop reason as we understand it. We were infected by Persian and Abrahamic Mysticism, and only began to crawl out of it during the reformation and enlightenment. Philosophy undermined theology as the middle class undermined the landed aristocracy. Darwin cut both the magian tradition as well as the rules that our norms were based upon.

Most philosophy is not testable. Much of it is terribly bad. Too much of it ignores the data from the physical sciences. Most remains introspective as a means of avoiding the data from the physical sciences. Although, the analytic program has in some reductio way, attempted to solve the problem of making testable statements, and incorporating data from the physical sciences, the discipilne was infected by pervasive religious derivatives and attempted to solve the metaphyisical problem as a way of regaining its prestige lost to the hard sciences.

Philosophy struggled to remain relevant.

The post analytics finally abandoned mysticism altogether. Some post analytical philosophers call their discipline “Post Philosophy” to openly and finally fully abandon philosophy’s magian ancestry. Meanwhile the sociologists and the economists tried to solve most of the problems of the social sciences through positivism but failed. And both the philosophers and the mystics have continued to fail — because we still hold our desperately to our agrarian norms and categories.

Philosophy today is a form of fitness that allows one to not fall prey to the limited methodology of another technical discipline. As a discipline itself it has failed to solve the material problems of creating an internally consistent set of categories and relations that will assist us in the development of new norms without at the same time perishing because of our hubris.

One cannot study economics, history, sociology, politics and philosophy as an integrated program. One must either choose an empirical course of study, or choose a narrative course of study. Until philosophy unites these fields, it will remain irrelevant. And synthesis is what we need of it.

There is still room for philosophy precisely because all the disciplines have failed to produce a conceptual framework for adapting to modernity. But philosophy is as much a prisoner of its traditions as it benefits from them. And academic philosophy, mired in the error of the analytic program’s pursuit of the metaphysical problem has been, and simply perpetuates an error that renders the discipline ineffective and deprives society of answers to pressing problems of anonymity and insensitivity created by a division of knowledge and labor that yields an inverse relationship between material comforts and psychological comforts.

Mankind suffers for their folly.

Philosophy Doesn’t Need a Rebranding, It Needs A Reformation

(POSTED ON THE NYT)

I suggested in my earlier essay that philosophy so conceived is best classified as a science, because of its rigor, technicality, universality, falsifiability, connection with other sciences, and concern with the nature of objective being (among other reasons). I did not claim, however, that it is an empirical science, like physics and chemistry; rather, it is an a priori science, like the “formal science” of mathematics.

As I understand it (and I am a practitioner, albiet a pragmatist, and I operate within the narrow field of political economy):

1. Philosophy is the process of creating, organizing, disassembling, and reorganizing categories according to their properties in order to expose causal relations which may be used by human beings for the purpose of improving their actions in the physical world — a world in which they possess fragmentary knowledge, experience pervasive material scarcity, limited time, are challenged by instincts and abilities unsuited to a complex society in an ever changing division of knowledge and labor, where those instincts must be sated and intentionally retrained by new ideas on a periodic basis in response to unanticipated change.

2. Philosophy as such is the study of norms: a) existing norms and theories of alternative norms (ethics) b) improvement of our process of reasoning itself by testing against the real world evidence of our norms (which must exist as a norm to function), c) improvement in public rhetoric, so that we may cooperate in large numbers toward shared ends whether by direct political or indirect market action. (which again must exist as an norm). So philosophy is the study of adapting and perpetuating norms, and the tools of constructing and deconstructing norms. Where norms are a tool of human cooperation.

3. Philosophy suffers from association with, and embracement of, mysticism, platonism and religion — in no small part because these allegorical systems are a means of establishing norms.. It suffers from a failure to incorporate empirical data as a means of testing expressions. It suffers from its distraction by the metaphysical program as practitioners attempted to legitimize their discipline as a hard science. It suffers from the desperate attempt of the entrenched institutional careerism by academics who are invested in these irrelevancies. And because of that, philosophy has lost its respect in society — a society that is suffering from the loss of its means of judging and propagating norms. A society that is suffering because of the failure of philosophy to fulfill its role at developing and justifying norms — in a vain attempt at becoming a science. A science is a process of discovery. Philosophy, as a vehicle for norms, is the process of invention. In effect, philosophy has sought to become a science by the process of introspection – which must naturally become recursive and meaningless — rather than the process of experimentation and analysis of the real world and our actions in it.

4. As a study of norms, economics is the means by which we can measure norms. (Albiet limited by our paucity of information collection, but evolving in response to our skill at information collection). Therefore philosophical concepts can be empirically tested. Behavioral psychology is the study of the human instinct and propensity for error. Politics is the means by which we define institutional mechanisms of cooperation.

5. Philosophers work too hard at either justifying existing norms, trying to find utopian norms, or trying to justify existing human instinctual preferences. Political scientists, Economists and behavioral psychologists, are in the process of replacing philosophy as a discipline. if they were to do nothing other than adopt the clarity of analytical philosophy’s language, or if philosophy would do nothing but export this skill to these disciplines, then they would succeed.

6. Philosophy has only one future, and that is to return itself to the study of norms, and a necessary feature of political action and to repudiate the metaphysical program as a series of catastrophic errors born out of the envy of the physical sciences, and the need of careerists and devotees to find relevance.

Branding is not the problem. Content is. And any decent marketer will tell you that the best brand is quality that is self evident to the observer. The discipline of philosophy is anything but materially relevant today. It is a profession lost. Gilding a lilly is unnecessary and gilding a dustbin doesn’t help.

Philosophy Has Been a Catastrophic Failure

The problem is, that by and large, philosophy has been a catastrophic failure, and arguably has done far more harm than good, while science has been a profound success. Why? Because the difference between philosophizing and theorizing, is that science includes a process for conducting due diligence against error, bias, wishful-thinking, fictionalism (pseudoscience, pseudo-rationalism, supernaturalism) and deceit, and philosophy provides means of justifying error, bias, wishful-thinking, fictionalism and deceit. Philosophy appears in practice to consist largely of sophisms and justifications that like numerology and astrology (or Pilpul and Critique), can construct fallacious arguments in favor of anything imaginable. In this sense philosophy in retrospect appears as little more that either the literature of moral fiction, or the literature of upper middle class appeal for changes to the status quo. In other words, the only difference between religion and philosophy is the same as the difference between numerology and astrology: the justification for an arbitrary means of decidability completely discontiguous with reality. As an economist and theorist in testimony (truthful speech) a non-cursory review of history leads one to the rather obvious conclusion that most philosophers were engaged in acts of fraud. Socrates (or Marxist Critique) and Plato (or Rabbinical Pilpul), against Aristotle (evidence), Machiavelli (evidence), Bacon (empiricism), Darwin and Maxwell (science). One is far better off studying the evolution of the disciplines rather than the secular theology of philosophers — particularly the germans, who, Kant having supplied an artifice of nonsense by which to excuse Rousseau’s nonsense, send the entire germanic world into nothing but secular version of christianity.

Should We Kill All The Pseudoscientists and Philosophers and Theologians?

The philosophy of Marx, Lenin, and Mao (version two) cost >100M lives and the World wars, as well as that of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (version one) cost > 500M lives (islam), the destruction of the four great civilizations of the ancient world(islam), and a 1500 year dark age (christianity and islam).

And that’s before we even start thinking about all the others. The damage Kant did alone to german thought (Rousseau > Kant > Continental Philosophy > Marxism > Postmodernism) is certainly as damaging as version one (judaism, christianity, islam).

Why are the idealists, utopians, and theologians all writers who cause deaths by the excitement to suicide of millions?

Philosophy in its forms of pseudohistory, pseudoscience, pseudorationalism, and occult, has done more damage than anything other than malaria, smallpox, and the great plagues.

I mean, by this measure, we should kill everyone who speaks in fictionalisms: pseudoscience, rationalism, utopianism, supernaturalism.

It might be the single best improvement in mankind since the invention of antibiotics.

The Demarcation Problem is Complete

KARL POPPER’S DEMARCATION PROBLEM IS SOLVED, AND THE CRITICAL RATIONALIST PROGRAM OF FALSIFICATION IS COMPLETE: IT WAS LAW ALL ALONG. AND HAYEK WAS RIGHT.

As far as I know, western success in science, technology, medicine, and economics was due to the transfer of our legal tradition (including traditional european law to Aristotle to Bacon to Hume to Hayek) – and the failure of our philosophers to understand that transfer.

That legal tradition includes a Metaphysical Traditional Contract:

1 – A Universal Militia Regardless of Cost

2 – Excellence and Heroism Regardless of Cost

3 – Duty and Commons Regardless of Cost

4 – Truth and Oath Regardless of Cost

5 – Promise and Contract Regardless of Cost

6 – Sovereignty and Reciprocity Regardless of Cost

7 – The Natural Law and Jury Regardless of Cost

8 – Wherein every man a soldier, sheriff, judge, and his own legislator, of his own demonstrated interests.

9 – And as a result – the only possibility for social organization is Voluntary Markets in:

.. – association

.. .. – cooperation

.. .. .. – production

.. .. .. .. – reproduction

.. .. .. .. .. – commons

.. .. .. .. .. .. – polities

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. – war.

10 – Together producing the fastest possible means of human adaptation to circumstances;

11 – Including the continuous evolutionary production of Human Agency (human capital);

12 – By the domestication of man by market eugenics,

13 – And as a result, the direction of surpluses to the production of commons, and the multiples of returns produced therefrom;

14 – Including the unique high trust society;

15 – And the informational, scientific, technological, medical, economic, social, political, and military benefits therefrom.

16 – Yielding a genetic distribution free of the burden of underclass consumption, and the costs of their organizaation, administration, and care.

These are the organizing principles of western civilization, and what separates the west from the rest, and origin of that separation is in truth before face, cost to self image, cost to the competence hierarchy, and cost to the dominance hierarchy, where truth refers to martial testimonial truth (what the military calls ‘reporting’, warrantied by the speaker, given the consequences that result from error, bias, and deceit in military contexts.

India is an extended family, china is a family bureaucracy, the west a military hierarchy, and semitia is feminine supernatural dependency: a civilization of and for women.

CRITICAL RATIONALISM

So, the demarcation in law between testifiability and fiction, is legal due diligence (falsification).

DUE DILIGENCE

Man can perform due diligence against every dimension perceivable by man:

1 – categorical consistency (identity),

2 – internal consistency (logical),

3 – operational consistency (existential possibility),

4 – external consistency (empirical),

5 – rational consistency (rational choice),

6 – reciprocal consistency (rational choice between parties in affected by any change in state),

7 – limites and completeness (full accounting within stated limits),

8 – sufficient to meet demand for infallibility of decidability by all parties affected directly or indirectly by the display word ord deed,

9 – and warrantied by possibility of the speaker’s restitution of all parties affected by display word or deed.

In other words, yes, one of the demarcations between science and non-science is falsificationary, and requires not only the test of falsifiability, but due diligence against falsehood in all dimensions perceivable by man, and warranty to falsify the incentive to escape due diligence.

EPISTEMOLOGY

Another is that the individual alone can perform that due diligence, or that the process of due diligence includes only:

… [ Problem -> Theory -> Test -> Repeat ] …

Instead of:

… [ Observation -> Question(problem) -> Free association -> hypothesis -> falsification by one’s reason -> falsification by the full set of dimensions falsifiable by man above -> Propositional Theory -> Falsification by Application in the Market for Solutions to Problems -> Settled (Surviving) Theory -> Presumption -> Metaphysical Presumption ] …

Which is a chain of iterations on:

… [ Problem(Question) -> Hypothesis -> Test(Falsify) -> Repeat ] ..

Under increasing scope of ‘markets’ (competitions) from the mind(imagination) demonstrated actions (due diligence), to the market for applications (applied).

… [ Mental-Imagination -> Physical-Action -> Market-Competition ] …

And this epistemological sequence applies for all knowledge claims regardless of the discipline, paradigms, and logic within that discipline.

CRITICAL PREFERENCE

And this brings us to where else Popper – like all literary (platonic) philosophers failed: costs. Costs of due diligence, costs of internal consistency, costs of operational possibility, Costs of empirical (external) correspondence, costs to others if one errs, implies, or deceives, and costs of liability for one’s displays words and deeds if one errs, suggests, implies, or deceives.

In other words, where philosophers are (like theologians) conventionally forgiven their use of suggestion and deceit, scientists, like testimony in court, are not. And this explains the causal relationship between the horrifying damage done by theology and philosophy while providing and questionable good, and the profound gains done by science and its unquestionable goods: raising mankind out of ignorance, superstition, tyranny, hard labor, poverty, starvation, disease, suffering, child mortality, early death, and the vicissitudes of a nature all but hostile to advanced life.

THE AGE OF VERBALISM AND THE AGE OF OPERATIONS

Philosophers generally work in sets (verbal associations), and ideals, while the law, engineering work in operations (sequences of actions) and the material. And while sets are largely verbal constructs free of cost, action, operations, engineering, science, law and economics include costs.

This is why there is a high correlation between moralizing and philosophy, and a high correlation between science and law. Because moralizing does seeks general rules regardless of cost, and sciences and law seek general rules including costs.

It also explains why the west developed geometry (engineering and technology) and the orient algebra (astrology and theology). And it explains the western restoration by Descartes restoration of mathematics from language to geometry. And the development of calculus because of our return to european geometry.

And that in turn explains western religion’s development of law, philosophy, epicureanism, and unfortunately stoicism, of the middle classes, and middle east’s development of monotheistic (totalitarian) religion of the underclasses.

Why does this matter? Popper never performed a study of scientific research, he just used reason to state that choices in scientific investigation was undecidable.

But it’s demonstrably false. The problem in scientific exploration like any form of action (engineering), is that as distance from human scale increases. either smaller or larger, the costs of investigation increases, and as such we pursue the information we can afford to.

And this turns out to be the optimum means of investigation. And this corresponds to the physical and human world’s behavior: nature must take the least cost action possible, and humans do as well – as long as we make a full accounting of causes (incentives).

DEMARCATION IS SOLVED

So the demarcation problem is solved. The word for science is due diligence under the law of reciprocity, inpursuit of giving warrantable testimony about the world regardless of our ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, propaganda, fictionalisms, and deceits.

BUT ALSO, PHILOSOPHY IS SOLVED

Philosophy now, like the logics, is complete for truth and limited only to preference within the limits provided by physical laws of Nature, and the Natural law of cooperation: Reciprocity within the Limits of Proportionality.

Truth is, and always has been, a subject of testimony under the law of reciprocity, and that discipline we call science, is merely our means of due diligence in pursuit of falsifying our testimony so that we may warranty and accept liability for our truth claims.

WHERE WERE WE FIND:

Deflationary Grammars (logics)

1 – Mathematics for the measurement of constant relations.

.. 2 – Operations for the measurement of existential possibility.

.. .. 3 – Reciprocity for the measurement of ethics.

.. .. .. 4 – Science (falsification) for the measurement of due diligence against error, bias, and deceit.

And Descriptive Grammars (logics)

.. .. .. .. 5 – Testimony for the truth claims under the promise of due diligence.

.. .. .. .. .. 6 – Philosophy for choice within the testifiable.

.. .. .. .. .. .. 7 – History for what we have done, and literature for what we might do.

And Inflationary Grammars (logics)

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. 8 – Myths, Legends, Fairy Tales, Parables, and Rhymes for pedagogy of the young, and the most error-free preservation of the consistency of accumulated wisdom over time.

And Grammars of Deceit (llogics)

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 9 – Suggestions: Loading, Framing, Overloading, Obscurantism, Propaganda, Social Construction, Religion.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 10 – Fictionalisms: idealism-surrealism, magic-pseudoscience, occult-supernaturalism(theology)

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 11 – Deceits (Fictions)

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 12 – Denial

All else is ignorance, error, bias, wishful-thinking, fictionalism, propaganda, and deceit. And baiting into hazard, using the fictionalisms of denialism, social-construction, idealism, pseudoscience, and the supernatural, is most advanced technology of deceiving other humans.

And philosophers have a long history of making false claims that bait our peoples into hazard, because they have failed to perform due diligence against the consequences of the harms that are the direct or indirect consequences of the falsehoods that they have advocated.

DEMARCATION IS SOLVED

Not only have we demarcated science from non-science, but we have demarcated math, operations, reciprocity, science, testimony, philosophy, history, literature, and myth.

Popper’s program is complete. We just don’t want to be accountable for paying the cost of due diligence, so we preserve philosophy like we preserve theology – to escape responsibility for our thoughts words and deeds.

Given These Dimensions Possibility

1 – Distinguishability (indistinguishable, distinguishably, meaningful(categorical), identifiable(memorable).

.. 2 – Possibility (unimaginable, imaginable, rational, empirical, operational, unavoidable )

.. .. 3 – Actionability (inactionable,contingently actionable, actionable)

.. .. .. 4 – Population (Self, Others, All, Universal)

And These Dimensions of Decidability

Indistinguishable(perception) >

.. Distinguishable(cognition) >

.. .. Memorable(categorical-referrable) >

.. .. .. Possible(material) >

.. .. .. .. Actionable(physical) >

.. .. .. .. .. Choosable(for use) >

.. .. .. .. .. .. Preferable(Personal) >

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. Good(interpersonal) >

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Decidable(juridical, political) >

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. True(most parsimonious descriptive name possible)(universal) >

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Analytic >

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. Tautological.

Where the Demand for Increasing Infallibility of Decidability Yields the Series:

1 – Intelligible: Decidable enough to imagine a conceptual relationship

.. 2 – Reasonable: Decidable enough for me to feel confident that my decision will satisfy my needs, and is not a waste of time, energy, resources.

.. .. 3 – Actionable: Decidable enough for me to take actions given time, effort, knowledge, resources.

.. .. .. 4 – Ethical and Moral: Decidable enough for me to not impose risk or costs upon the interests of others, or cause others to retaliate against me, if they have knowledge of and transparency into my actions.

.. .. .. .. 5 – Normative: Decidable enough to resolve a conflict without subjective opinion among my fellow people with similar values.

.. .. .. .. .. 6 – Judicial: Decidable enough to resolve a conflict without subjective opinion across different peoples with different knowledge, comprehension and values.

.. .. .. .. .. .. 7 – Scientific: Decidable regardless of all opinions or perspectives (True)

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. 8 – Logical: Decidable out of physical or logical necessity

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 9 – Tautological: Decidedly identical in properties (referents) if not references (terms). So to borrow the one of many terms from Economics, we can see in this series (list) a market demand for increasingly infallible decidability.

And Where We Can Warranty the Consequences of The Promise of Infallibility of Decidability:

1 – True enough to imagine a conceptual relationship

.. 2 – True enough for me to feel good about myself.

.. .. 3 – True enough for me to take actions that produce positive results.

.. .. .. 4 – True enough for me to not cause others to react negatively to me.

.. .. .. .. 5 – True enough to resolve a conflict without subjective opinion among my fellow people with similar values.

.. .. .. .. .. 6 – True enough to resolve a conflict without subjective opinion across different peoples with different values.

.. .. .. .. .. .. 7 – True regardless of all opinions or perspectives.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. 8 – Tautologically true: in that the two things are equal.

Where Decidability Consists In

a) In the REVERSE: a question (statement) is DECIDABLE if an algorithm (set of operations) exists within the limits of the system (rules, axioms, theories) that can produce a decision (choice) absent discretion. In other words, if the sufficient information for the decision is present (ie: is decidable) within the system?(ie: grammar).

b) In the OBVERSE: Instead, we should determine if there is a means of choosing without the need for additional information supplied from outside the system (ie: not discretionary).

Or in simple terms, if DISCRETION is necessary the question is undecidable, and if discretion is unnecessary, a proposition is decidable. This separates reason (or calculation in the wider sense) from computation (algorithm).

Where Gramma refers to the rules of continuous recursive disambiguation given the dimensions included in the paradigm(network of constant relations), and consequent limits on vocabulary and logic within those dimensions.

And Where Truth Consists in The Series

1 – Tautological Truth: That testimony you give when promising the equality of two statements using different terms: A circular definition, a statement of equality or a statement of identity.

2 – Analytic Truth: The testimony you give promising the internal consistency of one or more statements used in the construction of a proof in an axiomatic(declarative) system. (a Logical Truth).

3 – Ideal Truth: That testimony (description) you would give, if your knowledge (information) was complete, your language was sufficient, stated without error, cleansed of bias, and absent deceit, within the scope of precision limited to the context of the question you wish to answer; and the promise that another possessed of the same knowledge (information), performing the same due diligence, having the same experiences, would provide the same testimony. (Ideal Truth = Perfect Parsimony.)

