Category: Science, Physics, and Philosophy of Science

AN EXPLANATION OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE 20th CENTURY

(we are all scientists now)

In retrospect, the first wave of the enlightenment failed by not articulating transcendence but merely ‘good’. Darwin, Spencer and Nietzsche provided existential transcendence: evolution. Maxwell and Poincare (and later Einstein) provided evidence of our possibility of physical transcendence. The social scientists (Menger, Weber, Pareto, Durkheim) and the legalists (Jefferson, Hayek) came very close to providing the rule of ethical, social and political transcendence: Reciprocity. And despite Popper’s stumbling upon falsification and Mises’, Brouwer/Poincare/Hilbert, Bridgman, and Turing stumbling upon Operationalism in all its forms, in all their fields, I think it was the failed pursuit of logic as a science in its own as a defense of philosophy against science that begins with Wittgenstein, Russell, and Whitehead that opened the door for the attack on western civilization through the masses, using Abrahamism (deception using suggestion through narrative conflation and overloading), just as Abrahamic Marxism had been used immediately prior, and just as Abrahamic religion had been used as a means of uniting the dysgenic underclasses through deception against the eugenic aristocracy and their use of Deflationary Truth in the ancient world.

Their (typical) victorian vanity, as if philosophy was not the pursuit of law but a puzzle from a detective novel with which one could display one’s wit, produced a catastrophic failure for our civilization. Linguistic philosophy was a failed program largely because there is nothing in it that cannot be produced in mathematics alone. Mathematics, even if practiced deductively, is always reducible to operations, with the single exception of the law of the excluded middle – an exception which is only necessary for scale independence. And for language to function meaningfully requires action, sequence, and time – leaving linguistic philosophy the only non-operational and therefore ideal (if not magical) discipline.

So the operational revolution that was needed in both linguistic philosophy, law, and economics, was produced in computer science under Turing. Unfortunately, this failure of the philosophers not only made room for, but assisted in the replacement of Marxist pseudoscience with Postmodern pseudo-rationalism in the 60’s – itself the most novel innovation in the art of lying since the invention of Abrahamism.

So, my generation, raised with computer science, computability, algorithmic operations, object oriented analysis, the representation of existential reality using relational database design (vs set ideal set theory of language as a false bridge between mathematics and algorithms), has developed an intuitive antagonistic reaction to both linguistic idealism, postmodern pseudo-rationalism, marxist (boazian, freudian, cantorian) pseudoscience. Hence the libertarianism of the technology sector – at least until recent massive asian immigration.

So for this reason, philosophy is being reformed by people like myself, who have been raised in the discipline of computability and algorithms, well outside of philosophy departments, and who solved the problem that 20th century philosophy failed to: the deflation of the logic of language into only mathematics (sets), and only algorithms(language). And by doing so, all the disciplines: the logic of identity, the logic of mathematics, the logic of sets, the logic of operations, the logic of rational choice, and the logic of reciprocity, each correspond to a single dimension of existential and actionable reality. Thereby removing all mystery behind the logics.

Next, by overthrowing the ancient conflation of moral and legal justification, including Kant’s apriorism (all via-positiva), and replacing it with science’s criticism (all via-negativa), we are able to unite law, morality, philosophy, and science into a single discipline: the discipline of providing warranty of due diligence by tests of consistency in each dimension of actionable reality applicable to the testimony (speech) we publish (speak in the commons).

Everyone is a scientist now. Or else he is a mystic. The middle ground – the ideal – is gone. Plato is dead. Abraham is dead. Buddha limps along. Confucius survives. And Aristotle thrives.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine