Sunday, October 17, 2021

EPISTEMOLOGY: 5 COGNITIVE SALADS THAT DESTROY REASON

The clusterf*ck of seemingly disparate fields as Covid-19 narratives, transhumanism, scientism and general liberal-leftie craziness can be reduced to one single, cognitive set of errors rooted in the Materialist approach to Man. The problem is not widely recognized and understood, because it has the capacity of bringing down the entire Western notion of what constitutes science. We will try to shed a layman's light on the issue in these pages. 


Oct. 16, 2021 Dr. Kevin Homer in War Room Pandemic: High Priest Fauci And Elites Defined An Orthodox Narrative On Secret Data.

As Dr. Kevin Homer explains in the video, the priesthood of Covid-19 are actually pushing a form of religion, not science. A thing called the freedom of enquiry has been canceled. We are left with Scientism, or Rationalism. But science proper also harbors some serious flaws since Hume and Descartes introduced radical Skepticism into the concept. But they are by no means the only perpetrators. 

The essence of the thing
As we have seen in the previous posting on this subject on Sep. 30, 2021, "WHY LIBERALS CAN'T ANSWER A BASIC QUESTION" (scroll down), the first error denies the existence of essences. 

When you lump red apples and fire engines together because both are red, you might be dropping essences. Colors are accidents or properties of things, while fruits and vehicles are things in themselves and entirely incomparable categories of beings. 

You might laugh when postmodernists assert such assaults on logic, but the dropping of essences can become a lot more subtle than the obvious. 

While the humaniora were most notable in the vanguard of postmodern academic subversion, the actual root of the problem lies in the 'hard' field of Mathematics. Here the reality of material quantity meets the intellectual world of ideas. 

Idea versus Reality
A mathematical quantity is merely an idea. We can't imagine a dozen or a hundred things without knowing its quality. It begs the question, a hundred what? Zero as such does not exist. It is a mathematical tool, as all negative numbers are. Have you ever seen -2 people sitting in a park? A true circle for instance cannot even exist in reality.

The intellect abstracts the general idea of for example a circle from particular things in reality, like the moon or a pie. We have to thank the philosopher Ayn Rand for her great discovery relating to human concept formation. For more on this issue scroll down to the posting on Sep. 10, 2021 entitled "BABIES' BRAINS DUMB DOWN DUE TO DUMB COVID FEARS".

These immaterial ideas as zero and minus two are called 'Beings of Reason'. You can now see why the field of mathematics is fraught with boobytraps for those who forget the science before the science, ontological philosophy that is asking the question, what is it? Here's the crux. 

Beings of Reason are tools, thought instruments. But many confuse the tools with the knowledge itself. Ideas are that by which we know things, they are not what we know.  

Kant believed that he knew only Ideas, and so became a philosophical Idealist locking himself up in his own mind. Intellectual ideas are not what we know, but what enables us to process sensorial knowledge of a particular thing in reality. To confuse matters further, Nominalists like Kant, while dropping essences also believe Ideas are particular, not general. A basic error. Ideas are always general, by nature. 

Cognitive salads
Dr. Anthony Rizzi of the Institute of Advanced Physics in his book Science Before Science has listed the following errors caused by improper mathematical thinking in other areas:
  1. Math is morally neutral, which leads to a tendency to drop the Final Cause altogether, leading in turn to moral relativism.
  2. Math cuts off all relation to the physical, except for quantities, which causes dropping essences and
  3. serial thinking (the mind as an automotive, or assembly line).
  4. Algorithmic thinking without ontology (procedural, rote thinking) misses connections and proper understanding.
  5. Lack of clarity on the difference between immaterial Beings of Reason and material things in reality leads to confusing the one for the other (everything becomes 'the same').
When in doubt there is a rule of thumb that may help identify the true nature of a thing: all Ideas are universals, while things in reality are always specific.

Or you can do a reality check by investigating the matter at hand: for instance, do black holes really exist or are they the result of mathematics, as are the latest cosmological findings in the field of Rationalistic quantum mechanics: a universe consisting of an infinite number of parallel realities floating on a cosmic membrane?

Tags: philosophy, Scientism




Sep. 30, 2021

(ANALYSIS) WHY LIBERALS CAN'T ANSWER A BASIC QUESTION

Liberals say and do the weirdest things, sometimes with disastrous results. Their cunning in matters of power proves they are not dumb. And although it may seem to Conservatives from time to time that liberals are insane, they're not crazy either. So what is it with these people that brings them to posit an infinite number of genders, destroying the environment to save the climate or spending fiat money like drunken sailors?



July 15, 2021 cartoon "False Equivalence' by Michael Ramirez.

Conservatives are often stunned how Leftists and Liberals can come to what are obviously ludicrous positions. And worst of all, they may even act on them, with sometimes disastrous results as the recent US withdrawal from Afghanistan has shown. They're not dumb, they're not crazy. The answer is a matter of philosophy. Not the speculative variety in which they excel themselves, but of the sort that tells us about the basics of being and the nature of things. It answers to basic questions like, what is this?

It tells us also why postmodern 'science' has nothing to do with real science, why liberals can't see or draw connections between similarities, why they don't understand the dynamics of their own policies and why they hate facts while continually touting them. It's all connected and stemming from a single, fatal flaw in liberal ontology. 

The root
At the root of the problem lies the liberal and leftist inane antipathy of objective reality. This is because their world view can be easily debunked by logic. So the high priests of postmodernism have come up with a devise that solves their problem: they embraced anti realism as their world view while using an anti reason approach to knowledge. 













Based on Peikoff's comperative chart in the DIM Hypothesis.

This problem is exacerbated by the materialistic approach to intellectual knowledge, which is immaterial. It leads to what is called, Nominalism. The problem is twofold. First there is the belief that essences (being immaterial) do not exist and secondly, that everything is a thing in itself without having any common features with anything else. 

The latter explains why nominalists can't see connections, which disables the ability for proper insight, understanding and even learning, other then by rote. It also makes them blind to the dynamics of their own policies.

Unintended consequences
If the goal is universal vaccination against Covid-19 (leaving aside the moral and scientific value of such an idea), then President Biden issues mandates that anyone refusing vaccination will be fired. The unintended consequence is a crisis in healthcare during a pandemic because of a shortage of nurses. But that is simply not on their radar. Biden is laser-like focused on getting everyone the jab. 

The first consequence of the denial of essences, is that universals are being dropped, including anything else of a general nature such as laws, regulations, concepts, abstractions, fundamentals, standards, principles, and yes, science, which is all about the laws of nature. 

The basic question
The essence, or substantial form is the answer to the ontological question, what is it? Finding an essence requires thought and the use of one's intellect. It is a particular from a general, the type of thought called induction that liberals abhor.

What is the essence of Albert Einstein? It is man, drawn from his universal man-ness. Nominalists are unable to answer the question -- what is it? -- with any accuracy. 

It leads to the strangest assertions, for example, that Muslims are the new Jews. Or it may lead to comparing apples to pears, not because both are fruits, but because both may be green, which is an accidental form, not an essence.

Words are violence, because both hurt their feelings and Conservatives are terrorists of course. You might think this silliness is just a figure of speech; but they mean it literally, because they really can't tell the difference, being unable to reduce things to their essence. 

Next time we will talk about postmodern 'science' and why its basic mistakes defy common sense. 

Tags: philosophy, Scientism




Sep. 10, 2021

BABIES' BRAINS DUMB DOWN DUE TO DUMB COVID FEARS

Researchers of Brown University analyzed the cognitive performances of 672 children born in Rhode Island; 188 born during the pandemic (after July 2020), 308 born before it (prior to January 2019) and 176 of them born during its beginning stage (between January 2019 and March 2020) (abstract). They found that children born during the pandemic have up to 20 percent lower IQs than those born before it. This is really no surprise at all!


Aug. 14, 2021 War Room Pandemic - Liz Yore: IQs Dramatically Dropping During Covid.

COVID-19 has been debilitatingly boring for newborns, disturbing new research has found.  (...) “It’s not subtle by any stretch,” lead study author and Brown University associate professor of pediatric research Sean Deoni told the Guardian of the trend. “You don’t typically see things like that, outside of major cognitive disorders.” (More on New York Post)

A drop in cognitive abilities by as much as 20 percent is shocking, but it really ought not to be a surprise, giving that the fundamentals for the wiring of the human brain are starting to develop almost immediately after birth. 

Concept formation
We have to thank the philosopher Ayn Rand for her great discovery related to human concept formation based on Aristotelian philosophy. Rand uses a different terminology, but the analytical process is the same.

Concept formation works as follows. For example the concept 'length'. If a child looks at a match, a pencil and a stick, he sees that length is the attribute they have in common; but their specific lengths differ. In order to form the concept the child retains in his mind the length and omits its measurements.

In words: “Length exists in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity. I shall identify as ‘length’ that attribute of anything that exists that has length without specifying the quantity.”

The child does not say or think that consciously of course, because he can't yet talk. It is an automatic process.

Having grasped the concept of “length” by having seen the three objects, he uses it to identify the attribute of length in other objects, say a piece of string, a ribbon or a street.

The same principle takes place when learning entities, a table for instance. The child isolates two or more tables from other furniture by focusing on their distinctive shape. He sees that their shapes vary, but have one characteristic in common: a flat, level surface and supports.

He forms the concept “table” by retaining that characteristic and omitting all particular measurements, not only the measurements of the shape, but of all the other characteristics of tables, even those tables he does not yet know.

Arrested development
This is of course an all important and a very delicate process taking place at a tender age. Now consider what happens to a child that lives in an environment that lacks objects to learn.

There is the lack of exposure to the wider world due to lockdowns. At home parents are keeping their distance from the child so as not to infect it with the virus. When the child does see his parents, their faces are half covered with masks.

IQ and cognition are an important thing. But what about social skills? The Brown University research has not looked into that. We learn to read emotions from faces also at a very young age. 

Covid dumbing
So now we know that kids growing up during the Covid-19 crisis have social and cognitive disadvantages. Not to mention children from social classes that are already disadvantaged.

Thankfully brains are like muscle, they are flexible. Still, only the future will tell what the consequences will be of our sometimes idiotic behaviors with which we think to protect our kids from the virus. 

Tags: philosophy, Scientism