4 – Truthfulness: that testimony (description) you give if your knowledge (information) is incomplete, your language is insufficient, you have performed due diligence in the elimination of error, imaginary content, wishful thinking, bias, fictionalism, and deceit; within the scope of precision limited to the question you wish to answer; and which you warranty to be so; and the promise that another possessed of the knowledge, performing the same due diligence, having the same experiences, would provide the same testimony.

5 – Honesty: that testimony (description) you give with full knowledge that knowledge is incomplete, your language is insufficient, but you have not performed due diligence in the elimination of error and bias, but which you warranty is free of deceit; within the scope of precision limited to the question you wish to answer; and the promise that another possess of the same knowledge (information), performing the same due diligence, having the same experiences, would provide the same testimony.

And Where the Criteria for Truthful Speech Is Coherence Across the Dimensions Testifiable by Man, in The Series:

1 – Categorically Consistent (Non-conflationary,Differences)

2 – Internally Consistent (Logical)

3 – Externally Consistent (Empirical)

4 – Operationally Consistent (Consisting of Operational Terms that are Repeatable and Testable)

5 – Rationally Consistent (Consisting of Bounded Rational choice, in available time frame)

6 – Reciprocal (Consisting of Reciprocally Rational Choice)

7 – With Stated Limits and Fully Accounted (Defense against cherry picking and inflation)

8 – Warrantied

… (i)as having performed due diligence in the above dimensions;

… (ii)where due diligence is sufficient to satisfy the demand for infallibility;

… (iii)and where one entertains no risk that one cannot perform restitution for.

As a Defense Against the Series:

1 – Ignorance and Willful Ignorance;

2 – Error and failure of Due Diligence;

3 – Bias and Wishful Thinking;

4 – And the many Deceits of:

… (a) Loading and Framing;

… (b) Suggestion, Obscurantism, and Overloading and Propaganda;

… (c) Fictionalisms of Sophisms, Pseudorationalisms, Pseudoscience, and Supernaturalism;

… (d) and outright Fabrications.

In Defense or Advocacy Of:

1 – Any transfer of demonstrated interest that is not:

… (a) productive

… (b) fully informed

… (c) warrantied

… (d) voluntary transfer(harm, imposition of costs) upon demonstrated interests internal to the display word or deed;

… (e) and free of imposition upon the demonstrated interests of others by externality.

And Including but Not Limited to The Series of Those Categories Of:

1 – Murder,

2 – Harm, Damage, Theft,

3 – Fraud, fraud by omission, fraud by indirection,

4 – Free riding, socialization of losses, privatization of commons,

5 – Baiting into Hazard (The cause of 20th C pseudoscience)

6 – Rent-seeking, monopoly seeking, conspiracy, statism/corporatism,

7 – conversion(religion/sophism/pseudoscience),

8 – displacement(immigration/overbreeding),

9 – conquest (war).

Cheers

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Metaphysics Is Complete – All else is fictionalism.

May 4, 2020, 10:41 AM

Human Language Facility:
Grammars
... Paradigms
... ... Dimensions
... ... ... Vocabulary
... ... ... ... Referents
... ... ... ... ... State
... ... ... ... Operations
... ... ... Logic
... ... Testimonies
... ... ... Analytic Truth
... ... ... Ideal Truth
... ... ... Truthfulness
... ... ... Reasonableness
... ... ... Honesty
... ... Narrations
... ... ... Storytelling
... ... ... Fictions (analogies)
... ... **Metaphysics <---------------------- New**
... ... ... Fictionaisms (sophistries)
... ... ... Phenomenalisms (experiences)
... ... Deceits
... ... ... Deceptions

WHY? Moved metaphysics into a fictionalism.

This is not so much a philosophy as the results of science that I can no longer deny, and so I live according to the science – in large part because it is advantageous.

1. We are an expensive life form. Particularly our brains.
2. We must acquire, and we acquire at cost to ourselves.
3. All our emotions are nothing but reflections in state of that which we plan to, are in the process of, or have acquired an interest.
4. Cooperation is logarithmically more productive than any action an individual can take, and therefore we must cooperate to survive. (Possibly as much as ten thousand times as productive.)
5. People are purely rational, not moral or immoral but amoral: they cheat and try to acquire disproportionately from cooperation, they free ride, steal from, and prey upon others. This is why we demonstrate altruistic punishment of cheaters in all walks of life, even at high personal cost: to prevent defectors from cheating.
6. The optimum algorithm (really) for developing cooperation is to exhaust every opportunity for cooperation even from cheaters. They almost always come around, because it is always an advantage to come around. This was the entire message of christianity which was lost in the dogma. But it’s just science.
7. All our speech is merely a dance of negotiation so that we may create opportunities to acquire, do acquire, or preserve what we acquire. All of it is just signaling.
8. We are entirely incognizant of these behaviors because it is evolutionarily disadvantageous for us to be intuitively honest, honest with ourselves, and honest with others. This is the same reason we have many cognitive, social, and probabilistic biases in our genes. To keep us going when evidence would overwhelm us.
9. Most of the joy in life is playing this set of word games, cooperative games, and acquisition games with others so that we all acquire what we want as best we can without making others avoid us so that we can’t acquire what we want and need. This is why people commit suicide when they are lonely, and do not commit suicide when they are not.
10. Therefor the only rule of cooperation, of morality, and of law, is reciprocity: productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary cooperation with each other, and the only immoral actions are those that violate that moral rule by free riding, parasitism, theft, or predation. And that is why reciprocity is the basis of all traditional laws (and why it is not the basis of legislation).

This little list is the answer to nearly all of metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, sociology, ethics, and politics.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-personal-philosophy-as-it-relates-to-ethics-and-metaphysics-Why

May 3, 2020, 12:47 PM

1. Language consists of measurements organized into transactions and sets of transactions. We cannot speak in anything other than measurements of sense-perception-auto-association.
2. We refer to each internally consistent system of measurement as “metaphysics” if we are using platonic (imaginary) vocabulary, and “paradigm” if we are using the descriptive (existential) language paradigm.
3. Metaphysics = Language Paradigm = Internal Constant relations independent of external correspondence, operational possibility, rational choice, reciprocity, limits, scope, accounting, warrantability, competitive surval.
4. Description = Language Paradigm consisting of Realism, Naturalism, Operationalism, internal consistency, external correspondence, operational possibility, rational choice, reciprocity, limits, scope, accounting, warrantability, competitive surval.
5. Narratives create imaginary world models that assist us in calculating by the most primitive means available to us: empathy, sympathy, and imitation. Archetypes personify instincts. Plots are formulae which teach us the consequences of following our instincts in in different conditions in the pursuit of ends – and most parables teach us the crime of either hubris or cowardice or laziness.
6. We learn in generations of cognitive development from fairy tales to myths and legends, to heroic histories, to norms, manners, ethics morals, and traditions, to the dance of mating an family, to the various sciences, to the multitude of skills we use to apply them. Each of these generations requires greater agency and agency greater ability. Likewise we have theology, philosophy and the sciences. Likewise we have imitative, rule based, and outcome based ethics. Likewise we have an age of choice, age of consent, age of maturity, and age of political influence.
7. There is only one most parsimonious system of measurement of physical, natural, and evolutionary laws of action. That language is what we call the formal(logical), physical(non-sentient), and social (sentient, action) sciences.
8. That most parsimonious system of measurement of physical, natural and evolutionary laws of action, cannot capture the sense, perception, and associative experience. It can only EXPLAIN the experiential and associative to prevent ERROR and DECEIT by the experiential and associative.
9. All other systems of measurement vary from that most parsimonious paradigm. Each variation from that most parsimonious paradigm produces costly consequences for the individual, those who associate with the individual, the society that is affected by them, and the polity that includes them, and under some conditions the world.
10. People have explicable incentives for a) varying from that most parsimonious paradigm. b) choosing a fictional narrative (parables, stories, networks of parables and stories (mythologies), as means of decision (choice) making. c) habituating the degree of separation of conflation the parsimonious paradigm (real unknown), experienced (real known) from the fictional paradigm (imagined).
11. Our brains develop our minds in a predictable hierarchy from the sensory to the physical to the interpersonal to the rational, and the impulsive, normative, and considered, at varying rates. The degree of ‘friction’ due to developmental failures in our ability to learn each step in that hierarchy determines the degree of complexity we use for our ‘resting state’. Some of us more sensory, some more physical, some more imaginary, some more social, and some more rational resting states (our normal). And we are more or less able to express agency, or vulnerable to sedation givne our lack of agency dependent upon that resting state.
12. We are all subject to involuntary defect (psychosis, schizophrenia), voluntary defect (sedatives, psychedelics stimulants) invent and construct addiction to because cognitive agency is costly in the face of uncertainty, amplified by one’s failures to reduce costs of calculating successful actions, amplified by one’s failures of prediction of outcomes, amplified by one’s competitive failures in the familial, social, economic and political marketplaces, and by amplified others rejection and low status in those marketplaces. The solution of course is to lower one’s demands to suit one’s market value (epicureanism), and to learn to insulate one’s self from market pressures (stoicism, buddhism, christianity). The problem being that most of us maintain biological demand for social interaction and membership so that we seek means of sedation by escape, psychological construction, social construction, or changing our social circumstance, or improving our agency and market value so that we are more competitive.
13. We differ in cognitive ability, meaning we differ in the dependence upon a) physical sense-perception and auto association b) intuitionistic auto-associative valuation and subsequent emotional response c) prediction of social (empathic/short/interpersonal) and physical (physical/long/political) permutations, d) regulation of those predictions by direction of attention to differing predicted experiences and states, e) agency in selecting which of those regulated predictions we will permute upon in order to produce a desired outcome, f) skill in calculating (imputing, calculating and computing) the means of achieving those ends. Ergo we differ in demand for mindfulness (relief from competitive pressures), and our means of obtaining mindfulness.
14. The difference in individual family, class, and group ability is not superiority but accumulated defects due to genetic load due to survival of defects under monogamy, familism, pastoralism, agrarianism, industrialism, and lack of selection pressures, combined competing with those who continuously suppress genetic load by continuous selection pressure, which produces evolution of neotonic maturity, rational agency, and calculative ability as a consequence.
15. We have however discovered the genes for improving heart, muscle, lungs, and remove defects from liver, kidney, and stomach. So it is possible in the future to both add innovations and remove defects. Even if man’s continues dysgenic reproduction means we cannot control negative selection pressures (increasing genetic load) we can still speciate with elites by selective breeding (classes) and by selective genetic manipulation (positive eugenics).
16. There is no false equivalency. There is the most parsimonous science(calculation)(action) and fiction (theorizing) (imagination) and metaphysical (conflation and deceit).There is no extant metaphysical – only the imaginary. There is but most parsimonious – the truth – the rest is different degree of error, bias, wishfulthinking and deceit.

17 If that experience is unorganized the psychotic (rational ), schizophrenic(social), or psychedelic (experiential). If organized the fictional(fictions). if locally ritualized the cult. If socially constructed the religion. if chemically induced: the drug addiction. These are all imaginary. These are all addictions. They are all falsehoods. They are all admissions of failure. Instead there is the fictional, the historical, the wisdom literature of the centuries, and the sciences whether formal, physical(physics, chemistry, biology), or sentient (language, psychology, sociology).

1. Metaphysics = Addicts. Just addicts. Nothing more. We need only determine the reason for the addiction, and the method of addiction, but these are addictions, and addicts ‘disposable’ at best, and ‘cancer’ at worst.
2. There is every good reason to either remove addicts from public discourse and influence, on one hand, and to follow Duerte if they get out of hand on the other. This is what houses of government by demonstrated achievement accomplish, and what prohibition on addictions prevents from influencing those houses.
3. Addicts will stop at nothing to justify their addiction. They will export the costs of their addiction. To the limit of the adult tolerance for bearing the costs of it.

At present we need to imitate duterte and clean house.

There Is Only One ‘Philosophy’ If We Speak The Truth. The Rest Is Ignorance, Error, Bias And Lies

(very important for anyone interested in philosophy)

*(How should we teach Philosophy? Let me tell you.)*

One can teach philosophy as historical LITERATURE(Errors, Lies and Failures). Or one can teach philosophy as the evolution of TRUTH TELLING (science).

If you want to teach the history of TRUTH then you teach western philosophy – at least you teach a small subset of it. (A very small one).

If you do teach truth then philosophy is equivalent to a STEM course

SEQUENCE:

1 – Philosophy (science of truthful speech)

2 – Law (social/cooperative science)

3 – Economics (organizational science)

4 – Mathematics ( science of measurement )

5 – Physical Science (physical sciences of the universe)

6 – Technology (physical sciences in materials)

7 – Engineering, (physical sciences in construction)

If you want to teach literature, then teach moral literature.

SEQUENCE:

1 – Mythology, (Non-Conflationary Analogy)

2 – Theology, (Authoritarian/Conflationary Analogy)

—

3 – Moral Literature, «—- Almost All ‘Philosophy’

4 – The Novel and Short Story, «— Incl., Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Mystery, Etc.

—

5 – History, (description)

6 – Biography,(description)

—

7 – Argument (coercion)

7 – Essay (opinion)

8 – Poetry and Verse. (expression)

WE MAY DIVERSIFY LITERATURE BY CULTURE LIKE DIET, AND FESTIVALS.

But truth bears no competition. Polylogism cannot exist. All such attempts are merely ignorance, error, bias and lies.

THE WEST EXCEEDED THE REST THREE TIMES.

In the Steppe.(horse, wheel, bronze, heroism (and technology))

In the Ancient World (heroism, truth, reason, jury, natural law, commerce, and technology)

In the Modern World. (heroism, truth, trust, reason, jury, natural law, commerce, accounting, common law, and technology )

For these simple reasons: Truth not compromise, Analytic(non-conflationary), not conflationary, Competition(sovereignty), not Decision(rule).

OTHERS MUST LEARN TRUTH. WE DO NOT NEED TO STUDY ERROR.

LIMITS: SPEAKING IN SEQUENCES (SPECTRA)

I follow a general rule that if I speak in ideal types (concepts) and I cannot position an argument or idea on a spectrum (define its limits) then I do not know what I am talking about, and will unknowingly engage in conflation and imprecision from which no deduction is possible, since each attempt merely amplifies errors of conflation. Yet this is precisely what men do, because most men do not seek to discover uncomfortable (expensive) truth (requiring adaptation) but to justify a utilitarian falsehood (limit costs of adaptation).

PHILOSOPHY = CHOICE/PREFERENCE + DECIDABILITY/NECESSITY

Any Philosophical Framework, no matter which argumentative method is used to construct it (myth, parable, rationalism, pseudoscience, law, or science) must supply the following in order to produce a change in state of the human mind:

1 – Metaphysical value judgment as to man’s relation with reality (usually if not always unstated).

2 – A set of Concepts, Properties, and Relations,

3 – Values for those Concepts and Relations,

4 – Decidability from those concepts, properties, relations, and values.

And in that metaphysical value judgment, and by the means of arguing in favor of it, do we find the differences between civilizations, religions, and philosophies.

METAPHYSICAL ASSUMPTIONS

– The world is uncontrollable(or evil) and I must escape from it. (Mysticism/Judaism/Christianity/Islam = ‘Critique/gossip’ or ‘fantasy worlds’ or ‘utopias’)

– The world is hostile and I can only control how I respond to it (Buddhism = Disengagement)

– The world of man is chaos but we can create harmony, and I must learn to live in harmony with it (Confucianism = Historicism)

– The world is vast and I can only control and be responsible for what I have the ability to control and be responsible for. (Stoicism = Natural Law)

– The purpose of my existence is to alter the world for the better having existed in it. (Heroism = Technology)

ASSUMPTIONS ARE EVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES

We are (genetically, behaviorally, materially) more or less desirable to others in our capacity as children, kin, mates, friends, allies, leaders, rulers. We call this our ‘class’: Genetic, Occupational, Economic, Social. All of which overlap except for the outliers.

.

STRATEGIES ARE GOOD(LIBERATING) AND BAD(IMPRISONING), NOT MERELY DIFFERENCES IN PREFERENCES

So some strategies will lead you into dysgenia, ignorance, decline, poverty and illness (ISLAM). And some strategies will lead you into slow evolution (Confucius), and some strategies will provide you with eugenics and rapid evolution (Western Aristocratic Egalitarianism “Aryanism”, Middle-Class Rule of Law, Working Class Stoicism, Underclass Christianity.)

WESTERN PHILOSOPHY (HEROISM, LAW[natural empirical], TECHNOLOGY[science], REFLECTS CLASSES

(just as Confucius vs Lao Tzu, just as Brahmins vs the Underclasses) Westerners do not engage in institutional conflation. We separate mythic literature(heroism), religion(sanctity), festival/celebration/sport, education, law, science. And we either produce a subset of each for each class, or we emphasize one or another in each class. In other words, we produce conceptual products for various markets (upper, professional, middle, working, lower, under). And because none has any real power via conflation of argument or institution, this market remains: a competition between philosophies (methods of decidability).

WESTERNERS USE DECONFLATED INSTITUTIONS AND ARGUMENTS: SPECIALIZATION NOT UNIFORMITY

This ‘deconflated market’ model is profoundly important when comparing the west to other ‘conflationary monopoly’ civilizations and cultures.

THIS PROVIDES SPECIALIZATION IN EACH TYPE OF ARGUMENT, INSTITUTION

It allows us to specialize in each without sacrificing each out of pragmatic necessity given the diverse abilities of each class (or rather lack of abilities of each class).

THE PROBLEM IS THAT WE HAVE NOT (UNTIL NOW) HAD A UNIVERSAL COMMENSURABLE LANGUAGE ACROSS INSTITUTIONS AND ARGUMENT TYPES.

While we have had MONEY to make commensurable good and services across all specializations

While we have had NATURAL LAW to make conflict commensurable across all specializations.

While we have had MATHEMATICS to make everything we measure commensurable across all specializations.

While we have had NATURAL SCIENCE to

We have NOT had a MORAL LANGUAGE OF COOPERATION across all those specializations.

PHILOSOPHY IS LARGELY PRACTICED AS A MIDDLE CLASS AND UPPER MIDDLE-CLASS METHOD OF INFLUENCING THE RULING CLASS (STATUS QUO).

Religion is largely practiced as a lower class means of resisting the ruling class (status quo). Religion coerces man by resistance.

Credit and Trade are practiced as a means of rule by the economic class within the limits fo the religious and legal classes. Finance, Industry, Entrepreneurship, Calculative, Managerial, administrative specialize in organization of production

Law is largely practiced as a means of administrative rule by the ruling class, by employing the professional class, just as war is practiced as a means of territorial rule by the ruling class by employing the working, and underclasses. Law coerces man by force.

Science, technology, engineering, craftsmanship, and labor specialize in transformation (coercing the universe rather than coercing man).

Women specialize in the organization of reproduction, care, and caretaking. They need no ‘religion’ except to confirm the intuitions that they are born with. Festivals, Philosophy, Soldiery are for men. And Religion, Feasts, and caretaking are for women. Not that we cannot preclude one or the other. But this explains the kind of information system (philosophy) we are attracted to: one that justifies our genetic predispositions.

SO PHILOSOPHERS FAILED IN THE 20TH CENTURY

1 – Philosophers tried to make the discipline a SPECIALTY rather than a language of commensurability. (The continued investigation into Truth, since all the other specializations had broken off into sciences,)

2 – Philosophers tried to create a second set of lies, this time with pseudorationalism, and pseudoscience (the cosmopolitans:Boaz, Marx, Freud, Cantor, Adorno; Rand/Rothbard; and the Puritans: French, and American literary Postmodernists; And the secular Christians Rawls-and-too-many-others-to-list. )

3 – Philosophers failed to solve the problem of the social sciences (cooperation) and instead used a multitude of deceptions and obscurantisms in order to justify authoritarianism(non-cooperation). This exposes most philosophers as theologians in secular rhetorical garb.

PHILOSOPHERS EITHER ENGAGE IN THE INVESTIGATION OF TRUTH, THE ARTICULATION OF POSSIBILITY, OR THE CREATION OF A FICTION, OR THE CREATION OF DECEIT.

Philosophers have a very poor record in history. Despite so many, it is largely those who struggle to discover empiricism and its offspring ‘testimony’ that have contributed to man. The rationalists are almost universally reducible to excuse makers, and those who attempt to create a rational literature with which to replace biblical literature of mysticism.

