We Platonists Shall Have the Victory Over Materialists

March 21, 2013 10 Comments

The eternal One, the Dyad and the Triad.

The eternal One, the Dyad and the Triad.

By: Jay

Famous philosopher Thomas Nagel recently published a book questioning the hallowed dogma of strict, reductionist materialism.  I have not read the book, but a philosopher friend recommended it to me.  It’s nice to see someone daring to challenge the ridiculous control grid that is modern so-called academia.  In a similar vein this week, a friend set up a Google chat where I was able to meet an MIT professor and debate certain questions relating to materialism and Platonism.  While I have to tread lightly here, I want to make it clear that I am not advocating everything Plato taught.  However, in the course of debating academics and thinkers, appeals to the hallowed tradition of Platonism and mathematics seems to have some weight as an inroad.  I don’t think I made much progress in my discussion/debate with the MIT chap, but it illustrates for me further confirmation of the correctness of my own positions on metaphysics.

In the course of this conversation several ideas came to mind that highlight the impossibility of rank materialism.  Many of them have been highlighted here before, but it’s always good to rehearse them, since modernity is so committed to this dogma without question.  The first faulty presupposition is naive empiricism.  The scientific and academic establishment is still dominated by naive empiricism as its sole epistemological approach.  Believe anything you want, in fact, just so long as undergirding all of it is the ridiculous idea that “all knowledge comes through sense experience.”  This is the ancient error of the sophists, nominalists and Enlightenment empiricists.

Caught up in the populist ideas of their times, these strands of philosophers and thinkers simply assumed that the intellectual climate that fostered “progress” was and is only had in circles that adhere to this doctrine.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Since most in this school follow some form of what they would term “logic,” it is very easy to demonstrate that the claim “all knowledge comes through sense experience” is false by appealing to the sentence itself.  The claim itself is an exceptionally strong universal claim about both knowledge and metaphysics.  Given the propensity of those in this strand to bully theists for unsubstantiated claims, there is no possible way, on empirical grounds, to prove such a claim.  The claim itself necessarily entails a whole host of metaphysical preconditions, too, which are anathema to naive empiricism.   So the very dogmatic claim of naive empiricism, which even W.V.O. Quine, one of their own, showed was an impossible claim, is still quite impossible.  In fact, you can read David Hume himself, the grandfather of modern atheistic materialism, for an elaborate explanation of how empiricism necessarily entails radical skepticism and is therefore utterly destructive to all knowledge.  For example, in the Weekly Standard piece on Nagel’s recent workshop with materialists, we read: Read more of this post

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Light and the Feel of Numbers

December 4, 2012 7 Comments

Art by Michael Whelan

Art by Michael Whelan

By: Jay

I once watched a show on a young girl named January who was a schizophrenic. Childhood schizophrenia is not a common mental disorder, but what fascinated me in this particular case was the fascination January had with numbers. In fact, she even “felt” numbers and had a certain emotional relationship to them. What immediately struck me was the insight in the midst of this dark situation that January gave: what if, aside from her real mental problems, January was actually on to something—something that her parents and counselors had never considered. What if January was right, and that numbers do have a “feel”?

I once interviewed a recognized mathematical genius who explained that when he was younger, math was difficult because he was more interested in the look of the numbers (as symbolic representations), than in the actual conceptual manipulations of the integers. In both of these examples we have a different perspective on something very common: the look and feel of a number. Similar statements are also made by those who experience altered states of consciousness on drugs, particularly hallucinogens. In those cases, the senses are often mixed up, and so numbers might be mistakenly thought to have a “taste.” While these three cases are not “proofs” per se, they do point in the direction of something I’ve intuited for a few years now.

In the modern Western world nothing is more divorced from one another than the supposed domain of numbers, reason, and logic, set over against the supposed independent domain of feeling, intuition and aesthetic creativity. In another sense, we have right brain versus left brain. The degeneration and collapse of the West is, as I have argued many times, intimately tied to the division of the sciences into specialized, discreet unrelated “fields,” resulting in a compartmentalization of knowledge.

This compartmentalization actually has a tremendous effect of stunting any real progress, leading to a bunch of incompetent drones who (in their minds) master “biology” or “physics” with a ridiculously myopic, stunted, and philosophically nonsensical, contradictory worldview. The average “science” major walks away with his government certificate certifying sound and fury signifying nothing: this “graduate” could no more think his way out of a paper bag than he could give a coherent explanation of the supposed subjects he has “mastered” by repeating socially engineered textbooks by rote. Those who study other exceedingly worthless fields like “sociology” are even more foolish. Read more of this post

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Skynet is Real: Alchemists, Exemplarism and Techgnosis (Update)

March 16, 2012 5 Comments

The sphinx which appeared in Wells' Time Machine. The sphinx is the cherub who guards and controls space and time.

By: Jay

UPDATE Below!

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At the end of H.G. Wells’ Outlines of History, he speaks about the “rise of the machines” and their ability to allay the toils of men, granting them more leisure for scientific products, art, and other harmonious progressive pursuits.  Education will become universal, and a better world will ensue.  Wells was, to be fair, spot on with many of his sci-fi predictions.  One can’t but notice that this article confirms his claims from The Time Machine concerning the devolution into “stunted pig-goblin creatures” to quote Alex Jones, likened to the Morlocks, while the elites will become like the Eloi.

However, the rise of the machines has been wilder than even Wells could have imagined, and will probably not be the universal utopia Outlines imagines, but something closer to the dystopia of The Time Machine.  In fact, we have reached the point where A.I. is nearing the ability of what we see in many science fiction films and novels, yet I agree with the affirmation of Douglas Hofstadter in Godel, Escher, Bach that we will not achieve self-awareness.   Even if this did occur, there is no certain test to determine the existence of “self-awareness,” and the modern scientists who argue to no end against the soul or mind must also take their dogma of the inability to “prove consciousness” and apply it to the golem.  On their basis, you could no more prove one than the other.   So the reductionists who think consciousness is merely matter have no problem identifying humans as “more complex” computers (like Daniel Dennett).  Nevermind that they are all guilty of the naturalistic fallacy.

In effect, this is a Prometheus situation, and is precisely the goal the occultists, alchemists and “scientists” have sought for millennia.  Don’t be fooled by the propaganda of the “new atheists” and sciencey labcoaters: the real secret is that the mysteries are real.  Granted, many of the “Illuminists” are of an atheistic and rationalist bent (and the actual Illuminati were Enlightenment rationalists), but there is a definite esotericism behind the creation of the golem.  Atheism itself can become a form superstition, as I’ve written many times on this blog.  I want to make clear, though, that I’m not anti-technology, nor am I saying I disagree with these goals.  Clearly the Enlightenment thinkers were right–in fact, some of them are central to the mathematics behind all this, as well as to religion and metaphysics and esoterism, such as Leibniz.  Newton, too, was an esotericist, and other examples can be given such as Nikola Tesla and Wolfgang Pauli. Read more of this post

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Language Event, Narrative Structure and God

July 29, 2010 3 Comments

The movement upward in this consideration as presented is fractal-esque

By: Jay 

I propose a modified form of the transcendental argument for God’s existence. Not that it’s different, but it’s an aspect to the argument I’ve never seen previous proponents take. It occurred to me while reading Alisdair MacIntyre and while considering some of what Husserl and Karl Otto Appel have said. But of course, debates get old. They get old as I get old, maybe. Anyway, the subject matter itself is still worthy of reflection, even if one chooses not to engage in debate. Didn’t debate used to be a respected art? yes. But in our INGSOC modernity, questioning is itself suspect. But to the point. 

MacIntyre points out that there is a kind of narrative structure for any meaningful conversation to take place. He makes a convincing case in his piece mentioned above. It occurred to me that for the localized instance of conversation to make sense, though, there has to be a larger narrative structure within which the localized conversation takes place. MacIntyre’s The Virtues, The Unity of a Human Life and the Concept of a Tradition gives an example along the lines of approaching someone gardening. To say a nonsense statement like “flight of the condor eats cheese wings perpetually,” has no meaning. In fact, to say even a meaningful phrase assumes some sort of context, such as, “how is the gardening coming?” or something of that nature. So why is it that we do one and not the other? Deconstructionists, relativists, nihilists, and so on, can say that it’s just utilitarian and social convention that has caused to use certain sounds in a certain way to stand for certain things, and that we evolved this way, blah blah blah. 

But this kind of simple, mundane interaction doesn’t just show a kind of appropriateness to the content of what can be said, it also evidences a narrative structure. For example, generally, such a conversation would have a greeting, middle, and climax. Granted not always per se, but even a passing hello, has a kind of narrative structure to it, with an intended meaning that one party has, that the other party receives and many or may not acknowledge. Again, the intentions obviously vary as well as the received meanings and responses, but none of this changes the loosely narrative structure of such interactions. Read more of this post

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