Many people who enjoy philosophy are far closer to recreational readers of science fiction and fantasy with which to escape the effort of truth seeking in reality, than inquisitors into truth from which we may construct solutions. We can discover which of these a person is: recreational literature, seeker of a particular solution, or investigator of truth with very few questions and very little difficulty.

Whenever we do not argue in favor of truth we merely deprive Man of the knowledge he needs to invent institutions of cooperation that assist us in cooperating in the real world.

We can use the truth to identify possibilities, or we can deny the truth and create possibilities that require lies (religions) incompatible with reality.

We can create deceptions with which to destroy truth or obscure it.

It is quite easy in retrospect to determine which philosophers have done so.

PHILOSOPHERS AS PROFITEERS ON THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

In other words, philosophers sought a market into which to sell their ideas for profit or coercion, not truth, regardless of profit or coercion.

ROLE OF PHILOSOPHY?

1. Investigate and Prosecute Falsehoods And Their Advocates

2. Incorporate the findings of the sciences such that discover superior truths to those we use today.

3. Discover new possibilities having incorporated the findings of the sciences.

4. Articulate metaphysical representations, Reorganize Concepts, Properties, and Relations, Re-weight Values, and provide new criteria of Decidability.

IS THERE A SPACE FOR LIARS?

No. There is a space for parables. But liars, particularly philosophical liars, should be prosecuted like any other liar that creates a hazard in the commons. Most philosophers function akin to tiger traps baited with words and are completely unaccountable for the tragedy and death that they have caused.

I am a philosopher. As such, a prosecutor. Anything that survives prosecution, and which I am willing to warranty with my life, is worthy of publication into the commons. If either of those conditions fails, then I should be punished for it.

Why should philosophers have greater permissiveness than the manufacturers of ladders, and the brewers of coffee, or the makers of drugs?

They shouldn’t. Because arguably, philosophers and theologians ship the worst product that causes the most harm of any product man has made.

(I know. Everyone wants to play philosopher at everyone else’s expense just like they want to free-ride on everyone else in every other capacity in life. But speech produces consequences. And while we may always say truthful speech produces consequences that we must bear the cost of, there is no reason we must bear the cost of false speech. Especially given how much of it there is, and how expensive it has been for western civilization.)

THE MOST IMPORTANT SEQUENCE

– Testimony(what can I see not infer)

– Vocabulary

– Grammar

– Logic(reason) and Measurement(math)

– Natural Law

– Micro Economics (incentives)

– Strict Construction

– Rhetoric (argument)

-Cheers

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1262749110415707/permalink/1304648022892482/

Why Are So Many Scientists Bashing Philosophers?

1 – Philosophy has not kept up with developments: in particular, the universe is saying pretty consistently “I am simple”.

2 – But it is much, much, more than this. It’s that:

…… While undergraduate, graduate, and PhD physics programs improves the general understanding of the body politic, undergraduate, and graduate, and a very substantial part of the phd philosophy programs cause HARM to the general understanding of the body politic, second only to the pseudoscience of psychology, and third only to the pseudoscience of social science.

So the issue is the HARM done by teaching philosophy as the literature of justificationary utopias, rather than the incremental knowledge we obtain in testifying (ensuring we are stating truth).

As far as I can tell, philosophers have done far more harm than good in the past two hundred years. And before the past two hundred years, the list of philosophers that did good (Smith, Locke, Hume, Jefferson) is quite small, while the list of scientists and mathematicians who have done good (too many to list) quite large.

And the list of philosophers who have done terrible harm (Rousseau and the entire french school, Kant and the entire german school, The entire cosmopolitan school: Boaz, Marx/Keynes, Freud, Cantor, Mises, Rand/Rothbard, Adorno in particular) is nearly endless.

3 – Why are philosophers of my generation bashing philosophers as in need of the same Operationalist revolution as has been forced on Physics and Psychology?

3.1 – Does not incorporate costs.

3.2 – Does not preserve

3.3 – Does not incorporate actionability.

3.4 – Meaning (verbalism) not truth (elimination of error)

3.5 – The unknowable communal Pareto ‘Good’, rather than the knowable interpersonal Nash Optimum.

3.6 – False understanding of Truth as Binary, logical, platonic rather than as a sequence of sufficient for given purposes: True Enough For:

… – Understanding/Meaning, (Learning)

… – Communication of Meaning ( communication, teaching)

… – Opportunity Discovery, ( what most of us desire from learning )

… – Actionability, (domain of science, how is this possible)

… – Voluntary Contract/Cooperation, (economics and ethics)

… – Dispute resolution(decidability) (conflict and law)

 

Curt Doolittle

the Propertarian Institute

L’viv Ukraine

The Scientist Is “the One Who Knocks”

October 12th, 2018 9:54 AM

THE SCIENTIST IS “THE ONE WHO KNOCKS”

—“As a philosopher or theologian, how do you feel when scientists boldly venture into your field, making dogmatic statements? Should what is good for the goose also be good for the gander?”—- Quora User

Well, I’m an anti-philosophy Philosopher. I use the framework of philosophy (Aristotle’s Categories) and some of the terminology to undermine the sophistry so common in nearly all of philosophy; and I argue fairly frequently that philosophy shares more with religionâ??s sophism, conflation, fictionalism, and lack of external correspondence.

In my understanding, I write Law (Testimony). Law requires tests of the logical, empirical, operational, rational, reciprocal and complete (limits and full accounting). So law requires far more survival criteria than do logic, physical science, and the soft sciences of psychology and sociology.

As I understand it, what I do is in fact, Science – if science consists of â??necessary due diligence against ignorance, error, bias, and deceit.â??

I find plenty of folly in religion, literature, philosophy, economics, law, soft science, hard science, logic, and mathematics. So every field has itâ??s people who presume.

And the reason they tend to presume is that they understand the FRAMES of just one discipline rather than either Frames of ALL disciplines, or the ONE frame that remains constant across all disciplines: Hypothesis, Due Diligence, Testimony, and Warranty.

So while logic and mathematics can intrude on science, and science can intrude on philosophy, and philosophical rationalism can intrude on theology, the opposite cannot be true (ever). The reason being that what we can testify to decreases as we move from math, to logic, to science, to philosophy, to theology. And without testifiability we cannot make truth claims. Because that is what truth means: testimony that is consistent, correspondent, coherent, and complete.

The universe is not complicated. It’s the host of little comforting lies we tell ourselves that cloud our reason, intuition, and comprehension.

And so to borrow an edgy quote, I don’t fear a scientist knocking at my door. Because “I am the one who knocks”.

Converting Kantian Rationalism to Scientific Prose

Lets translate Kantian Rationalism into scientific and testimonial speech.

I’m going to teach epistemology by using economics in order to repair much of the damage that has been done to epistemology by the Platonists(mathematics), and the Rationalists (Kant etc), and the Analytic Philosophers (Just about all of the 20th century).

*Reality consists of a limited number of actionable dimensions and by using economics we are able to include all of them, and therefore avoid the errors that the platonists, rationalists, and analytics have introduced into philosophy.

“DEFINITIONS AND SERIES”

1. Empirical:

Based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic. “From Observation”.

2. A Priori:

“independent of observation.”

There are three dimensions to claims of a priori truth claim:

i) Aprioricity vs A posteriori,

ii) Analyticity vs Syntheticity, and

iii) Necessity vs Contingency

Therefore we can produce at least the following spectrum of a priori claims.

(a) Analytic A Priori: tautological: 2+2=4 and all deductions thereof.

(b) Synthetic A Priori : Increasing money increases inflation.

(c) Necessary Synthetic A Priori: Childless women will have no grandchildren.

(d) Contingent Synthetic A Priori: “all other things being equal, as a general trend, increasing demand will increase supply, although we cannot know the composition of that supply in advance, we can identify it from recorded evidence.”

This produces a an ordered spectrum of declining precision:

(a) Identity(categorical consistency) – Analytic A Priori

(b) Logical:(internal consistency) – Nec. Synthetic a priori

(c) Empirical: (external consistency) – Gen. Synth. a priori

(d) Existential: (operational consistency) – Cont. Synth. a priori

Which corresponds to the testable dimensions of numbers.

(a) identity (numbers)

(b) logical (sets)

(c) empirical (ratios)

(d) existential (constructible)

(e) time is unaccounted for in the a priori model.

Which corresponds to dimensions of physical reality

(a) point

(b) line

(c) shape

(d) object

(e) time (change)

Which corresponds to a subset of the dimensions of actionable reality , the full set of which we express in fully express in Testimonialism as:

(a) Identity(categorical consistency)(point)

(b) Logical:(internal consistency)(line)

(c) Empirical: (external consistency)(shape)

(d) Existential: (operational consistency)(object)

(e) Volitional: (rational choice of rational actor)(change)

(f) Reciprocal: ( rational exchange between rational actors)(changes)

(g) Limited: (Limits: At what points does the description fail?)

(h) Fully Accounted: (Have all costs and consequences been accounted for – defense against cherry picking and special pleading.)

Which together account for the totality of actionable reality (by man) that we currently know of (and its quite hard to imagine anything else is possible).

DEDUCTIBILITY FROM A-PRIORI PROPOSITIONS

Ergo, while one can claim the tautological truth (the Analytic A Priori), and one can claim the ideal(logical) truth (the Necessary Synthetic A Priori), one cannot ever know the non-tautological(identity, The Synthetic A Priori), non-ideal(Contingent Synthetic A Priori ) truth, because we rarely possess sufficient information to do so.

What does this mean? It means that we can deduce from Analytic A Priori and Necessary Synthetic A Priori, but we cannot deduce from General Synthetic A Priori, or Contingent Synthetic A Priori Statements because we cannot know if such deductions are true (for specific cases).

So the problem with making a priori claims in economics is that you can say statements about statements but not about consequences in reality. You can only say ‘all other things being equal’, we should observe this effect. You cannot say, “we will always observe this effect’. Why? Because we don’t always observe such effects, and economics is rife with examples, the most commonly cited being unemployment does not necessarily increase, and prices are sticky – and for good reason.

(NOTE: Now that’s sufficiently complicated that I almost confused myself, and I might need a day away from it to make sure I didn’t screw up what someone might read into those last two paragraphs, but otherwise it’s correct.)

The innovation that menger brought to the table was to bring the principle of relative change from calculus to economics. The principle contribution of hayek was to transform transform the use of materials to the use of information as the model for all social phenomenon. The principle contribution of Popper was to bring the information model to philosophy, and in particular the philosophy of science and to model scientific investigation on a market. This followed the transition in physics from the use of electromagnetic fields to that of information. Which then brought physics and mathematics into full correspondence.

What Hayek and popper and the classicals and the keynesians all missed and brouwer in math, bridgman in physics, and mises in economics, and the entire analytic and continental movements missed was that man cannot make truth claims.

For example, we did not think the ideas of time(velocity of change), length(distance), and space(volume) varied. Einstein’s discovery was the same as mises’, brouwer’s and bridgman’s: that all our pretense of axioms are false. If our idea of length and time can be false, every other idea that is obvious to our senses and reason can be false.

The difference between economics and physics is in :

(a) volition vs determinism

(b) reciprocity vs transformation

(c) sympathetic testing of rational choice vs entropy.

THE SCIENTIFIC (UNIVERSAL EPISTEMOLOGICAL) METHOD

“DEFLATION”

(0) The purpose of the scientific method is to eliminate ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, fictionalism, and deceit from our statements about reality.

“DIMENSION”

(1) We can make:

(a) statements about experiences(metaphysical), or

(b) statements about statements(ideal), or

(c) statements about existential properties(existential/real), or

(d) statements about existential cause and effect(change).

(e) statements about volition

“CLOSURE”

(2) No test of any dimension can be completed without appeal to the subsequent dimension. (ie: godel. this is profoundly important. no dimension can provide a self-test.) Ergo, all speech is deflationary.

“CRITICAL RATIONALISM”

(3) All descriptive propositions of existential cause and effect (change) are contingent.

“CRITICAL PREFERENCE”

(4) The only method of decidability between two or more non-false cause and effect propositions(change) is cost. This is a clarification of Occam’s razor. And appears to be true, for the simple reason that nature cannot but choose the least cost method, and man generally chooses the least cost method – even if we cannot know the full causal density of his considerations.

DUE DILIGENCE AGAINST IGNORANCE, ERROR, BIAS, DECEIT

(5) The only method of making a truth claim is to perform due diligence in each dimension of reality (a ‘premise’ of the consequential dimension) applicable to the cause and effect phenomenon. (ie:physical world can’t engage in rational choice, or voluntary exchanges)

Again, those dimensions are:

(a) Identity(categorical consistency)(point)

(b) Logical:(internal consistency)(line)

(c) Empirical: (external consistency)(shape)

(d) Existential: (operational consistency)(object)

(e) Volitional: (rational choice of rational actor)(change)

(f) Reciprocal: ( rational exchange between rational actors)(changes)

(g) Limited: (Limits: At what points does the description fail?)

(h) Fully Accounted: (Have all costs and consequences been accounted for – defense against cherry picking and special pleading.)

“DARWINIAN SURVIVAL OF IDEAS”

(6) All propositions (facts, propositions, theories) must survive the markets for criticism at the observer-mental-testing, observer-action testing, market application testing, and market survival testing. In other words, the universal epistemological method follows this lifecycle:

(a) observation

(b) *Free association* (F -> observation)

(c) test of reasonability (F -> free association )

(d) *Hypothesis*

(e) Perform Due Diligence (a-h) above. (F -> free association )

(f) *Theory*

(g) Publish to the market for application

(h) Survival in the market for application(F ->observation – of failures )

(i) *Law*

(j) Survival in the market for refutation (F-> observation – of failures)

(k) *Habituation into metaphysical assumptions*

“SPECIAL CASES”

7. This universal epistemological process is universal despite the fact that various results can be identified with it. Because just as we find prime numbers largely by trial and error we find special cases of statements by trial and error. But when we find these statements we have to ask ourselves what is it we are finding?

(a) Sensations: statements about experiences(metaphysical), or

(b) Logic(analytic): statements about statements(ideal), or

(c) Fact: statements about existential properties(existential/real), or

(d) Theory(Synthetic): statements about existential cause and effect(change).

(e) Morality: statements about volition

(f) Testimony: statements about the fully accounted change in state of a given instance of the statement we are making (I have a credit card report that shows John Doe, on 1/1/2018 at 4:06:32 exchanged $2.00 for a hershey’s candy bar at Don’s newspaper stand then existing on 225th and Main in Cityname.”)

EXAMPLES

The most common special cases that we find are those that are impossible to contradict at the same dimension. (a,b,c,d,e) above.

(a) Sense(Metaphysics): we cannot sense a ball is green and red all over at the same time.

(b) Logic: If I issue credit on fractional reserves, I will increase the supply of money.

(c) Fact: The differences between commodity money and note money include but are not limited to: liquidity, demand, exchange fee or interest gain, portability(weight/volume), reserve risk, vendor risk.

(d) Theory: All other things being equal, if we increase the supply of money, prices will eventually increase accordingly and lower the purchasing power of payments against debts.

(e) Morality: All other things being equal, when we force majoritarian decisions on the polity by using representative democracy, we create a monopoly out of the market for the commons, and eliminate the possibility of cooperating on means even if we pursue different ends.

“ECONOMIC LEVERS”

Polities can generally use this series of levers to affect the economy.

-Near Term-

(a) Monetary Policy

(b) Fiscal Policy (Spending)

-Medium Term-

(c) Trade Policy (import export policies, foreign trade policies)

(d) Regulatory/Legislative Policy (also includes price controls etc)

(e) Immigration-Deporation policy / Expand military, WPA etc.

-Long Term-

(f) Human Capital Policy (Education policy)

(g) Institutional Policy (laws, regulations, bureaucracies, institutions, banks)

(h) Strategic (military) Policy

“SCHOOLS OF ECONOMICS”

The schools of economics reflect the culture and class of their origins. These groups do not acknowledge that their strategies and biases are as I”ve stated them here but their research evidence states the contrary. So I have tried to provide a general Spectrum of the institutions by what I understand is their culture/class bias.

a) “Austrian / Rothbardian” (“Jewish”, Separatist) : Rule of Credit, Parasitic Optimum, Separatist / Anarchism.

+Financial Class Bias. Anti-Commons Bias.

(As far as I know, no university teaches the Jewish Austrian method.)

b) “Mason-ism” (“Anglo Libertarian”, Right ) : Optimum Rule of Law, Nash Optimum, Minimal State / Christian Monarchy

+Entrepreneurial Class Bias.

(the only University I know of using this program is George Mason.)

The “Mason-Libertarian” school places greater emphasis on maximizing the voluntary cooperation of individuals and organizations through reduction of impediments to ethical and moral cooperation.

c) “Classical” (“Chicago”, Anglo, Center Right), Rule of Law, Insured Nash Optimum, Parliamentary State / Classical Liberalism.

+Middle classes bias. (I would argue ‘not biased’)

All other things being equal, the Chicago school places greater emphasis on policy that insures against error and failure by seeking formulas and rules that investors, businesses, and consumers can predict, thereby preserving rule of law, and maintaining the prohibition on discretionary rule.

d) “Mainstream” (“Saltwater”, Center Left) : Mixed Discretionary Rule, Pareto Optimum, Social Democracy

+Working Class Bias, Consumer Bias, Female bias(anti-male bias). Minority(anti-white) bias. Underclass Bias (anti-entreprenurial bias).

All other things being equal the mainstream seeks to optimize consumption at all times, using every lever available, and favors abandoning rule of law, and adopting rule that is increasingly empirical, reactive, and discretionary.

e) “Left Mainstream” (“Saltwater”, “Jewish left”) : Authoritarian Rule, Anti-Aristocracy(War), Extractive Maximum (Predatory), Socialism/Communism

+Underclass (outsider) Bias.

This is the Krugman/Stiglitz/Delong club of leftist economists maximizing both consumption and financial extraction as a means of undermining western aristocratic civilization and western norms and traditions and rule of law.

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS

–“…performative…”

You keep using terms that I don’t think you understand, which is why Kant invented those terms: to conflate the empirical and the rational. He was afraid of the anglo empirical revolution. For good reason.

—“…morality…”—

Correct. Morality (reciprocity) requires inter-agent action. So does all economic activity. Economic activity can consist of moral (reciprocal) and immoral (unequal, irreciprocal) actions. We can make a claim that statements about irreciprocal (involuntary) actions in economics are immoral or we can claim that they are false. Whether you understand it or not, Mises is saying that its false not immoral, when he says ‘it’s not economics’.

—“That you can verify something in reality doesn’t mean you need to empirically test it.”—

We cannot solve the problem of ‘all other things being equal’ in order to understand why predicted phenomenon either vary widely, or do not exist.

The neutrality of money does not appear to exist, because relative changes can propagate into various niches that absorb those changes, just like pennies being lost in landfills (so to speak).

—“I can observe that two plus two equals four but I don’t need to design an empirical test to prove it.”—

Yes but then it’s a tautology, whereas the nearly all economic phenomenon are only general rules.

—“Likewise, I can observe that minimum wages increase unemployment all other things being equal, but I don’t need to conduct an empirical test to prove it.”—

That’s just the thing, we aren’t trying to prove that it should increase unemployment, only that it turns out it that a lot of the time it doesn’t. Or rather, that the consequences of it are externalized and invisible. So where does it go? Well first it increases prices to consumers in the case of minimum wage workers it maintains employment but it prevents rotation of new workers into the economy. And the question is, is that a net gain or a net loss for everyone? Well, it’s immoral to both conduct the test, and the consequences are immoral. But does that mean the those consequences are not empirically measurable and therefore whether the policy is net beneficial? That is what economists measure.

Secondly, if we think some good is achieved through raising the minimum wage, how can we accommodate the externality of lower rotation through the job pool? For example what if raising the minimum wage prevents least common denominator service economies? (Racing to the bottom). Is that something people prefer? In other words, would you rather have better service and higher unemployment (and greater subsidies for non-performers?)

The underlying question is this: if prices are increasing profits can we capture more of that increase for hourly employees than we do for management, owners, and investors (or creditors)?

So there is no difference between increasing the supply of money in order to temporarily increase consumer purchasing power at the expense of debt-holders, and increasing the minimum wage in order to capture a rise in prices for laborers at the expense of owners and investors.

Or stated even more simply: given that economies are always changing velocities, can we redirect changes in state between participants without ‘killing the goose’ (destroying the system of production).

Well the answer is a moral one, not a logical or empirical one.

And the reason to claim otherwise is to use the false pretense of ‘unscientific’ or ‘logical positivism’ or ‘a priori’ or ‘logical contradiction’ to create a straw man as a means of preventing investigation into the science of economic immorality: economic manipulation by the forcible involuntary transfer of property between individuals.

(Which is exactly what mises and rothbard were doing: shaming via straw man using obscurantism by overloading even well intended people with half truths that when fully expressed are false.)

That’s the question people ask with these issues. No one questions if it will increase unemployment. They question the limit before it increases negative unemployment. The same as taxation. No one questions that taxation will produce declining revenues. But empirically, what is the maximum taxation that they govt can achieve before that happens – and what are the consequences.

CLOSING

Now you probably have no idea how profound this bit of text is. And I suspect you could spend a few months integrating it into your thought process. But that’s in large part, the state of the art in epistemology.

THUS ENDETH THE LESSON.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

The End of Justificationary A Priorism

THE END OF APRIORISM VS EMPIRICISM

(read it and weep) 😉

PROPOSITIONS

1. All domesticatable animals are domesticatable for five reasons. All undomesticatable animals are undomesticatable for any one of them.

2. All human personalities are highly functional for five or six reasons. All dysfunctional families are dysfunctional for any one of those six reasons.

3. All happy families are happy for the same five or six reasons. All unhappy families are unhappy any one of those five or six reasons.

4. All TRUE statements are true because of consistency in six dimensions. All FALSE statements are false because of inconsistency in any ONE of those six dimensions.

5. All analytically true (mathematically true) statements correspondingly model reality because of consistency of correspondence of six dimensions. All analytically false statements are false because they fail to correspond to reality in any one of those six dimensions.

6. Existential(actionable) reality is composed of only so many ACTIONABLE dimensions, followed by only so many CAUSALLY RELATABLE dimensions.

7. The ‘True Name’ (Most Parsimonious Truth) of any phenomenon (set of consistent relations at some scale of actionable utility), can be described by the number, scope, limits, relations, relative change, and ACTIONABLE change, of those dimensions.

THEREFORE

1. There exist fundamental laws of existentially possible action and comprehension in the existing universe as it is constructed (and likely must be constructed).

2. These laws can be described theoretically until known, and by analogy, axiomatically once they ARE known. By convention (by honesty and truthfulness) we distinguish between declarative axiomatic systems (analytic), and existential theoretic (existing) systems in order to NOT claim that axiomatic and declarative, and theoretical(laws), are equal in empirical content. They are not. To do so is to conduct either an analogy for the purpose of communication, or an error of understanding, or a fraud for the purpose of deception. We can determine whether ignorance, error, or deception by analysis of the speaker’s argument(error or ignorance) and incentives (fraud), including unconscious fraud (justification).

3. We can theorize from observation and imagination, to understanding (top down) or from understanding to imagination and observation (bottom up). But unless we can both construct (operationally and therefore existentially) as well as observe (empirically, and therefore existential) then we cannot say we possess the knowledge to make a truth claim about a theoretic system or an axiomatic system – although we must keep in mind that axiomatic systems are ‘complete and tautological’ and theoretic statements ‘incomplete and descriptive’.

4. To warranty against falsehood of any Statement, we must perform due diligence upon our free associations, ensuring that we have established consistent limits(invariant descriptions) for each of the dimensions:

i) categorical consistency (identity consistency)

ii) logical consistency (internal consistency)

iii) empirical consistency (external correspondence)

iv) existential consistency (operational correspondence)

v) moral consistency (voluntarily reciprocal)

vi) Scope, Limits and Parsimony (scope consistency)

5. The empirical measurement that Taleb, artificial intelligence researchers, and myself are seeking is how to quantify the information necessary for the human mind to form a free association (a pattern). This unit, if discovered, will be analogous to calories of heat, as the basic unit of state change in information. My theory is that this number, as Taleb has suggested is extremely large (logarithmically so) which accounts for the rarity of intelligence: the amount of memory, and the evolutionary and biological cost of memory, necessary to form even basic relations (free associations) appears to be extraordinarily high.

THEREFORE

1. Mises epistemology is false. MIses, Popper, Hayek, Bridgman, Brouwer all had a piece of the problem but they all failed to synthesize their findings into a complete reformation of the scientific method (the method of stating truthful propositions.

– economics is a scientific, not logical discipline.

– the categories mises uses to determine human action are insufficient (and constructed in my opinion as a justificationary fraud just as is Jewish law – which is my interpretation – only causal axis I can find – of why he failed.)

WHAT DID MISES ERR REGARDING?

1. Apriorism is but a special case of Empiricism, just as Prime Numbers are a special case in mathematics, and just as is any set of operations that returns a natural number; and again, is a special case, just as contradiction is a special case in logic.The laws of triangles form a particularly useful set of special cases. (But we must understand that it is because they possess the minimum dimensions necessary for spatial descriptions,)

Note: The human mind evolved to prey upon other creatures. Unlike frogs and cockroaches that just seek the closest dark spot, humans must prey. To prey we must anticipate velocity in time. This is why we can chase something, and we can throw rocks, spears, and arrows at moving things. And why we and canines can model the destination of a thrown or fallen object. But we also evolved the ability to choose. To model one set of conditions and compare it to another set of conditions. And to model the conditions of OTHERS (intentions), and to compare it to other conditions. So this is why we can hold about five things in mind at once before resorting to breaking a ‘vision’ into patterns. (I have elaborated on each of the dimensions elsewhere).

2. Few (possibly no non-tautological, or at least non-reductio) aprioristic statements survive scope consistency (I can find none in economics that are actionable).

3. We can establish free associations(hypotheses) empirically (top down) or constructively (bottom up). But the method of discovery places no truth constraint on the statement. All must survive the full test of dimensions.

4. This does NOT mean that we cannot use a ‘partial truth’ (an hypothesis that does not survive all six dimensions) to search for further associations (partial search criteria). It is this UTILITY IN SEARCHING that we have converted first into reason, second into rationalism, third into empiricism, fourth in to operationalism, and fifth into scope consistency, and sixth into ‘natural law’ or morality or ‘voluntary cooperation’ – volition which is necessary to ensure the information quality in small groups, just as norms and laws are necessary methods of establishing limits in larger groups, just as money is necessary for producing actionable information in very large groups.

5. there is but one epistemological method: accumulate information, identify pattern, search for hypothesis, criticize hypothesis to produce a theory, distribute the theory (speak), let others criticize the theory until it fails, or we create a conceptual norm of it (law), and finally until we habituate it entirely (metaphysical judgment).

6. There is nothing special about physical science other than philosophy was free of COST constraints but held by moral constraints, and science was free of MORAL constraints as well as cost constraints, and judicial law was bound by both.

So by these three disciplines: the imaginary and mental, the cooperative and existential, and the physical – we managed to slowly assemble a sufficient understanding of truth in each of those disciplines, that together we can establish tests for ANY PROPOSITION in ANY DISCIPLINE: Mental, Cooperative, and PHYSICAL by the due diligence of consistency in the dimensions that apply to that instance.

i) Categorical and Logical (mental)

ii) Operational and Existential (physical)

iii) Morality and Scope (cooperative)

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

Why Do Rationalists Avoid Testing via the Empirical, Operational, and Reciprocity?

(Curt Doolittle December 18 at 9:24pm)

1. if we CAN fully expand a sentence, before we test it for internal consistency, and we do not do so, then why? In other words, what is the informational content between an unexpanded sentence, and an expanded sentence? And why would we fail to expand a sentence that can be expanded?

What is the difference between the order of terms in mathematics, the order of terms in set statements, and the order of terms in operational language, and the order of terms in fully expanded natural language, and the order of terms in colloquial natural language?

So if we start with a statement in colloquial language then fully expand it in natural language, then fully expand it in operational language, then it is almost impossible to construct the vast majority of sophomoric pseudo-philosophical questions.

2. The necessity of the prohibition on the verb to-be, (another category of expansion) evolved to prevent stating authoritatively that which is merely subjective opinion. But in addition, it also prevents conflating intention, experience, interpretations, and actions. Of which we can only test actions.

3. Promissory expansion of statements (sentences) evolved to prevent forms of suggestion and conflation. (Instead of Strawson’s light version of performative truth, use promissory – strict -construction that precedes each statement ” I promise that….”

4. In the sequence:

1 – identity (categorically consistent)

2 – logical (internally consistent)

3 – empirical (externally consistent)

4 – operational (existentially consistent)

5 – moral (reciprocally consistent)

6 – fully accounted (scope consistent)

7 – limits and parsimony (limit consistent);

each dimension of which increases the informational content we are testing …. we have the choice of choosing to increase the dimensions that we test, using the methodology capable of testing that dimension, or limiting ourselves to the current dimension’s means of testing.

Now, when we increase the dimensions, we gain new knowledge which we can then use to recursively test each prior dimension by its method.

So why would one choose to test a question by internal consistency rather than external correspondence followed by another test of internal consistency?

5. When testing for internal consistency, we eventually run into the problem of completeness. And while we can construct relatively complete statements axiomatically we cannot do so theoretically (against reality) because of causal density, except in the special cases (reductio).

Why Did The Philosophers Of Science Only Partly Succeed?

WHY DID THE PHILOSOPHERS OF SCIENCE ONLY PARTLY SUCCEED?

(cross posted for archival purposes)

Did you ever read a novel, which you felt passionate about, and thought that the story was enthralling and insightful, then returned years later to re-read it thinking it was ok, but childish? You wonder what you were thinking?

The story didn’t change, you did.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the problems of ethics and politics and found my way to Instrumentalism, Operationalism, and Intuitionism as means of placing higher constraints on our theories (and arguments) such that we are unable to engage in deception and self-deception.

So when I read almost all philosophers, popper included, I have the same reaction to their ‘allegorical’ imaginary arguments, that others would have to even weaker allegorical religious or platonist arguments.

Now, in many cases, you can convey the same relationships (understanding) through supernatural, platonist, abstract imaginary, and operational terms. But the difference in correspondence between your terms and reality is narrowest at the operational end of that spectrum, and widest at the supernatural end.

Popper is one of the best philosophers of the past century. Certainly one who had the most impact upon me. But he had the most impact on me because I am predisposed to think scientifically, and in the manner that he sought to convince us.

Only a minority of us are predisposed to think as such. For those who are not so predisposed, they fail to grasp Popper’s arguments. And unlike other philosophers (Smith and Hume for example) Popper failed to sufficiently articulate his ideas such that one not be predisposed to agree with them. And the evidence confirms this.

The reverse test is also telling: if one cannot articulate poppers ideas operationally, then one merely agrees with them allegorically, but does not understand them operationally. Now, I can articulate CR/CP operationally, but I’m less certain about falsificationary ideas, and I’m less sure about verisimilitude.

If we put popper’s work into the context of ethics and politics, he is in the same position as Taleb, Hayek, and the rest: the moral prohibition on government, is to make small tests and measure the results, rather than large risk-inducing, fragility-creating irreversible programs. However, it is in the interests of the redistributionists, if not all rent-seekers, to do precisely that.

Telling us what NOT to do, is very different from telling us WHAT to do. And this is the problem with taking the philosophy of science, which pursues absolute, most parsimonious theories, in pursue of absolute truth, regardless of time and cost, and applying it to human affairs whose purpose is to outwit the dark forces of time and ignorance at the lowest possible current cost.

Human cooperation requires solutions to the problem of institutions that facilitate our cooperation in ever expanding ways, most quickly, at the lowest cost. To tell us what we should not do, is not very useful in telling us what we should do. But they cannot tell us what we should do, because they failed to solve the problem of the social science. And they failed to solve that problem, because the dramatic increase in the legitimacy of science due to its successes encouraged philosophers to copy the methods and assumptions of science, which does not equilibrate in reaction to investigation, and apply those methods to human cooperation which does equilibrate in reaction to investigation.

As such, Popper remains, largely a moral philosopher. He tells us what not to do. His recommendations are simple enough to apply to the problem of science, which does NOT require complex coordination in real time, and incentives needed to construct a voluntary organization of production. But it is not explanatory enough, that he could provide a solution to the problem of

I suspect that he maintained the error of classical liberalism: “Us and We where there is neither.” Once we abandon that fallacy, politics and ethics are no longer an impossible equation to solve, they are solvable entirely. Because one can calculate means of cooperation, but one cannot calculate ends of cooperation.

So, this is why I have a different perspective from you. To move from A to B is one thing. To move from B to C is another. Popper brings us to B. But in light of the fact that the problem is to bring us to C, he fails, like all other philosophers of his era failed. And we continue to bear the problem of that failure.

I hope that adds some clarity to my position.

Cheers

Continental > Postmodern Philosophy -vs- Analytic > Testimonial Philosophy

ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY -> POSTMODERN -> TESTIMONIAL PHILOSOPHY

You see all these damned lists I make? All these definitions I write? How I walk through long sequences of reasoning? How I’m pedantic about what information is present, and what operation alters what information? How I place great burden on your ability to maintain a chain of reasoning, instead of giving you shortcuts that rely upon what we call ‘meaning’ – existing analogies in your memory?

This category of philosophy is called ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY. Now technically analytic philosophy only requires set comparisons so that statements are internally testable, and non-contradictory. In other words “Does this appear to be true, and from the information stated in the words, can I say this is false?” Analytic philosophy attempts to incorporate scientific knowledge and their goal was to raise philosophy to a science – they failed. But analytic philosophy does not attempt to require basic research into creating sets of data.

So analytic philosophy is extremely useful in the analysis and criticism of probabilistic data created in the age of probability and statistics. But it is not in and of itself useful for the solution of problems. There is nothing new therein.

But TESTIMONIAL PHILOSOPHY (what I write) additionally more burdensome because it requires I make sequences of testable statements constructed out of operations, taking as few liberties as possible, so that we do not get to ‘fudge’ using ‘fluffy’ or ‘obscurantist’ language.

I have categorized myself as an analytic philosopher, since the term post-analytic philosophy refers to postmodern philosophy – lying.

But I am settling on Testimonial Philosophy as term that separates Modern Philosophy (‘meaningful’ post-mysticism), continental (rationalisms), analytic (testable statements), postmodern (‘deception’), and Testimonial (scientifically complete using all dimensions of criticism.)

Religious philosophy takes very little scientific knowledge – if any. we can say it might even be a detriment.

Continental philosophy requires only that we do not rely upon mysticism or the supernatural, only that what we say is meaningful, and possibly useful. It’s a philosophy of analogy and meaning.

Post analytic philosophy takes this idea further by replacing the supernatural that was created by the divine, and saying we can create the supernatural by choice and repetition: the social construction of truth.

Analytic philosophy attempts to convert philosophy into a science in the hope that we can something about the world from our statements and words. But while we can test for falsehood with analytic language, we cannot divine from our words what we do not already know when we make use of them.

Testimonial philosophy attempts to unite all disciplines into a single language constructed only out of truthful statements that have survived criticism by all dimensions.

Truth is what survives total criticism whether we desire it or not.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

The Intellectual Catastrophe Of Specialization And The Cure For It In Education

Outside of the top 5% in all disciplines:

– Physicists are often ridiculous because either they don’t understand their own subject, or because they lack the philosophical training to know the difference between general rules of the discipline (dogma) and the epistemological necessity that these general rules provide a shortcut for.

– Economists are often ridiculous because either they don’t understand the limits of mathematics, the limits of statistics, and the limits of human cognitive bias, but most importantly, the epistemology that places that their models, methods, explanatory and predictive power that seems to evade them – and is now being supplied by experimental psychology and cognitive science.

– Philosophers are almost universally ridiculous becasue either they ignore what we have learned about epistemology from physics, economics, and cognitive science, or they do not understand the difference between meaning(map) and existence(territory), or because they are subject of dogmas (sets, internal consistency without external correspondence), but most importantly because they do not account for costs on the one hand and rely on a false intuitionistic definition of the good on the other.

– Mathematicians are only slightly ridiculous since their field is the easiest to test, but they seem to ignore the fact that mathematics functions by removing properties from reality, but that all mathematics in application is bound by reality that it ignores. As such we see them confuse the reductio logic of mathematics with mathematical platonism. They confuse the determinism of all axiomatic declarations with mystery rather than the limits of human comprehension that mathematics assists us in extending through symbols and constant relations. They confuse the rate at which operations will produce members of a collection in any period of time, or over so many operations, with the size of the set itself which must always be bound by some limit. They confuse the name of a positional number with the name of a function upon positional numbers that produces a ratio. They seem to have lost sight of the fact that their discipline can either be treated as a science of measurement, or a logic disconnected from reality, or ideal fantasy no different from philosophical and literary adventurism. I could go on at length here with ease.

THERE IS ONLY ONE FIELD: TRUTH (TESTIMONY)

What differs is the instruments we require to inspect. We have invented both methods of inspection (and they’re reductio in almost all cases), and methods of measurement, and methods of decidability.

WE INVESTIGATE:

1 – Reason, Logic, Mathematics, (Reason)

2 – Physics, Chemistry, Biology, (Existence)

3 – Psychology, Sociology, Politics, History, Economy, Law (Cooperation)

WE MEASURE

1 – Categories, properties, and relations

2 – Logic of comparisons and transformations

3 – Empirical measurements of existential reality

4 – Moral measurements of cooperation

– WITH –

5 – Operational language to articulate all of the above free of error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, pseudoscience, and deceit.

– AND –

6 – Full Accounting, Limits, and Parsimony To protect Against Our cherry picking by error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, pseudoscience, and deceit.

THIS IS HOW WE MUST TEACH HUMANS IN MODERNITY

1 – Strength, Fitness, Sport, Defense, War, Strategy

2 – Mythology, Story, Biography, History, Essay, Diary, Criticism

3 – Self, Friendship, Employment, Partnership, Marriage, Parenting, Managing, Commanding, Ruling

4 – Property, Manners, Ethics, Morals, Natural Law, Evolutionary Strategies

5 – Psychology, Sociology, Economics, Politics, Conflict(War/Crime)

6 – Vocabulary, Grammar, Logic,Testimony(Truth), Rhetoric, Judgement

7 – Reading, Writing, Programming, Strictly Constructed Law

8 – Arithmetic, Accounting, Algebra, Geometry, Statistics, Calculus, (Mathematics of Mind/Cognition <–Note!)

9 – Empiricism(observation and measurement), Physics, Chemistry, Biology, (Sentience <–Note!)

10 – Monuments, Architecture, Arts, Decoration, Music, Plays, (the discipline of creativity: knowledge and free association.)

This curriculum produces skills in all areas of life. If a student can make it through the first half of each, he or she will be adequately prepared for life in modernity.

SORTITION

Rolling three years in each class

Boys and Girls In separate classes

Children start by maturity level, not age, with delay preferable to early entry.

Emphasis should be given to rate of maturity and individual needs so that boys with high testosterone and rapid maturity are given more exercise and those with less and lower more drills.

IMHO Pass Fail, or % is all that is needed, since they will be exposed to the same information repeatedly. I don’t like ‘grades’. As far as I can tell most grades are a reflection of the relationship between the intelligence and maturity of an individual and the artificial standard of the industrial classroom.

. . .

The Timeline of Philosophy – Five Movements

The history of philosophy can be reduced to the five struggles:

1. First, between man’s primary desire to retreat into the limits of his senses in the face of evolving complexity, and his reluctant acknowledgement that he must learn and employ the tools of reason and calculation in order to extend those limited senses, despite the discomfort these unintuitive abstract tools subject him to.

2. Second, the conflict between his preference for the material ease of the division of labor and his emotional discomfort at the consequential alienation caused by post-tribal, post familial, and increasingly individualistic commercial society.

3. Third, between the comfort of historical norms and the precious status we each achieve by adhering to them, and the opportunity of economic, technical and organizational innovation that of necessity disrupts those norms.

4. Fourth, the need to develop justification of our system of norms such that we can resist or conquer the economic strategies, organizational strategies, and status signals embedded in competing systems of norms.”

5. And fifth, the most disturbing: between the masculine aristocratic inter-temporal instinct to concentrate capital and to constrain the breeding and consumption of the lower classes, and the feminine communal instinct to perpetuate her genes no matter how she has bred them, and her defensive posture of granting others the same opportunity, despite that it threatens us with Malthusian fragility, and eternal poverty.

These five conflicts define the history of philosophy as an attempt to justify existing norms, or an appeal to modify them so that we may adapt to the future or regress into the past.

The Real Class Struggle is not hierarchical, it’s vertical. The proletarians are simply the tools of each. There are only three forms of human persuasion and three forms of political persuasion:

Martial

(warriors and politicians) Makers of Laws and Violence – the fast moving organizers.

 

vs

 

Public Intellectual

(priests, speakers and writers). The makers of moral arguments – the slow moving resistance.

 

vs

 

Entrepreneurial

(tradesman, commerce and banking). The pragmatic actors of change.

The Philosophical Eras:

• POST ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 1970-> ( Abandonment of the transcendental program and complete reliance on natural sciences )
  1. Post Analytic Philosophy is pragmatic rather than transcendental: Post Analytic Philosophers attempt to solve real world problems.

2. Postanalytic philosophy makes use of the methods of analytic philosophy, but opposes its transcendental aspirations and its assumption that we’re engage in a process discovery rather than invention.

3. Postanalytic philosophy is also referred to as Postphilosophy: the notion that philosophy no longer serves its historical role in society, having been replaced by the natural sciences and the wide availability of literacy, media, and information.

Notes:

1) I have very little confidence in the symbolic system outside of using very simple diagrams. And political philosophy, by its nature, requires that we use common language in an effort to make our ideas accessible to non specialists who can then proselytize our ideas to the common man. As such, I see symbolic systems as a convenient but self-defeating shorthand that serves only to inhibit us from achieving our goals.)

2) I believe the discipline of philosophy can add value to the post-analytical era, not just in ensuring the fitness of minds, but that philosophers must reorder causal categories using empirical information so that new useful narratives can be added to the political discourse in order to assist in the evolution of norms from those that are beneficial in and older technological and organizational state to those that will be more beneficial in the new technological and organizational state.

• ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 1900-1960 ( Incorporation of Natural Sciences, abandoning history, abandoning religion, abandoning norms, while retaining the transcendental program. )

The term “analytic philosophy” refers to a method of argument that emphasizes clarity – testable rather than normative statements. It uses:

1. Formal Logic

 

2. Linguistic Analysis

 

3. Respect for the natural sciences.

 

4. Specifically abandons the assumptions of Religious and Institutional ‘Norms’.

Analytic philosophy is identified with specific philosophical commitments (many of which are rejected by contemporary analytic philosophers), such as:

1. The principle of Logical Positivism: that the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of our thinking. This may be contrasted with the traditional foundationalism, which considers philosophy as a special, elite science that investigates the fundamental reasons and principles of everything. As a result, many analytic philosophers have considered their work as a means of improving our interpretation of the evidence that we have obtained from the natural sciences.

2. The principle that the logical clarification of thoughts can only be achieved by analysis of the logical form of propositions, often using the formal grammar and symbolism of a logical system of notation. The logical form is a way of representing a proposition in similarity with all other propositions of the same type.

3. The rejection of heavily loaded and inarticulate philosophical systems in favor of attention to detail, exposing causal relations, using ordinary, clear language.

But practically speaking, the analytical program was an attempt to turn philosophy into a natural science, to retain philosophy’s historical public importance by pursuing the transcendental program. And it was a total failure outside of improving the philosophy of science.

• THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC REVOLUTION

Empiricists Adapt To Modernity

• THE CONTINENTAL COUNTER-REVOLUTION AGAINST ANGLO EMPIRICISM

( Attempts To Retain Historical Norms In The Face Of The Agricultural and Industrial Revolution, Science and Darwin )

The Germans And The French Hold On To History, Hierarchy And Privilege.

France As The Most Backward Country In Europe

The Anti-Empirical French Moralists

The Bloody Revolution As Proof Of Failure

The Third Attempt At Germanic Expansion

The Marxist Religion As A Revolt Against Modernity

• THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION III – ANGLO EMPIRICISM NORTHERN ITALIAN RATIONALISM AND GERMANIC LITERACY Empiricism, Restoration of monarchies, And The Return To Reason

The Return Of Science

The Return Of Commercial Society In Italy

The Move Of Trade From The Mediterranean to the Atlantic

The Rise Of British Empirical Pragmatism

The Downfall Of Islamic Disruption Of Trade

The Scholastic’s React To The Conquistadors

The Printing Press And Germanic Craftsmanship

The The Second Attempt At Germanic Expansion

• THE REVOLT AGAINST REASON AND MODERNITY 70AD->1400 ( Incorporation of Magianism – The Spread Of Ignorance From Augustine To William Of Ockham )

The Roman Problems Of Administering A Landed Empire Rather Than A Naval Empire

The Abrahamic Invasion and Conquest

The Surrender to Immigration and Over-expansion

The Justinian Oppression Of Northern Europe

The Augustinian Attempt At Assimilation.

The Plagues And The Shortage Of Coinage

The Jewish Revolt Against Reason

The Islamic Revolt Against Reason

The Hindu Revolt Against Reason

The Chinese Revolt Against Reason

The Arab Conquest of Mediterranean Trade

• THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION II – RATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE – The First Commercial Society ( Greek Rationalism – The Emphasis On Human Actions – Empirical Pragmatism ) “We Control Our Destiny”

 

The Limits of Rational Pedagogy

 

The Twin Rivers, The Nile, and The Agean

• GREAT TRANSFORMATION I – THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION AND RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS ( The Scriptural Religions – Uniting The Tribes – The Agrarian Era )
• NATURAL RELIGION ( Rituals Staring With Sacrifice )

A Few Timelines Of Philosophy Elsewhere:

The Basic Philosophy Alternative To Wikipedia

The Thompson Wadsworth Philosophy Timeline

The Western Philosophy Movements Timeline

RIT’s Timeline of Major Philosophers

The HyperHistory Wall Chart

Peter von Stackelberg’s Comparative History Chart

The Origins of Philosophy

ORIGINS OF PHILOSOPHY IN COMPETITION BETWEEN NATURALISTS, THEOLOGIANS(Pseudoscience), AND MYTHICISTS(PseudoHistorians)

The Presocratic philosophers were called physiologoi (Greek: ??????????; in English, physical or natural philosophers). Aristotle was the first to make a clear distinction between these physiologoi or physikoi (“physicists”, after physis, “nature”) who sought natural explanations for phenomena, and the earlier theologoi (theologians), or mythologoi (story tellers and bards) who attributed these phenomena to various gods.

Diogenes Laërtius divides the physiologoi into two groups: Ionian, led by Anaximander, and the Italiote, led by Pythagoras.

IT BEGINS IN 635 BC

But they begin in 635BC with Thales, who was a greek citizen, but may or may not have been a descendent of the Phoenicians, who may or may not have originated on the Red sea, which may or may not refer to the civilization that developed on the trade route between africa and yemen in that region south of what is today ethiopia, but continues across the south of the arabian peninsula, and to the trade routes with India. It is this trade route as much as the mediterranean that accounted for much of the wealth of the levant.

Engineering and construction, and Commercial transactions encourage the development of contract, reason and calculation – because of risk, investment, and liability.

So Thales evolved his thought Just as there is a competition today between literary and theological authors, and scientists, and commercialists. The law has no competitor except religion.

And its possibly important to note that it was the borderland peoples who invented reason, not the urbanites in Athens. Why? Density encourages civic deceit. Objective analysis of civic deceit produces reason.

Thales bought all the olive presses in Miletus after predicting the weather and a good harvest for a particular year. Another version of the story has Aristotle explain that Thales had reserved presses in advance, at a discount, and could rent them out at a high price when demand peaked, following his prediction of a particularly good harvest. Aristotle explains that Thales’ objective in doing this was not to enrich himself but to prove to his fellow Milesians that philosophy could be useful, contrary to what they thought, or alternatively, Thales had made his foray into enterprise because of a personal challenge put to him by an individual who had asked why, if Thales was an intelligent famous philosopher, he had yet to attain wealth. This first version of the story would constitute the first historically known creation and use of futures, whereas the second version would be the first historically known of creation and use of options.

But his theoretical insights are from geometry.

|CAUSALITY| Commerce(Finance) > Engineering > Geometry > Science.

Philosophy (Moral Literature) Is Not Much Help

I AM NOT SURE PHILOSOPHY (LITERATURE) IS MUCH HELP

(from elsewhere)

It’s one thing to suspect, another thing to do.

Reading is hard.

Arithmetic is harder is harder than reading.

Accounting is harder than arithmetic.

Programming is harder than accounting

Natural Law is harder than programming.

If you look at the people who have been with us for a long time everyone has gotten better at argument. Some can use the basic arguments. Some people can use the various series. But how many of us can write natural law in operational grammar?

The beauty of Propertarainism is that it contains each of those levels: the historical argument, the causality of Acquisitionism (incentives), The epistemology of Testimonialism, the Ethics (and definitions of unethical) of Propertarianinism, the politics of Market Government, the competition of group evolutionary strategies, the aesthetics of transcendence …. and the logic, grammar, and rhetoric of natural law.

There is something for everyone no matter their level of ability. But just as some people can do arithmetic, some accounting, some mathematics, some programming … only some will be able to write natural law (for example, like James Augustus does intuitively or John Dow approaches). Myself I think it is more important for most people to recognize and READ it (just as reading can be taught to most people) than it is to WRITE it (which requires far less effort and ability).

The vast majority of people will learn propertarianism (natural law) from Eli, not me, and can be introduced by William Butchman or others.

Those who can construct grammatical arguments, I think, will be those who come by it intuitively, or who have financial, legal, and programming experience, or who simply work hard at it like any other of the ‘logics’.

The problem for those who study philosophy (literature), is that it is in fact just ‘literature’, and not a STEM discipline (science). And to some degree it anchors you just as religion anchors the theological. Natural Law, like programming, logic, and math, is a STEM discipline.

The difference between programming and natural law is merely that the comparison tests (incentives) of man, and the operations (actions) of man, are mere ‘calculations’, and as such broader, and less limited than the ‘computations’ of machines.

And while the machine checks our cognitive biases due to it’s rigid grammar, we must check ourselves in our arguments by checking our own grammar.

And that is the very hardest part.

Moral Language As Attempted Fraud?

Aug 24, 2016 6:04pm

—“CURT. YOU DON”T KNOW WHAT HUMAN DIGNITY MEANS? SAY IT ISN”T SO!!!!”—

(Hmmm…. I don’t know what human dignity means, but I know what life, body, movement, property, and contract mean. As far as I know, one of the central failings of Islam is the requirement for respect without having yet earned it by demonstrating it. Ergo, natural law, using common, judge-discovered law, under rule of law(universal application), and possessing universal standing produce all ends I know of. And duty and respect are not positive rights – they cannot be. They are earned rights, like all other: by reciprocity. )

 

I just understand that moral language, like religious language it evolved from, is usually just another polite way of conducting fraud, so I try to avoid the language of fraud, and use the language in which its most difficult to engage in fraud and deceit: scientific (truthful).

Law evolved as those rules that prevent retaliation spirals by forcible standardization of crime and punishment (an extension of weights and measures) so that the king’s peace, and the people’s market prosperity (and therefore taxation) can expand.

Natural rights evolved as those that preserve the church’s peace, and require, the governments to standardize both law and policy.

Human rights evolved out of the wars of Europe, where the purpose was to force states to maintain their borders, and seek prosperity in the interests of their people, rather than at the expense of their neighbors.

Now, just like the mystics told us comforting lies, and the church told us comforting lies, and philosophers search for comforting lies, the academy replaces the church, selling diplomas instead of indulgences by telling us comforting lies, and the politicians under the deceit of fiat credit and the merits of democracy tell us comforting lies.

This is because the truth is often unpleasant.

America is ‘great’ because we conquered and sell off a continent every year to offspring and immigrants the same way that china uses fiat credit to move people from its poor hinterlands in the hope of creating a more productive economy from which taxation can be extracted by the state and profits extracted by the oligarchies. Just as the Russians did. We used this excess profit from selling off land to first displace Europe from the hemisphere, then once the European civil war began between the Atlantics and the continental (germans, eastern Europeans, and Russians), we used our wealth to defeat them, and

Today our economy like that of Canada is not wealthy because of our virtues, but because we have the greatest asset that we can sell off to the world: housing, adequate rule of law, and the Ponzi scheme that such multiple generations create by doing so under fiat credit (hopefully inflated away fast enough that the illusion persists.)

This military that we have seems expensive until we understand that since Nixon it has been paid for by demand for dollars used to buy oil. And the rest of the world understands this which is why Russia Iran and to a lesser degree china desire to control the archaic and anachronistic Muslim world: because most of the worlds oil exists between the Saudi peninsula and the arctic northeast of Moscow.

If they can create an alternative currency backed by oil they can displace America and the dollar as the country or countries or block that can issue world fiat credit for at least the next century, and at the same time make the American military which polices the world system of finance and trade, impossible to pay for, and end western expansion of democratic secular humanism, and the imposition of the aristocratic model on familial and state-corporate civilizations that require central management because of low trust familial norms and traditions and institutions.

(Hence the Saudi attempt to exit the oil business and transition into a financial rather than oil power.)

Now I don’t hope to do anything by producing this illustrative narrative other than to state that it is silly people, naive people, ignorant people, who take any position that morality is other than an ingroup method of argument for the pooling of opportunity costs for limited gains.

It is just as foolish to apply the economics of the family, to that of the firm, to that of the nation, to that of the world, since they operate on opposing laws of nature – just as it is foolish to apply Newtonian physics and euclidian geometry to the universe that works by its antithesis in quantum mechanics and post-euclidian geometry.

Moral statements if not false are equivalent to the promise that your small investment will produce aggregate returns for all investors, that are multiples of the upfront cost, despite the risk.

To say otherwise is an attempt to conduct the foolish application of a local technology to a scale in which it no longer applies OR, an attempt to conduct a fraud in order to obtain unearned returns at other’s expense, or any other variation on such frauds.

Advocates of Human rights (which are ony natural and negative rights plus half a dozen later positive ambitions made as nods to then-communist states in order to obtain their consent), use moral language to make a ‘pitch’ but the answer is that unless we and our governments refrain from parasitism, there can be no peace and prosperity among men, nor dividends from production that produce the desired multiples on our investments in the commons, nor the taxes to create those commons.

The chief difference between civilizations at this point is merely trust – who talks religiously, who talks morally, who talks legislatively, and who talks scientifically. The more truth that one relies upon the less friction exists in a society and the more productivity it releases without resistance from parasitism.

I hope that is enough uncomfortable truth to circumvent the mythology we manufacture for consumption by the common people lie folk music, television serials, blockbuster movies, liberal arts classes and intellectual propaganda.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

Conflation and Deconflation in Argument

(important concept in demarcation between science and non-science)

I want to try to put my objection – if we can call it an objection – into a more articulate form, and see if I can convince you, or at least see if I am capable of communicating this idea with any degree of clarity.

1 – CONFLATION TO COMMUNICATE VS DECONFLATION TO INNOVATE

I”m not necessarily objecting to the conflation of experience, action, observation, and existence, because otherwise we could not produce literature and art, the purpose of which is loading and framing in order to attribute value through shared experience, to ideas. But I want to point out the consequences of conflationary( monopoly ) and deconflationary (competing) models by which civilizations produce and use knowledge.

2 – DECONFLATION AND COMPETITION VS CONFLATION AND AUTHORITARIANISM

In the western tradition, we maintained separate disciplines for Law, Religion, and ….welll… “Theory”, or what we call ‘science”. Or Religion: what we should do, Theory, how we do it, and Law, what we must not do. In the west , our civic disciplines are divided into the common law; contractual politics that are limited by that common law;

Our celebrations and festivals and art function as our ‘church’ experience (bonding), and our mythology as our literature (aspirations).

Our science and technology and commerce function as their own discipline inspired by religion and limited by law.

Our succes at discovering truth proper (scientific truth) is due to our evolution of empirical contractual law, independent of the state, independent of religion,

We divided the related properties of existence, and thereby deconflated them just as all human thought consists of a process of deconflation (increasing information), free association (pattern recognition), and hypothesis (ideation).

3 – COMPARISONS

Other civilizations that did NOT start with sovereign contractualism did not do this, and they retained conflation, in order to retain authoritarianism. (fertile crescent, east Asia). Monotheism, uniting law, religion, and even a pretense of existence into a literature, created the most conflationary totalitarianism yet developed. Law, politics, religion, and science deconflated those same concepts and left them not only open to further investigation and evolution, but prevented the deception that arose from the conflation of manipulation of the physical world(cafts and science), dispute resolution(law), cooperative action(trade), common aspiration(religion), and education.

The result in every civilization and in every era is that conflation led to stagnation. and deconflation led to innovation. (We can go through every civilization. Fukuyama does it for us actually.)

4 – WE ALL SEEK TO ESCAPE THE COST OF DUE DILIGENCE

All of us seek opportunities and aspirational information provides us with opportunities. We all want something for nothing, and we feel intellectual opportunities are the most valuable ‘freebie’ we can obtain. Moreover, we can read books and decide ourselves, rather than enter into production of goods and services, production of commons, production of arts, or production of offspring – all of which require cooperation with those who differ in knowledge, opinion and desire from us. Which is why many of us seek to use philosophy, like religion, like science, as an authoritarian method of decidability rather than a voluntary exchange of promises, contracts, goods, services, commons, and liabilities.

All of us seek to avoid limits upon us, and so we seek to separate the limits of cost, and the limits of morality,the limits of cooperation, and the limits of law, and by doing so the limits of reality. Philosophy notoriously throughout history differs from Law and science, by ignoring costs (effort, resources, time, and money), which is why it’s failed to retain independence from religion in the modern academy.

5 – THE ENLIGHTENMENTS AND THEIR OPPOSITIONS

The anglo enlightenment, beginning with Bacon’s creation of empiricism by applying the methods of the common law, to the methods of scientific investigation, was terribly disruptive to the non-contractual peoples, even though it was natural to the anglo-saxons (north sea peoples) who had been operating a contractual government since at least the 700’s if not earlier. The English revolution was painful but was eventually settled by contract – as is traditional in anglo saxon civilization, and remains today in the USA.

The french enlightenment was written as a literature of moral persuasion, in order to protect itself from empiricism and contractualism. And its revolution destroyed french civilization, created state currency financed total war, and force the uniting of german princedoms in response. That this effort was merely an attack on the land holders in both private (noble) and church hands is obvious to us. That this ended french contribution to western civilization is less so. That it has been the sponsor for marxism and Islamism are less obvious. France fell from the stage and without interference from other nations would be german colony today.

The german enlightenment used not empiricism, and not moral literature, but rationalist literature (kant) in order to protect its social order from empiricism and contractualism that threatened the hierarchy that constitutes german ‘duty’. Kant replaced germanic Christianity not with science but with rationalist literature. He spawned the continental philosophical movement retaining conflation which has tried every bit of verbal trickery to retain conflation while proposing alternate methods of INTERPRETING and VALUING what we experience, but not better methods of ACTING upon the universe we exist within. in other words, the germans remain desperate to restore religion. Unfortunately, the germans were cut short in their maturity by the entrapment between the bolshevik/soviets who wanted to obtain eastern Europe, and conquer Europe, to defeat deconflationary empirical contractualism – and the anglos who wanted to maintain the balance of power. And the germans who had spread what remains of Hanseatic civilization across central and eastern Europe with members of her own nation, and wished to defend them.

The Jewish enlightenment expanded on the french and german by creating the great authoritarian pseudosciences: boazian anthropology (ant-Darwinian), fruedian psychology (anti-Nietzche restorationism), and Marxist socialist (anti contractualism), and even Cantorian mathematical platonism (anti-materialism), frankfurt-school criticism (anti aristocratic ethics), and combined it not just with press, but with new mass media, and new consumers with disposable income from the consumer capitalist industrial revolution. Out of the Jewish enlightenment, we get the horrors of the Bolsheviks, the soviets, the maoists, and world communism. 100M dead. And at present, we are about to lose Europe for the second time in two thousand years to another wave of ignorance.

Without bolshevism and communism we would very likely never had the world wars, and would still retain the best system of government ever evolved by man: Juridical monarchy, a market for commons by houses representing classes, a market for goods and services, and a market for reproduction, all under the rule of law.

6 – THE COST OF CONFLATION AND DECEPTION

What has been the cost of each of these failed enlightenments? What has been the cost of the Jewish alone? What of napoleon? The British was a trivial tribal dispute between the (failed) corporate-republicans and the (successful) national-monarchists.

What if the British enlightenment hadn’t been cut short by the conflicts (counter enlightenments) of the French, German, Jewish and Russians? What if the greeks had finished their invention of the industrial revolution? What if Justinian hadn’t closed the stoic and greek schools, and forcibly indoctrinated Europeans into mysticism instead of literacy and reason? What if the RESTORATION OF DECONFLATION imposed on the west by the first great deception of authoritarian monotheism had not been necessary?

Most of the great lies in history are created by conflation, and all our great achievements in dragging mankind out of ignorance and poverty have been achieved through information provided by deconfliction and competition.

SO while as a human I can empathize with the desire to assist in COMMUNICATION through conflation – thereby allowing us to impose values upon ideas, during education, and allowing us to experience life through the words of other minds. That is very different from the act of conflation in philosophy which appears in large part, whether literary philosophy, moral philosophy, or religious philosophy, to be nothing more than the use of subterfuge (the use of suggestion under the influence of suspension of disbelief), to cause either submission or agitation by artful deceit.

So just as we must have communication and education (conflation) we must have analysis and prosecution(deconflation). Without both tools, (literature for education, law for deconflation) we cannot protect ourselves from the greatest crimes in history.

Because outside of the great plagues, philosophers and prophets are responsible for more death and destruction, ignorance and poverty, susceptibility to starvation and disease than any general ever dreamed of being.

So contrary to giving philosophers a license to special pleading, my position is that the evidence is in, and that unless words are backed by warranty that they do no harm, the are no different from any other product of man. And that while no producer of goods, services, and ideas, wishes to be accountable and to warranty his materials, actions, and words, that we must constrain those people such that no intellectual products, like no services, and like no material goods can enter the market for knowledge any more so than goods and services can enter the market for consumption.

My assessment of history is that the jurists and scientist do all the work, and the prophets and the philosophers take all the credit, and us it like today’s marketers and advertisers for personal gain despite the drastic consequences of their deceptions.

So I tend to damn philosophy or literature that is objectively criminal, regardless of the intentions of the producers and distributors of it.

7 – WHY CAN WE NOT WARRANTY OUR SPEECH?

I have no idea why, in an era of mass manufacture and distribution of information that we do not require the same increase in due diligence against harm, that we have incrementally added to the production of goods and services.

If we can police polite speech (political correctness) against shame by the true, then why can we not police philosophical speech against damage by the false and immoral?

We cannot ever know what is good or true until we test them. We can, however, know that is bad and false.

If it is bad and false we can either regulate(prior constraint) in the continental model, or enforce involuntary warranty(post facto restitution) in the American model. My opinion is that regulation creates corruption and restitution creates quality.

So as to your preference for conflationary philosophy, I would say that as long as you would warranty that your conflation does not harm, then it seem you have nothing to worry about. But if your use of conflation does harm, then you do.

And if we had the same defense against deception that we have gainst every other kind of fraud, that there would be very few philosophers – and the few we had, would be of much higher calibre rather than simply those who write the rationalist equivalent of science fiction and fantasy, under the pretense of possibility, thus inspiring people to the social equivalent of yelling fire in the theatre.

8 – CLOSING

There is only one moral law of nature: do no harm. Everything that does not harm, is by definition good. One thing may be better good than another. But that is a matter of preference and taste, not of truth,

No free rides. No special pleading. Ideas produce more harm than material goods by orders of magnitudes.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

Philosophy vs Sophism

COUNSEL: PHILOSOPHY VS SOPHISM

Given any term, always use a series of at least 3 to 5 when analyzing propositions. I prefer 8 to 12 whenever I can get them, and english because it has so vast a vocabulary of working, governing, intellectual, logical, and scientific origins is extremely useful for creating constellations of constant relations whether in one series, or a competition between series we call ‘supply and demand curves’.

Using series – which is what I teach – disambiguates and prevents errors of conflation when using ideal types and fallacies of construction such as ‘principles’.

Example:

Good < Moral < Ethical < Amoral > Unethical > Immoral > Evil

constant relations:

1… change in capital whether positive, neutral, or negative

2… degree of intent, accidental, self interest, other interest

3… degree of informational distance between actors and victims (ethical interpersonal, moral inter social, evil both.)

Most sophistry in philosophy consists of:

1… using ideal rather than serialized (enumerated) definitions; 2… using the verb to be (is are was were, be, being) rather than the means of existence;

3… conflating points of view between the observer, actor, and acted upon;

4… and failing to construct complete sentences in testimonial (promissory) grammar, using operational terms.

You will find that this is one of the points of demarcation between pseudoscience, theology, philosophy, moralizing, and testimony (what we call science): disambiguation and operationalization into complete promissory sentences will rapidly demonstrate that almost all philosophical questions are sophisms.

Witticisms. Nonsense. Puzzles. Riddles. But nothing more.

ORIGINS

Mathematics has only one constant relation (position) consisting of a single ratio, which provides scale independence, and cost independence which produces fully deterministic and testable descriptions. Yet philosophers since the time of the greeks have be trying to imitate it’s utility to no avail, and instead, have created textual and verbal interpretation under the premise the the triviality of one-dimensional positional logic can provide the same utility in deduction and prediction (induction) as the constant relations of mathematics.

Animism > Readings (Divination) > Astrology > Scriptural interpretation > Textual interpretation > legal interpretation > numerology > postmodern linguistic divination all constitute the same: finding what is not there as an appeal to an non-existent authority.

The only peer to mathematics in language is serialization: lines that test the constant relations between points (terms), and supply demand curves that test the relationship between lines ( propositions.).

Sophists Nearly All

It’s exasperating. Continentals are secular theologians at best. But even analytic philosophers are mostly sophists. Try to explain that the logics are falsificationary not justificationary. Ask them to try to prove something non trivial. Heads explode.

Better, try “The liar’s paradox isn’t, it’s just a sophism of grammar using the copula in an incomplete sentence.” In fact, ask them to state any difficult philosophical question without using the verb to be, in a complete sentence, in operational language. Oops. Sophisms all.

Very frustrating for philosophers playing cunning word games to realize that (a) almost all supposedly complex questions are merely errors in grammar, and (b) there is no closure available to the logics, (c) the logics are purely falsificationary – just like the sciences.

Demand for Preservation of Literary and Religious Mysticism so that we can roll around in our mental playpens

 

@John Dow

–“Me: “This notion that novelty doesn’t exist in an intelligible form seems rather ridiculous to me.”—

I didn’t say novelty didn’t exist. I said it’s always and everywhere reducible to the structure and terms I’ve outlined. There is a continuous evolution but it isn’t evolution outside of the bounds I’ve stated.

Language is apparently infinitely descriptive but largely because we increase precision and generalize categories so that the scope of our concepts remains limited.

—“You would have to assume all forms of cognition have perpetuated themselves without change for eternity, or you would have to entirely reject the notion of mimetic cognition, but then how would you account for all of the empirical data supporting it?”–

There is only one form of cognition. Thats just a fact. We can alter the concentration of stimuli to the neocortex so that we limit exposure or access exposure of other facilities in the cortical hierarchy; and we can add experiences (relations) that create infinite combinations, but just like there are only up and down quarks in the but all elements are built upon combinations of them, and all molecules built of them, and all biochemistry built upon them and so on, that does not mean available operations at each scale are not enumerable.

Same is for language. We invent increasingly complex combinations that combine increasingly complex experiences, but we do not invent new means of constructing them.

—“Surely you acknowledge that mimetic evolution occurs, not merely genetic evolution? How else could historically verifiable innovations in discourse like metaphors or new scientific paradigms emerge?”—

Well I don’t use literary pseudoscientific terms, but yes imitation and recombination in all means of expression from marks, to movements, to vibrations, to sounds occurs just like EVERY OTHER TECHNOLOGY we have and there is nothing different about it other than the low cost compared to material costs, which is why fashionable language is more fashionable among those lacking ability to express material change instead of signal change.

And internally the information is all represented by the same means, just associated by physical connection to networks of neurons, connected to networks of nerves, that sense stimuli in very primitive terms.

So I think what I see is that this is another of those examples where the fact that we can logically and physically describe the structure of any experience, that is not the same as experiencing it. And that’s true. That does not however translate into anything other than the conflation of complex experience and the deflation of cause of the experience into its constituent parts.

So like aways I can say ‘when you feel x, it’s just y’. And you can say, ‘but that’s not the same’. Well, yes it is. its just the difference between describing how to play the piano and the experience of playing it once you know how. This is the eternal competition between bottom up construction, and top down experience.

—“Dealing with the phenomenon of mimesis is incredibly important in the construction of epistemological theories, as mimesis is the most fundamental means by which language and therefore the capacity for intelligibility is transmitted, this is an empirical claim I am making here. Here are a few papers amongst hundreds on the subject as an example: https://journals.lub.lu.se/index.php/pjos/article/view/8842

https://www.degruyter.com/…/cogsem…/cogsem-2014-0002.xml”—

As far as I know there is only one means of epistemology possible and thats free association, hypothesis, theory, repeat. it can’t be otherwise. That’s all our brains are capable of. I think you must mean something else. Not epistemology but deconstruction?

Ok these papers are not science. Why not read the science instead of literary pseudoscience? Development is well documented and follows a predictable path as foundations are built from sensory, then motor, then social, then linguistic and the rational – because that’s the cortical hierarchy and how information develops from the back of the brain to the front (hopefully). Much of it governed by developmental success in utero and shortly after. Small variations in cortical structure produce vast variations in behavior – largely because most neural complexity is in suppression rather than computation. In other words we developed agency late (which is why we don’t eat our young and lizards do – no inhibitory structure (and no neocortex to have it in.)

So again what you mean is that as we mature we might have greater developmental ability in the sensory (musicians), the physical (keanu reeves, natural athletes), or the emotional (prototypical hypersensitive chick), or in the social (salesmen), or in the frontal (mathematicians and philosophers). BUt the mistake is in thinking this isn’t just a lever from back of the brain to the front, and for some reason greater association and therefore attention to that region of the brain.

—“Me: “What you can do however, is create a epistemo-political discourse, and my point is that you can pack it with as many parameters as you like”—

Yes we can seek, and do seek, to create many associations both honest and dishonest, correspondent and not, possible and not, rewarding and not, expensive and not, as a way of capturing and holding attention, providing incentive for or against, and making promises or not. As far as I know all language is negotiation. +Attention +> Promise +> Meaning -> Due Diligence -> Warranty

—“…but ultimately in practice those parameters are only as good as the people enforcing them,”—

Q: What do you mean ‘enforcing them’. how is a parameter (all I know of is sense, relation, fact(measurement), value) enforced?

—“in fact they are contingent upon the interpretation of the people enforcing them. Do you have an actual argument against this precise notion?”—

Q: what do you mean ‘enforcing’? Do you mean habituating? Do you be the language, the meaning, or the behavior that reseals? What are you talking about?

—“Again, this is an operational claim about the practical application of fields of knowledge, namely that they are disciplinary and therefore reliant upon the adjudication of a discretionary authority”—

But that’s not true. Langauges develop by utility and convention in every discipline, and the terms rotate like any other. What you mean is that there is a paradigm, and one can enforce the paradigm and the terms that constitute measurements of relations in that paradigm. So was the church successful wth terms (only some). How have terms changed over time? (with utility) Why do we make up new terms (to serve as standards of weight and measure less open to migration) but they must adhere to the paradigm. Do individuals make these up? Not really, the evolve in a competitive market and the best terms survive. Why do they survive? Because they meet market demand for system of measurement within the paradigm they seek to discuss.

I think what you might mean is that propaganda can create framing and with enough repetition people can be malformed by environmental saturation that they begin to operate on a different paradigm by suggestion. Now that’s not LANGUAGE that’s propaganda. And propaganda only works as long as it doesn’t contradict the interests of the group or impose a cost upon them for its use.

—“(this builds on from the notion that language emerges from mimetic transmission). “—

Again I don’t use pseudoscientific terms, but yes, language evolved from physical to proto-verbal to verbal to mark making, to symbol making and glypy making and now every grammar of constant relations we have.

That says nothing about the fact that as I stated earlier it follows a tediously consistent set of rules (that I mentioned earlier) regardless and there isn’t a lot of novelty in it at all mostly because it’s almost impossible for novelties to survive competition when information is this cheap and free. I’d love an example other wise.

The script business evolution and the novel evolution and mathematics, and now programming all of these languages folow the same geometric structure because all of tehm must produce testable tranactions and terms we ca reduce to analogies to expeiernce.

—“Your system is based upon the notion that you need to enforce a “full accounting” of operational testimony in public speech, “—

It means that if one is taken to court one must demonstrate having done due diligence or one is liable. That’s a very different thing from asking people to speak in operational prose.

—“someone will obviously need to do that enforcing and ultimately there must be a judge of last resort to solve disputes as to their findings.”—

WE do this every day in every court in the land. No matter what you say you er led to the same standard of liability for the externalities produce by your speech not what you intend. So we do this every day, Marketers make ads, people make promises, lawyers make contract, people testify, reporters writes stories, … we test this every day.

The langauge and the law adapt so that the empirical result is reciprocal. Just like programming langauges. Just like disciplineary languages. Everyting in every language.

—-“I am literally pointing to how you yourself envisage your system being implemented and suggesting that it demonstrates my epistemological argument that authority precedes intelligibility,”—

The problem precedes intelligibility and the market solves the problem by empirical evidence of competitive tests and continuous reformation just like very other epistemelogical cycle known to man. The problem-solution competition is the authority and words are standards of measure that either serve their purpose in solving the problem or language adapts to do so.

There is no observer in the mind. There is no authority in language, there is no decider of the language only dispute. This is how everything in the world works. Certain disciplines use certain terms because we have no term of art otherwise. Law in particular uses latin terms just like doctors do in order to prevent migration of the meaning of the term and this is reinforced by convention because harm may come otherwise.

(My company managed the term library for Microsoft. We used an ocean of librarians. For years.) Many companies do this to protect brand and legal liability, and often to prevent consumer confusion. So for example most companies have style guide. But the market causes adaption to the style guide, just like it does the dictionary.

—that knowledge is a discipline which requires arbitration, that interpretation is unavoidably discretionary.”—

There is no structure for that arbitration. The MARKET does. People respond to the market. The only places that is different are where small organizations have legal liability otherwise. The evidence is langauges always rotate.

—“You: “If you mean how various narratives evolve in each culture and subculture, yes I have, and so have others, there is nothing magic to it. There are dozens of authors who have documented dozens if not hundred of cultures.”

Well, you have assigned a utilitarian teleology to language, and then process everything through those economic parameters. “—

What i did in this and in al things is to create a value neutral system of measurement in operational terms. I used economic terms because it is a value netral system of measurement, and becasue economics correctly desribes all human behavior as negotiation on gains by incentives.

What I think you mean is that deceit and gsrrm are cheap, fictions are cheap, and force is expensive, and payment is very expensive, and you are looking to preserve cheap means of coercion?

—“This is based upon the assumption that cognition exclusively a bio-machine programmed by evolution to pursue resource allocation as means to the end of genetic reproduction. “–

Well it is and has to be but that’s irrelevant. We evolved limbic system to provide incentives and we feel those incentives as emotions, but the underlying measurement of gains losses and probabilities is invisible to us because it is calculated very rapidly in parallel summarizing into an e motion. That does not mean it cannot be analyzed and described in economic language. It can. It may humiliate the author to have his poetry reduced to “he’s just retelling little red riding hood” but that’s just true.

—“Again, this is based upon the assumption that mimetics is simply an expression of genetic functions,”—

I don’t know what that means. I now that everything we express is an analogy to experience in just increasingly complex sets of relations – and has to be, and that those foundations are limited by a strict grammar lie all else in the universe.

—“my point however is the evidence suggests that mimetic structures exist as a distinct strata upon genetic machines,”—

If you mean paradigms and vocabularies in a continuous market of utility then yes. I don’t know hat else you mean.

—“in a way analogous to software’s relationship to the hardware it is inscribed upon.”—

Well you just made my point about limited variation in grammars and senses producing nearly unlimited but bounded variation.

Nothing on a computer cannot be explained operationally. Same for people, and their stories and their feelings If you read ancient text its very obvious that the only difference is the increasing precision and decreasing context of the language themselves. Otherwise same shit every day in every civlization.

I discovered cuneiform when young and was so desperate to see it at the London museum. when i finally found a translation it might ave been said by a gang banger. It’s just repetitive trash talking. Not some deep wisdom.

Famous story, not sure if it’s Ur? but found a brick. Inscribed was ‘All men are fools” in Akkadian. The problem with reading early greek is that the language is too young to have developed sufficient precision to compete with context. English is the opposite.

—“Software tells hardware what to do, in the same way mimesis tells the body what to do,”–

Well that’s not true. software is deterministic. Every single thing people do is predictive (a guess and the information is constantly self organizing to adapt to market demand (reality) for action.) Because we predict we can combine probabilities and develop new variations on sequences of actions and computers can’t. This error proneness is why we aren’t deterministic (we have limited free choice) we lack the info to do otherwise.

—“genetics merely ensures that neurons are receptive to mimetic inscription, it does not in itself generate the structure of semiotic cognition.”–

Thats nonsense. neurons do one thing. On and off. Just like a computer transistor, just vastly more complex in vast parallel in a vast division of labor. they survive (are fed) by attention, when they successfully predict an action or reaction, very fast. But they only have our senses for variable, and those variables are only on off and frequency. Our brains build up sequences (everything is retained as a predictive sequence, not a fact, again demonstrating competition), and use them to predict moment by moment in a continuous sensory stream. And while you’re in the womb your brain develops because nerves are all the same, your brain develops based on what sensors and motors or internal relations it’s connected to (thats’ all the types of neurons we have – those three) So the vocabulary and grammar of human beings is entirely dependent upon their physical structure the sensations we can concentrate in the brain, and the evolution of successful sequential predictive relations, to self organize. For example touch at the tips of your fingers isn’t ordered in the brain they learn their order by use – by survival in the market for successful prediction resulting in attention.

We can imitate anything another an experience if it can be reduced to an analogy of existing experience. But those experiences are limited Fore example it is very hard to imagine being an octopus, or a bee, and fairly easy a dog – they are like us, but lacking other than rudimentary sequence planning.

—“This particular argument I am making is therefore in this sense a scientific one, and it implicates the sociological strata as non-reducible to the biological. “—

That’s patently false. You can’t think of anything I can’t explain which is why it’s extremely frustrating to religious people to understand the mammalian or reptilian triviality of their most valued experiences. Now to reduce them to these functions is only to say that they are operationally explicable, and consists entirely of explainable physical phenomenon. but ehe experience of conflating all one’s senses, all one’s memories, all the predictions from those memories, and the continuous cyclical switching attention between different functions while the hippocampus is trying to organize an episodic memory for rehearsal and later recall is simply inaccessible to self introspection.

SO just because you can’t disambiguate experience with introspection (you can’t) that doesn’t mean we can’ explain what’s creating the conflationary (ambiguously related) experience itself. We can. And just as finding out we weren’t he center of the universe, or even important in it, and that we are a rare but deterministic output of a calm planet with a rotating iron core, over four billion years, it’s exasperating to those of you who have built up expectations of wonder, that are in fact, only wondrous because of our inability to introspectively analyze what it is our brains are doing in unbelievable parallel at unbelievable speed for a mere 100 watts of power.

—“And perhaps more profoundly it implicates a meta-scientific argument, that shared intelligibility is contingent upon the social relation of authority,”—

Intelligibility is dependent upon the survival of paradigms and attendent vocabularies to solve daily problem of daily life at all scales, just like all knowledge and there is no such thing as an authority, only anchors that slow change (like the dictionary and english spelling) while the market runs onward continuously adapting to continuously evolving human demand.

The only thing that can alter it is the saturation of the environment with stimuli that is more endemic than the related stimuli – which is why it’s easy to demonize a remote enemy but very hard to persist the paradigm, vocabulary, and belief, that you can fly.

That’s why religions work. False promise of untestable benefit, or benefit taht cannot be obtained, for paying the priesthood, limiting status deltas, and prohibiting alternate standards of behavior. Thankfully we invented rational law instead. Unthankfully we invented credit and credit scores, and unthankfully social scores are coming.

—“and therefore contains an arbitrary component. This doesn’t mean we have to dismiss the notion of sense imposing itself upon us from outside language as “reality”, simply that our apprehension of it emerges from a creative process of trial and error socially arbitrated by authority.”–

So again,

(a) authority is a trivial if not non-existent influence on language but sure as hell is on behavior,

(b) market demand for utility to compete in the group against other groups does determine paradigm and language, most of which is to adapt to law and custom and strategy

(c) We can easily use propaganda but there are limits and those limits tend to be un-testable, and therefor change our behavior by externality, rather than on the subject at hand.

(c) none of us like reducing our ‘undiscovered valleys’ open for our continued investigation and reward, shown to be not a masterpiece but a coloring book

(c) you are like many fans of literature, under the impression that words are some sort of magic or hold some persuasive power, and the y only do if it provides people returns and survives in a market for returns.

(c) All human be havior can be reduced to value neutral incenties described ineconomc language because humans only act by incentives.

German Philosophy

by Daniel Gurpide

The more I follow Curt’s posts, the more I realize German philosophy is not that ‘great’.

The Greats of German philosophy (Kant-Fichte-Hegel-Marx-Heidegger, I’m leaving Nietzsche outside on purpose, I know) make up a Counter-Enlightenment tradition that ends up being suspicious of science and technology, anti-individualistic and anti-liberal. They all contributed in varying degrees to the authoritarian regimes that developed in the 1900s – the various forms of authoritarian nationalisms, the national and international socialisms, the fascisms – and the cultural catastrophes named ‘Frankfurt School’ and ‘Post-Modernism’.

Kant (the only picture in Kant’s house was a portrait of Rousseau that was hanging over his writing desk) buttressed the pre-modern worldview of faith and duty against the inroads of the Enlightenment: “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” (Kant)

Hegel explicitly attacks the entire tradition of logic as it had developed from Aristotle to modernity. He wants to believe in a kind of spiritually-driven, dialectically-evolving metaphysics that cannot be expressed logically. His deeper views are that one’s self is but an aspect of the collective, that the Divine works through collective self-realization, and that the State is the manifestation of the Divine.

Hegel on the beginning of the universe: “So far, there is nothing: something is to become. The beginning is not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to proceed; so that being is already contained in the beginning. The beginning thus contains both, being and nothing; it is the unity of being and nothing, or is not-being which is being, and being which is also not being.” This is a forewarning of the worst Heidegger, the ‘nazi’ philosopher par excellence who paradoxically ended up recreating the Jewish cosmogonic myth (Creation ‘ex nihilo’).

The triad Kant-Fichte-Hegel is behind the modern German educational system, still active nowadays: a factory of perfect automata devoid of personality, adept at crushing any signs of individualism. Social conformism explains why today in Germany there is no resistance to the suicidal program implemented by ‘Big Mutti’.

German philosophers are Lutheran pastors in a new garb. All of them, even Marx. Is he German or Jewish? I’m not sure. Isn’t Protestantism another big gulp of Abrahamism? Are Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Heidegger German or Jewish? Is more dangerous the combination of a German philosopher raised in an Abrahamic cult or a Jewish thinker educated in the German school?

Nietzsche’s Morality Isn’t (Nietzche Failed)

Nietzche had little understanding of law(dispute resolution), and less understanding if not no understanding of its opposite: economics (cooperation). When he says ‘morality’ he means ‘convention’. and in that sense, convention may or may not survive moral scrutiny. That does not mean that there are no moral statements. It’s easy to define them.

The question is instead whether moral action serves the desired purpose. Just as whether violence serves the desired purpose. Just as whether deception serves the desired purpose.

Convention places no limits on man other than the cost he bears for abridging it.

Not all our purposes need be moral, as long as the cost or benefit of immoral action is worth it to us.

That is different from saying that we cannot determine moral actions.

We can.

But whether we DESIRE COOPERATION or not is a test of morality. Whether something suites our PURPOSES or not is a question of utility and the cost of it.

This is where almost all philosophers are confused. They treat moral as the equivalent of good, rather than moral as what is necessary to achieve good through cooperation. But if the proposed good that might come from cooperation is undesirable, or a net negative, then moral action is not useful.

What do these words mean?

Moral = preserves or encourages cooperation by the non-imposition of costs.

Immoral = inhibits or discourages cooperation by the imposition of costs.

The fact that the MORAL is approximately equal to the good for ingroup members, with whom we wish to cooperate, has no bearing when we DO NOT WISH to cooperate with members ingroup or outgroup. Non cooperation is merely a question of cost. Is cooperation more or less valuable in the achievement of our ends?

If we do not wish to cooperate, then the moral or immoral is little more than an assistance to us in judging the long-term consequences of our actions because of the possible retaliation of others in times when we are not as strong as we are now.

I hope this helps because this appears to be a subject of confusion in the Nietzchean community.

Morality is a fairly simple, reasonably scientific fact at this point.

Whether a moral action is GOOD or not is a very different question.

It may or may not be Good. Just a violence may be moral or immoral, the moral may be useful or not useful. It may be beneficial or it may be harmful.

In my work I state that the moral is necessary for long-term competitive survival because of the productivity of labor in the production of everything from food to warfare. In this sense, the moral is good because it makes a group more powerful than others in every dimension – assuming they wish to allocate production to competitive ends.

I state that all disputes are resolvable by objectively moral judgments. And it’s true. But this only matters if we want to resolve disputes peacefully, so that we can continue to cooperate and gain the projected benefits of cooperation.

That says nothing about whether we want to cooperate – either as individuals or as groups or as nations, with other individuals or groups or nations. We may. Or we may not.

I argue only that those who cooperate more, will eventually be more powerful than those who cooperate less. And power enables us to bring about what we desire.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

The Error Of The Ancients: War is Fine But Economics Beneath Them

THE ERROR OF THE ANCIENTS: TALKING BIZ WAS “OH, SO, BOURGEOISE”

Aside from the conquest of the west by byzantine mysticism, the central problem of western philosophy was thinking and ruling classes avoidance of the centrality of economics. We get philosophy to circumvent the traditional law. And we get science to circumvent the traditional church. And we finally get jewish pseudoscience and puritan outright deceit as ways of circumventing science, economics, an law.

Economics really doesn’t come into being until smith’s combination of it with ethics, morality, and politics, or turn into a science until menger. Then just as the german scientific revolution is about to kick in, we get the wars, and the postwar era keynes replaces pseudoscience with obscurantist immoral mathematics that menger and smith had sought to avoid. Then the americans kick in – so proud they are to have found a way to destroy civilization faster using stocks as money.

Lesson? Get your hands dirty.

Plato As The Origins Of Evil

Plato began the ‘religification’ of socrates work, and while Aristotle corrected it, Plato, Saul, and Augustine created the intellectual dark ages, just as the muslims created the economic and cultural dark ages, just as Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Marx, Boaz, Cantor, Freud, the Frankfurt School (Council of Nicea), and the French Postmodernists and Anglo Puritans attempt to bring about a second intellectual dark age.

Thankfully Smith, Hume, Poincare, Maxwell, Darwin, Menger, Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, Spencer, Hayek, Nietzsche, and Turing largely saved us from them. But it wasn’t until the 1990’s that we had the technology to refute the pseudosciences of the 19th and 20th century ‘literary philosophers’ (moral fictionalism).

Unfortunately, just as great war that gave us modernity produced the anglo enlightenment, and then the french, german, jewish, russian, and chinese counter-enlightenments, the European Civil War (World War) to prevent German expansion into eastern Europe, plus the mass industrialization of lying via the use of electronic media, allowed the damage done by the Ashkenazi counter-enlightenment (pseudoscience), and the second French counter-enlightenment(postmodernism), to prosper for almost a century – which has nearly destroyed western civilization.

But we have purified the west before, and we can do it again. But the continental intellectuals have never transitioned – they remain provincial people, with literary tastes, seeking as did Kant to create church within the state, to replace the vacuum left behind by abrahamism, like a drug addict always hungering for his lost substitute for endorphins.

But eventually, there are enough of us remaining in empirical civilization and in the end, empiricism will, ,unless overwhelmed by the underclasses.

Plato was a cancer upon man, trying to nothing more than recapture the past glory made possible by the discovery of a silver mine, flooding athens with wealthy, and not athenian character.

Blame Plato’s Philosopher King For The Rise Of Totalitarianism In The Twentieth Century? (No)

No.  Popper’s argument (like many of his disingenuous political arguments) was an attempt at deflection from Popper’s factions.   His contribution to science not withstanding. The reason for the rise of totalitarianism in the west was the moral legitimacy given to statism by the Marxists, Socialists, Keynesians and Postmodernists, and later the neo-Conservatives.

However, the Marxists, and all Marxist derivatives I just listed — like Popper, exemplified by Popper’s own systemic use of platonic truth (analytic, unknowable truth) and platonic existence (three words theory) — were Cosmopolitan (Jewish) theorists.  Not Greek or Christian (Anglo, German, or French) theorists.  

The Cosmopolitans, whether Marxist/Socialist/Postmodern/Feminist, or Libertine (Misesian/Rothbardian) or Neo-Conservative (Straussian), all sought — through false, elaborate philosophical justifications, all reliant upon loading, framing and overloading (elaborate suggestion),  and the argumentative technique of Critique, that was developed over the centuries for the purpose of scriptural interpretation — to create a world safe for Cosmopolitans by advocating for authoritarian universalism. 

This technique was accomplished by uniting Kant’s rejection of anglo meritocratic empiricism in favor of rational (hierarchical) authoritarianism, then combining it with traditional Jewish religio-moral authoritarian arguments.

Jewish thought is structured as a totalitarian system of indoctrination, under the threat of ostracization, using the concept of an angry god,  to create a religious, moral, and rhetorical school, identical in purpose to Plato’s proposition for legal, rational, and historical school reliant upon law for punishment. 

But unlike western traditional aristocracy (or Plato’s version of it), the Jewish school of thought advocates dual ethics (moral inequality) whereas Plato and western aristocratic ethics advocate equality under the law, but merely argue for meritocracy because of differences in virtuous character and ability. 

The evidence is clear, and we can trace the origins of authors in each of the cosmopolitan political movements, covering the all three axis of the political spectrum, through development, until they are later adopted by a minority of christian and western public intellectuals, and used by the academy to replace the church, using the cosmopolitan deceptions, to advocate for the state, rather than fulfill the church’s role as an opponent to the state.

But in both the origin of the ideas, in the distribution of the ideas, and the disingenuous advocacy of the ideas using the new media available in the 20th century. the totalitarianism of the twentieth century was caused by Jewish Cosmopolitan authors, in not only the socialist (left) but also the conservative (neo conservative) and libertarian (libertine) political spectrum. 

Conversely the rise of the desire for statism among western conservatives is a defensive reaction to the expansion of the of the state by the cosmopolitans. 

Westerners rely upon testimonial truth, juries, science, reason, law, universalism, merit, and the blanace of powers as a prevention against the rise of authority.  These properties are the inverse of jewish cosmopolitan thought.

During the enlightenment, when the franchise (democracy) was extended to all, each sub-group in europe attempted to justify its cultural strategy, cultural ethics, and cultural philosophy, as the dominant one for universal use. 

The marxist/neocon fallacy won because it was possible to use the media, democracy, redistribution, advocacy for immorality, to overturn the balance of powers, overturn meritocracy, and justify the state as a vehicle for implementing immorality that has resulted in the destruction of the west, and the western family, and the western ethic.

Cheers

https://www.quora.com/Was-Karl-Popper-right-to-blame-Platos-concept-of-the-philosopher-king-for-the-rise-of-totalitarianism-in-the-twentieth-century

. . .

Correcting Aristotle’s Categories of Philosophy

The Law of Nature “Correcting Aristotle on Categories of Philosophy”

Physical Laws (Transformation) – THE NECESSARY

Physics: Astronomy, Chemistry, Biology, Sentience, Engineering, Mathematics

Law of Man (properties of man) (Action) – THE POSSIBLE

Acquisition, perception, memory, psychology, sociology

Natural Law – Cooperation – THE GOOD

Ethics, morality, law, economics

Law of Testimony – THE TRUE

Testimony, epistemology, grammar, logics, rhetoric

Law of Aesthetics – THE BEAUTIFUL

Sense, beauty, design, craft, content. manners. Fitness

–Curt Doolittle, The Propertarian Institute, Kiev, Ukraine

Translating Between Philosophy and Propertarianism’s Natural Law

(core)

Metaphysics: Realism, naturalism, operationalism, empiricism, survival, compatibilism, cooperation, propertarianism, acquisitionism, action.

Ontology: realism/naturalism, soft determinism, three faculties: physical, intuitionistic, and mind as motion(no name for it in philosophical terms: experience consists of continuous recursive hierarchical temporal memory – memory of memory continuously constructed by continuous prediction from sequences of sense perception.) the problem is getting people from the observer to perception consisting of change (action) not state.

Grammars: As far as I can tell The Grammars (which you don’t know yet) produce the most parsimonious paradigm. Philosophy considers ideals, rarely if ever costs, means of production(models), possibilities(consequences and externalities).

Operationalism: testimony in operational terms (one continuous consistent commensurable system of falsifiable measurement)

Science: testimony in empirical terms (observation of demonstrated evidence) expressed in a commensurable terms (operational).

Epistemology: Competition between justification(hypothesis), operation(theory) and empiricism(evidence) at increasing scales (self-reason via positiva-justification, via-negativa and via-positiva-tests, via-negativa market survival)

Truthfulness: Due diligence against ignorance, error, bias, deceit, in performative, promissory testimony in complete sentences that are consistent, correspondent, operational, limited, complete, and coherent.

Axiology: value: acquisitionism: acquisition of property in toto defined by demonstrated interest (IOW self reported values never reflect demonstrated preference, and demonstrated preference can always be expressed as acquisition of property in toto -a gain yielding a fully commensurable system of measurement),

Ethics: Reciprocity – via negativa, all ethnical and moral questions are decidable by tests of fully accounted reciprocity.

Sociology: Compatibilism, Tripartism, Trifunctionalism.

Cooperationism(Economics): Returns on Time in a division of labor.

In other words: I’m describing economics. Which, as others have stated before me, appears to function as the union of the disciplines.

PHILOSOPHY SUPERSEDED BY SCIENCE

Philosophy: Do we think philosophy produces Truth, Meaning, or Choice? As far as I can tell Law, Economics, Science, Mathematics, and the human logical facility (differences in constant relations) produce testimony.

So what is the remaining function of philosophy? Reorganization of preferences and means of achieving them given the truth we have identified with “science in toto”: (law, economics, science, math, logical facility).

In other words, discovery of truth (science) selection of preference (philosophy), sedation or abandonment (theology).

Which makes sense to me since Math(measurement) Science(matter) and Economics(people) produce evidence, law produces testimony and decidability independent of preference, and philosophy produces preference, and as far as I can tell theology allows people to escape the work of philosophy, law, and science – leading to graceful failure as our knowledge and ability decreases from science to norm or law, to philosophy, to theology.

Philosophy served as the stage between unorganized thinking and science, and that anything that still in philosophy that had any value in decidability has been replaced by science and scientific epistemology.

Metaphysics: Replaced by Paradigms and grammars

Paradigms consisting of market for parsimony. Parsimony consisting of Action. Action consisting of Actionable, Testifiable, Warrantable, Free of Incentive to Deceive. Consisting of: Realism, Naturalism, Operationalism, Rational Choice, Reciprocity, full accounting.

Humans have developed a series of paradigms that deflate inflate, or fictionalize the most parsimonious but complete paradigm (above). In P we call these the ‘grammars’. (You can search our site for the grammars).

Humans possess the ability to determine constant and inconstant relations (differences). And to control the use of their detection of differences. We call this ability reason when used informally. We call comparisons of sets as means of testing constant relations ‘logic’. We have produced many logics. Mathematics is the most basic – consisting of one constant relation: position. In the discipline of logic we test rules of inference. However, logic isn’t closed and so all logic al assertions are contingent.As such all non-trivial logic is falsificationary. ALL of the grammars are logics of increasing tests of constant relations within different limits.

Epistemology: Replaced by Theory.

Free association(falsify by reason) > hypothesis(falsify by action) > theory (falsify by market) > law (falsify by limits- or ‘exhaustion’ if you prefer)

Truth: Replaced by Testimony (categorically, internally, operationally, externally, rational, reciprocal

Ethics: replaced by Reciprocity ((productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer free of …)

Politics: Rule of law, professional judiciary, monarchy as judge of last resort, houses for classes for markets of commons, mixed economy, soft demonstrated (market) eugenics, direction of savings to the production of commons.

Strategy: most rapid adaptability (rate of evolution)

Aesthetics: Transcendence (Evolution)

Those are are all decidable propositions (Truths). That does not mean that one cannot express or a group cannot express different preferences.

It’s hard to accept but philosophy in the pursuit of truth has ended. All philosophy can tell us is choice (preference) because preferences are not true. Philosophy as a method of moral fictionalism survives in Europe. Philosophy as propaganda sophistry and deceit exists everywhere.

But truth and decidability have been usurped entirely by science: testimony.

This is why philosophy departments are now included with religion in libraries and in academic budgets.

Q: Curt, is your field (philosophy) art or science

(FB 1546464457 Timestamp)

—“Curt, is your field (philosophy) art or science?”— Francesco Principi

As I understand my work, given that science is an extension of the law, these are the three options:

1. Law, Sciences(Logics/Mathematics), Measurements. -vs- reality, competition, and testimony w/ warranty THE TRUE (EXISTENTIAL/REAL) – I consider this a ‘a science’.

-vs-

2. Philosophy, Literature, History, -vs- sophism, justification, and deceit w/o warranty THE IDEAL – I consider this an ‘art’.

-vs-

3. Theology, Scripture, Mythology -vs- supernaturalism, authoritarianism, and deceit w/o warranty THE FANTASY(IMAGINARY) – i consider this a ‘fraud or deceit’

In other words, I am not sure that the old versions of these terms have any meaning. I consider philosophy that which is yet unsolved in the narrow sense, OR the imagination of possible worlds (fantasy literature) in the broader sense.

So in the narrow sense I see philosophy closed (completed), and what was philosophy of ‘the big questions’ are solved. In the broad sense of imagining and reconstructing relations that we might prefer or that might be good, there will never be an end to that category of philosophizing.

As far as I know theorizing about the true and possible has replaced philosophizing, and theorizing completely under testimonialism has replaced the limited theorizing of the 19th and 20th century sciences.

So I tend to say I am a philosopher of natural law because it is all people can understand in the historical context of the available term.

But, technically speaking, what I understand that I am doing is the science of the law. Which in itself I think is what natural law must eventually mean. Where natural law and the laws of nature are separated only by conscious choice.

And so I don’t see any difference between science and law other than warranty. And as we have seen, science without warranty of due diligence is largely pseudoscience. and pseudoscience is just another term for fraud.

So as I understand it, truth = law, and all else are sub-grammars of that law if that is all that is required to solve that problem, or deciets that violate that law.

1. The Physical Laws (invariability),

2. the Natural Law (decidability),

3. History, and Literature (meaning), …

… are the only non-false domains and methods of inquiry remaining.

Drug addicts defend their habits. There are many ways of drugging the mind. Lies are the most common of them.

And stoicism, family, oath-feast-festival, and our nation of all those that came before, all those that are, and all those that are yet to be, are the cure for that addiction.

Q: Curt, What is your innovation on popper in epistemology, science, and truth?

–“Curt, I believe I already know the answer to this, but believe it to be valuable to your general audience nonetheless: what is your innovation on Popper in epistemology, science, and truth?”—Moritz Bierling

GREAT QUESTION. THANKS.

It’s very hard to do this question justice in a few thousand words. But tend to think of it as in the last century we had a lot of thinkers basically fail to complete the scientific method and thereby create a test of non-falseness like we do in law. And they couldn’t do it.

What I’ve done, because I”ve been lucky enough to spend most of my life working with “computable” systems – meaning **existentially possible to construct through a series of operations** is supply the habits of strict operational construction with requirements for existential possibiity, to the scientific method, and complete what those thinkers failed to discover.

POPPER

Popper applied Jewish critique, (criticism, which evolved into cultural marxism), to science, as “falsificationism”. Meaning, the way to avoid pseudoscience is to require that a statement be falsifiable.

He did this because pseudoscience was rapidly expanding under the popularity of authoritarian socialism, as much as because he was simply interested in philosophy. He was trying to preserve intellectual cosmopolitanism (Jewish diasporism), and this culminated in his work “The Open Society” which is what Soros uses as his ‘plan’.

Now, in his efforts to correct science, he developed a set of ideas that I will try to reduce to these:

1. Falsification (critique, criticism) vs justificationism (excuses)

2. Critical Rationalism: we can

3. Critical Preference: we cannot know which theory is more likely true. there is no method of decidability.

4. Verisimilitude through Problem->Theory->Test

5. That science, by verisimilitude, is conducted as a MORAL (social, normative) process, and that scientific discovery was accomplished by moral means.

BUT THIS IS THE PROBLEM

Unempirical: his statements are logical not empirical, and he never did any research, nor has any been formally done.

Costs: he, like most philosophers, continues the Aristotelian tradition of ignoring costs. Costs provide us with information about which theories we can afford to pursue. Historically then, we can empirically demonstrate that man uses costs as methods of decidability.

Decidability: Costs provide decidability, for the simple reason that just as we pursue the least cost methods of research, nature evolves using the least cost method of evolution. It’s only humans that can choose to do the expensive thing and take a risk. Nature can’t do that. Nature is tightly deterministic. Man is only loosely deterministic. Because all of us guess a future and see if we can achieve it.

Falsification: Falsification is not very precise, and he did not see the dimensions. So he did not restate the scientific method as a series of dimensional tests equal to the dimensional tests of mathematics. So categories(identity), math(relations), logic (words/membership), operations (costs/existence), morality (choice/cooperation), and scope (full accounting) were each methods of falsification, that a scientific statement would have to pass.

Verisimilitude: Because costs do determine the progress of our investigations, our knowledge evolves just as organisms evolve, planets evolve, solar systems, galaxies, and the universe. What differs is the cost of inquiry in each culture. White people happen to have the lowest cost of inquiry because they have a high trust civilization where the norm of truth is highly defended as (nearly sacred) public property.

Physical absence vs Social presence of first causes. Unable to distinguish between the problem of instrumentation in the physical sciences in the absence of knowledge of first causes (‘nature’s choice’), versus the problem of subjective instrumentation in the social sciences, in the presence of first causes (sympathetic choice)

The Cycle

Problem -> Theory -> Test is actually … incomplete.

The correct structure is:

Perception(random) ->

…Free association (searching) ->

……Hypothesis (wayfinding) ->

………Criticism(test – individual investment) ->

…………Theory (recipe/route) ->

……………Social Criticism (common investment) ->

………………Law (exhaustion – return on investment) ->

…………………Survival (Perfect Parsimony – incorporation into norms) ->

……………………Tautology ( invisible – assumed world structure )

This long chain that represents the evolutionary survival of ideas, can be broken into these sections:

1 – Perception -> free association(searching) -> identity (opportunity)

2 – Question (Problem)

3 – Iterative Criticism( Survival!!! )

………..wayfinding (criticism) / Hypothesis.  Wayfinding is a form of criticizing an idea.

………..criticism / theory / personal use

………..testing / law / general use

………..recognition / survival / universal use

………..identity / tautology / integration into world view.

DIMENSIONS OF CRITICISM

The dimensions of criticism in pursuit of Determinism (Regularity, Predictability, “true”)

– categorical consistency (identity)

– internal consistency (logical) (mathematical/relations, linguistic/sets)

– external consistency (empirical correspondence)

– existential consistency (existential possibility)

– moral consistency (symmetric non imposition)

– scope consistency (full accounting, limits, parsimony)

If a statement (promises) or theory passes all of these tests it is very hard for it to still contain their opposites:

– error in its many forms

– bias – wishful thinking in its many forms.

– suggestion – pleading – guilting – shaming – complimenting

– obscurantism, pseudorationalism, pseudoscience – overloading

– lying and deceit in their many forms.

TRUTH

Truth is the most parsimonious operational description that we can give short of a tautology. In other words, truth is the search FOR TRUE NAMES.

MORE

I have also discussed truth in quite a bit of depth elsewhere so I don’t feel its important to discuss it here.

SUMMARY

So what I have attempted to do is ‘complete’ the scientific method, that popper started upon. It is not particular to science, but to any TESTIMONY we might attempt to give.

The consequence of doing so is that philosophy, morality, law, and science are now synonyms using the same language and structure.

Which kind of floored me actually.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Q: Testimony – P Is the Expression of Our Ancient Traditions.

TESTIMONY – P IS SCIENTIFIC(LOGICAL, OPERATIONAL, EMPIRICAL) ARTICULATION OF OUR ANCIENT TRADITIONS.

by Scott Strong

What’s brilliant about you Curt is your ability to articulate it all so methodically. The reality is these Western ideas weren’t really formed by one great philosopher but are rather an an hod, kit-bashed collection of mostly intuitive practices that our ancestors accumulated, not out of some great philosophy or moral conviction, so much as pure pragmatism in that they were the best practices that simply worked and because if people did things that didn’t work, the group would die in battle, or starve in the lean winter months.

Propertarianism is not your invention, but rather your codification and articulation of the mostly intuitive unconscious pragmatic wisdom of our ancestors.

===

That’s right. I just wrote it down for the first time the way others have written their bibles of primitive thought in primitive language. It may not have been possible to our body of advanced thought until we had an advanced language to write it in. But we’ve been practicing it for thousands of years. And that’s why propertarianism is a product of our European civilization, not me – i’m not that important and our ancestors are. And that is why it has more legitimacy than some other nonsense some philosopher pulled out of his had. I’m just a scientists discovering and capturing the rules of western civilization.

I’m just doing natural science in the natural law of our people – writing down the formulae.

Turns out like this: Hayek is the Philosopher. I’m the Logician.

Apr 29, 2020, 9:18 AM

It’s more that Hayek is the philosopher and I’m the logician – but I”m only the logician because my generation included Gary Becker’s application of economics to all social science, Hoppe’s near analytic reduction of property to a system of measurement, the popperian-falsificationary and scientific method debate was still in progress, the revolutions of algorithmic programming, the genetic revolution and the cognitive science revolution. Great insights are the result of being born in a time where the generations before have distilled various streams into a river of knowledge for one to bathe in.

Hayek’s Renunciation Of Conservatism – A Failure Of His Own

Hayek is somewhat famous for his essay “Why I am not a conservative.”

In that essay, he states that conservatism has no solution to offer us.

But Hayek, along with Popper, Mises, Parsons, and the more sociological Pareto, Burkheim and Weber, all failed to provide us with that solution. They all tried and failed. Pehaps Hayek and Popper made the most theoretically valuable attempts. Perhaps, Pareto, Burkheim and Weber made the most valuable observations. But the movement failed. It failed to provide a scientific solution, or even a rational one. It failed because it could not produce a set of actions by which people, particularly the political elites. could adapt to new economic and technological circumstances, which was the rising influence of the prior peasantry due to economic participation, and education. THey had no counter to the Marxian Luddite world view.

Unfortuately, although Hayek and Popper both emphasized the knoweldge problem, they still operated in ineffective terms – ineffective causality. Hayek, who got very close to the solution, relied on his work, the sensory order, and thereby made the same mistakes as did Hume, Kant and Mill – failing to sufficiently understand the nature of the human mind in terms of what is NOT possible for it to understand, as well as how it understood. At least Keynes came up with an abstract mathematical principle that would allow politicians to work with tools at their disposal.

Mises came closest, by picking up after Weber’s statement that most social advancement was to do with rules and tools for humans to make decisions, with the economic calculation argument. And while it’s insufficient on it’s own as they expressed it, the calculation argument, was closer to than answer than the various historical or psychological and the Misesian Logical, or the Hayekian sensory models.

Conservatism is a Pareto-residue. A military class’ value system. It is a prescription against hubris. It acknowledges that we are most easily misled by our vanities and perceptions, and that political hubris is most often a political downfall, rather than an heroic political achievement. It says if we do not understand it we should tread lightly, becaus the costs of failure are dear.

As such, it is a prescription of what NOT to do, in a world where we are increasingly empowered to take personal and political actions, yet because of prosperity, we are isolated in time from the outcome of those decisions, and as such, commit the act of hubris, beccause we confuse our abilty to sense an outcome with the fact that that outcome is simply slower to be detectable by our perceptoins.

However, we must act. We must create political actions. Even if those actions are simply to prevent the hubris of others in our politiy from harming us by the results of their folly.

And to act we must understand what is possible and impossible for people within a polity, or at least, beneficial and harmful to us and our fellows.

And conservatism as it is constructed, uses a language of history and largely expresses a condemnation of the Greek concept of hubris. These prohibitions are not quite a religion, and not quite a science. They are a set of observations and limitations. They tell us what not to do, while we do what we know how to do. They warn us about using our pretense of knowledge. They are not a form of skepticism, but a warning against egoism.

But, as a set of principles for an activist, participatory government, they are not sufficient to define what actions we may take as a polity. As limitations for Kings and Oligarchs, they are tribal wisdom. But as wisdom for activist democrats, they are both impossible and uninformative.

In a democratic polity, and perhaps, even a republican polity, Conservatism must become a science in order to combat what are the normal human political preferences that are the outcome of each generation’s politicians, serving each generation’s young, by trying to apply the principles of the family, tribe and clan to the extended order of human cooperation that we call the market, but which is effectively a highly complex information system between people of varied ability, knowledge and desires. And the market is a tool that exists precisely because we cannot know as a group, what many individuals know as individuals. It is a tool mandated by our political ignorance.

It is only science, or the force of scientific argument, that allows us to make decisive political movement in the face of the ignorance and error in the polity due to necessary human ignorance.

All the great minds have failed to create a science of politics.

Hayek failed. He called himself a liberal. Popper did as well. Most of these great thinkers were classical liberals or libertarians – which means a cautious, market oriented conservative. They attempted to discover a science by which to convince members of the polity, or at least their elites, what NOT to do. They were scientists searching for truth to employ in political coercion. They were members of a class that would not be disenfranchised, or diminished, or see their people harmed by the fashionability of democracy, and it’s simplistic view that prosperity could be generated by government, rather than encouraged and protected by government.

In time, Mandelbrot came closer. The behavioral economists closer still. We have seen the recent demonstrated failure of mathematical idealism in economics, and therefore politics – economics being the argumentative scripture of modern politics. But even the behavioral economists are postiviists. THey measure without knowing what they measure, and all of their measurement simply confirms what is common sense, and disproves the ideal type that economists seek to express with their formulae.

The science that the great thinkers of the last century attempted to discover is not a form of sentiment, or emotion, or cognitive bias, but calculation. Calculation in the broadest sense. Calculation in the sense of the tools human memory must make use of in order to compare possible outcomes.

And that process, when understood is quantifiable. It is measurable. It can be tested. It can be proven by testing. It is enormously complicated. But we should not confuse the difficulty of obtaining the data with the value of possessing it. We codified laws. We wrote constitutions. We contrived philosophies. We conducted wars, and we built nations and complex governments. Surely we can solve the greatest problem of human conceptual history, politics, even to the extent of including Hume’s problem of induction.

The properties of individual human memory are the fractal patterns of Mandelbrot’s observations.

Society prospers or dies because it’s tools of calculation keep pace with it’s birth rate. A government’s purpose, if it has one, is to spread calculability. What it does instead is spread taxes, which distort calculability. We do not live in the law-and-tax world any longer. We live in the credit and calculability world. While there will always be laws, laws are only important for those who abandon market participation – what we define as criminals.

Our problem is to insert as much calculative ability into society and therefore into politics. So that rational arguments can be made. So that irrational arguments can be exposed. So that instead of class warfare there is class migration and class cooperation. So that we can cease being a society of laws – prohibitions and punishments, and instead become a society of actions – ambitions and compensations.

Conservatism currently simply assumes those ambitions and compensations without being able to articulate them, or understand their causes.. But it does not comprehend that there are ambitions and compensations that the market CANNOT create. And we cannot make political judgments among the myriad of possibilities, nor stay within the Pareto-Optimum of helping without hurting, without the tools by which to cooperate politically in large numbers while avoiding the problem of creating a self-interested corrupting bureaucracy which simply exploits producers for it’s own benefit, while arguing that exploitation is for the common good.

We need to get government off the drug of secular humanism, the food of taxes, and the fantasy of laws.

We need to build the calculative society.

We need to get away from the religion of secular humanism, and the mystic luddite fantasy of socialism. WE can have our cake and eat it too , if we can measure the ingredients. We can have low taxes and redistribution. We can have small government and large public expenditure. We can cooperate between classes instead of foment class hatred. We can have it all, if we reward our risk takers and producers and redistribute to our laborers and consumers. We can avoid hubris. Hubris is simply the warning that we cannot perceive what we cannot measure, so do not interfere in that which cannot be measured. It is still hubris if you can’t sense or percieve it. It is still hubris if you cannot measure it. And in politics hubris is simply violence and theft. But it is not hubris if you can measure it, and calculate it.

The great thinkers failed to give us the the calculative society. The philosophers failed. The economists failed. They had the answer in their grasp.

We can have the calculative society. And that calculative society is a science of Conservatism.

Conservatism Is Not A Longing For The Past – It’s A Capitalization Strategy.

Being a conservative simply means taking a gradual approach to social change and particularly with respect to the financial, family and military traditions that affect status and political power, which they are skeptical of. Conservatism means being skeptical that our visions of the future will come true, and looking at the world as what people ACTUALLY DO not what we WISH they would do. In that sense, conservatism is historically scientific even if linguistically archaic. Conversely, while liberalism is linguistically modern, it is utopian, idealistic, contra-observation, contra-history, and therefore anything but scientific. The differences between these two philosophies are vast and numerous, but the one that is most important, is the difference between the reliance abstractions from experience in conservatism, and the reliance on abstracting experiences in liberalism. This may seem a complex idea, but liberals try to extrapolate the daily experience into the extended order of human cooperation. THis is called ‘induction’. Conservatives synthesize the actual experience of aggregate human activity from history. This is called ‘deduction’. Induction is a process that we are not sure, despite the vast effort of philosophers, exists. In other words liberalism if faulty on scientific grounds. It is a religion.

This language problem has always been an issue for conservatives. Liberal dictums may sound scientifically sound if one induces from experience. Conservative (dictums) are sensible when one deduces from abstractions of history. And everyone must use these shortcuts, because too few of us possess the knowledge to make rational judgements and therefore must rely upon basic principles when making decisions. In fact, rational thought is applied to the vast minority of choices. Most decisions are made by habit. The rest according to shortcuts.

For the vast majority of people from either conservative or liberal, neither induction or deduction is a rational process of choice, but instead, a process of identifying analogistic sentiments: it’s the act of pattern recognition rather than reason. Pareto called this process of pattern recognition “residues and derivations”, others called them “Metaphysical Judgements” or “Sentiments”. Contemporary thinkers and public intellectuals call them “beliefs” or “biases”, or “science or religion”. And our language incorporates these different sentiments. Our arguments do as well. Our narratives, myths, popular fiction, entertainment, status aspirations do. But so do your political rhetoric, which, because reason would be a technique unavailable to the masses, rely entirely on a complex web of constantly warring sentiments wherein the citizenry seeks confirmation bias, rather than a simple argument consisting of reason, where the citizenry seeks both consensus and falsification of their biases. In other words, where people are skeptical – conservative and rational.

Utopianism is a technology that people use during periods of prosperity. Because we have been artificially prosperous due to the discovery and exploitation of a continent, we as a nation are notorious for predicting an optimistic future that cannot or has not occurred. The public dialog over the causes of our prosperity is often inaccurate and self-congratualtory rather than factual. We have transformed our culture of evangelical christianity into one of evangelical democratic secular humanism.

Conservatives are skeptics. They may speak in antiquated language, because antiquity is their source of their language. They may fail to articulate their position effectively in contemporary terms because of that language, but regardless of the source of their language, the content of their language is strategic, intelligible and rational. And it is not just a language, but a methodology that represents their strategy for social order. They ACT conservatively, think conservatively, and treat the world conservatively.

This conservative strategy and conservative activities are why conservatives are, in general, more prosperous – and frankly, happy. And the sacrifices that they make in order to be prosperous are material to them. They remember them. And therefore they resent those sacrifices being ’spent’ by others who do not make the same sacrifices.

Monetarists and capitalists are not conservatives. They may hide under conservatism. But they are not conservatives. The conservative class is a military, middle and craftsman class and it always has been and always will be. It is the ‘residue’ of the european fraternal order of soldiers at the bottom, and at the top, it’s a ‘residue’ of the middle class movement that revised and adopted civic republicanism during the enlightenment as a way of transferring power from the kings and church to the middle class. it is an alliance of the military and middle class.

Liberalism (socialism, communism) is a ‘residue’ of a union of the priestly cast and the peasantry. Academia is simply an outgrowth of the church. The peasantry has always allied with the church, and the church has always had power because of it’s support by the peasantry.

And that said, we do not have a separation of church and state. Our state religion is now democratic secular humanism. We are now a state-run-religion using the myth of division of church and state to oppress (or reform) religions so that we can have a state sponsored church.

That’s it. That’s the articulated conservative position.

The republican party collects conservative coalitions. The republican party is not a conservative party. conservatives join the republicans because they have no choice. They see the party as corrupt.

People are complex and only join parties because of limited choice mandated by our ‘winner takes all’ form of government, which fosters class warfare.

In fact, all political decisions exist on a spectrum or bell curve. There are a myriad of political decisions to be made. There are a myriad of people with different abilities to understand each political opinion. Each person is interested in a myriad of decisions. Parties are collections of people with opinions. Very skilled people tend to be highly unsatisfied with party choices. Very unskilled people tend to simply support their party of nearest interest. Parties therefore pick platforms that make enough people happy that they can get into power.

Arguing that conservatives want to keep things asa they are, is a silly argument. The objection is simply illogical. The question instead, is whether liberals propose a solution that conservatives can live with, and wether conservatives can propose a solution that liberals can live with.

The difference between social classes are differences in Time Preferences (between “consume” or “capitalize”, or gratification now versus gratification later). Longer (lower) time preferences are only possible if you have the ability to comprehend long term time preferences. This is another reason why social classes are organized by intelligence, and why a market economy tends to organize us into economic classes according to our application of intelligence to the satisfaction of OTHER PEOPLES WANTS, instead of our own. Time preference affects not only a dimension covering an individual’s perception of gratification. It’s a second dimension that describes whether his gratification now or later is served by providing solutions to himself or to others. This is the moral lesson of Adam Smith – that capitalism creates a virtuous cycle.

If we had listened to the liberals in the last century we would have ended up like either Russia or China. If we had listened to conservatives we would not have had our progressive social changes, but we would not have corrupted our financial system using Kenesnian inflation. It’s the competition of ideas that gives us the choice as a body politic.

It is the combination of LIBERAL OBJECTIVES and CONSERVATIVE METHODS that provides the means of achieving shared goals.

Lets say that again. Liberal objectives are moral desires. Conservatives methods are moral means. It requires both these tools to achieve moral ends. The problem is, conservative methods take time because they require the learning and adaptation of people to calculative processes. These processes have nothing to do with religion. Christianity is largely a religion of the poor. Protestantism is perhaps the most important religion for generating wealth in the west as it is a class religion. Secular humanism is a feminine religion just as Aryanism (expansionist civic republican tradition of the initiatic fraternal order of city-defending soldiers) is a masculine religion. We do not need all to believe one thing, share one goal, work according to the same rules. If we did, we’d break the principle of the division of knowledge, labor, time, and intelligence.

WHat people really want when they seek universal agreement is to concentrate labor, knowledge, time and intelligence on their goals at the expense of other people’s goals. Since people are unequal in their ability, in their class goals, in their cultural goals, in their age and experience, in their knowledge and in their intelligence, then we must divide up our actions into bits and pieces which we cooperate with each other to achieve.

Democracy as we have implemented it is a winner-take-all political order. It foments class warfare. It does not foment class cooperation.

We need a government that is a return to the division of labor and division of classes and time preferences.

Democracy is a failure as we have implemented it. Because we confuse the value of the transformation of power inherent in democracy with the universal aspiration of classes, cultures, ages, generations, and abilities.

 

Q: It’s A Function of the Right Place At The Right Time

(to others)

I would say that I was able to complete the program – the completion of the scientific enlightenment because I was lucky enough to live in an era of software programming, and lucky enough to understand how the philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth century failed, because of that ‘odd’ exposure. If I had to say who was most influential it would be popper’s inability to complete his program, mises error in miscasting praxeology, hoppe’s success in using property as a unit of commensurability despite the error in his dependence upon kantian rationalism; and the observation that hayek came very close in his work on the law, but for his reliance ( like so many others) upon is perception of psychology rather than the computability and cognitive science that we have today. But that I was most able to articulate the argument clearly by combining those failures with the near successes of Hilbert,Brouwer, Bridgman in other fields.

I think aside from (a) programming, (b) we have sufficient information about the failings of mathematics in modeling (Not describing) economic phenomenon, (c) we have exceptional information on cognitive science and genetics (d) we have enough evidence of voting patterns under democracy, and (e) it is finally possible because of the internet to access information rapidly enough that if one works very hard it is possible to master multiple fields in one human lifetime.

So my ability to complete the program and provide the Wilsonian Synthesis ( solve the unification of science, biology, philosophy, ethics, law, economics, and politics,) was due largely to existing at the right point in time, with so many men who ca me so close just one or two or three generations before me.

Unfortunately, this is going to be one of those issues just like reason (aristotle) , rationalism (Descartes) and epiricism (Bacon, locke smith hume, darwin, menger, maxwell, spencer etc ) that is going to be as unpleasant to adapt to.