Progressive Tax Codes

I don't think that progressive taxation is in all cases necessarily and absolutely against the natural law. For starters, there should at least be tax brackets to allow a break for the poor, if not a fleecing of the rich. Furthermore, to a limited degree, I would say some fleecing of the rich is acceptable. Why? How could I hold that what is immoral for an envious, looting mob should not also be immoral for Leviathan?

I dunno. It is indeed difficult to derive from first principles, but the legitimate sovereign state just seems to be a valid, distinct moral category, to which there pertain privileges beyond those of the private citizen.

That being said, it is terrifying how the masses don't give a second thought to the perceived justice of the rich being forced to pay taxes at a higher rate then everyone else. "But the rich have an obligation to help the poor," says the imaginary interlocutor, to which I respond, "Absolutely!" But more importantly, I have an obligation to not be party to the envious looting of what isn't mine!

The best justification of theft

If its true that it is better to give than to receive, then surely the best gift you can give someone is to take something from him.

The Problem of Evil

Assume that for all x, God can x.
Prove/disprove: God can schmoogledy gibsildum.

Prove/disprove: God can choose to create only creatures who always freely choose good.

Well, I can create a prison where all the inmates freely choose to remain inmates. (Ignoring those who've been shot during an escape attempt.)

Wiki-Spawn!

It was the spring of 2004, and a friend of mine had introduced me to Wikipedia for the very first time. Like all unscrupulous brats, the first thing we always simply must do when we discover something new and wonderful is to spend all of our mental and physical resources attempting to vandalize it. We started with the obvious, e.g. changing dates, inserting the odd expletive, creating pages for ourselves with grossly over-adulatory biographies. These edits were always caught with terrifying rapidity, and as we had not yet tired of the project, and like all young men wanted to make a lasting impact on the world, we were forced to adapt our tactics and we began exploring subtlety. We tried keeping the basic facts of an article correct while altering grammar and style to create a variety of bizarre effects - a specialty of mine was a very disorienting juxtaposition of amateurish vocabulary with a sort of erudite, Victorian sentence structure. We would compete, seated side by side in the university library, to see who's edit would last the longest before being caught and reverted. A huge advantage of this arrangement was that we could easily move to another terminal every time our IP address was banned.
When we had tired of this paradigm (after a few weeks I dare say), our youthful audacity once again broke forth and goaded us on to better, more ambitious designs. "After all," we said, "if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well" - this had always been our mantra, which we always applied with ironic impropriety. Our hope was that a bold enough move, if done with sufficient confidence, might just be crazy enough to fool everyone and stick. With particular pride, and to give just one example, I recall inventing a new language, which I continued to work on for several days before all of my efforts were cruelly wiped clean. "Its not fair," I remember thinking, "I speak this language. They have languages on here that no one speaks anymore! Its all so arbitrary!"

Now the really funny business is this. One of my edits really did stick; it was one of the subtle sort, when we were searching out the most obscure corners of human knowledge and attempting to make the most inconsequential additions and subtractions. Every now and then, I check to see if it is still there. It always is. This falsehood began its life on a new page that I created for it. The page was a stub, with only one, very false, very trivial sentence. When he was created, he was one of several in his litter - all pertaining to the same subject (and accordingly referenced on that subject's main page), and all totally false.
This little falsehood has survived a great deal; when he was merged with another page, he managed to keep his head above the raging waters; when this page was split, he managed to avoid the rocks and keep his toes pointed downstream; when his grammar was edited, he kept a straight face. Tragically, all of his brother falsehoods were lost at one point or another, and I still have tremendous admiration for his resilience. I probably needn't say that he had also won my dearest affection, truly a special place in my heart.

Recently I told the story of my little falsehood to a friend of mine, and she promptly Googled him. I realize now how strange it was that it had never occurred to me to do this. I guess I just thought my little falsehood would never grow-up. But what a joy when first I learned that now he had a family of his own! I was so proud. The Google search reported not just the Wikipedia article in which he resided, but also three hundred and fifty six little baby falsehoods! (Let me assure you that my son has a very unique name). But the joy soon faded as I inspected my many grandchildren. In hindsight it is of course obvious, but at the time I was slow in drawing the inference - my falsehood had reproduced asexually. All of his offspring were identical copies - but really, I mean identical. A bit eerie, that. Staring at the rows and rows of these little demons gave me the willies, and it started to change the way I felt about my once dear little, very own, pride-and-joy falsehood. Every time I look at him now a chill runs up my spine and I cannot get the image of all those blankly staring beastly robotic repetitions out of my head. I try to justify it. "How could I have known," I often wail, "that people would blindly trust Wikipedia without checking facts?" Perhaps I made him too good, too resilient, too much of a survivor. Can I destroy him now? Or will that be interpreted as vandalism? And even if I did succeed, how can I possibly defeat all of his spawn - and all of their spawn?

The Literal Sense

Is not synonymous with "the Amelia Bedelia" sense. For example, when I read that "the medievals were literally full of beans"-- I do not understand "literally" to be a clue that if we were to cut them open we would find nothing but beans. Rather it is a clue that "full of beans" is not meant to be symbolic of some other metaphorical truth that would plainly be expressed in some other way, and that the statement really means something about medievals and beans, although exaggerated. (The actual meaning is that beans formed a large part of the medieval diet.)

*In case you don't know, Amelia Bedelia was the main character in a popular series of children's books. She was a nanny/maid and would always take instructions from her employer "over-literally" e.g. spreading dust on the curtains when told to "dust" them, making a cake out of a calendar when told to "make a date cake".

A word on Hegel

The Sense-certainty section is designed to get the whole dialectic engine started on the right track from the very beginning, to avoid the dogmatic assumptions of the modern veil-of-perception skeptic. If we may be permitted to stretch the analogy further, the dialectical forerunner of Pyrrhonist skepticism can be seen, even in this early stage, to make up an important part of the “engine” itself: the explosive combustion of fuel, which in itself is a typically destructive force, can be harnessed within a set of cylinders and orchestrated to drive two offset series of pistons, with a resulting mechanical oscillation that can be translated into forward motion.
The ‘negation’, in Hegelian dialectics, is the force analogous to explosive combustion, and the Pyrrhonist’s equipollence method as something like a single volley in a simple two-cylinder engine, a one-two, left-right, a pow-pow pair of explosions that results in one complete revolution of the axle. The Pyrrhonist himself is wholly occupied with the rotational motion, and only concerned that the axle should return to its initial state so that the whole process should be ultimately neutral. From a higher perch, for example to Hegel, each such rotation brings consciousness closer to its last stop at AbsolutesWissenBahnhof, provided of course that the equipollence engine has been properly constructed, and that the tracks upon which it runs have been properly laid down.

Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom is the one who thinks there is a 20% chance we are living in a computer simulation. His paper, found here, is not concerned with establishing this 20% figure, which he affirms is rather his personal gut feeling. It is more of a trivial exercise in logic, but he makes a number of remarks that are very problematic. Take for example. "Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct)."

This brings up all sorts of difficulties.


Suppose I'm a Nuclear Physicist and you are a computer programmer. I approach you requesting a simulator that will include a newly theorized particle, the awesometron. Now the awesometron is a strange particle, because it participates in none of the four forces. It has no mass, no charge, it does not undergo decay. In fact, this is why we want you to simulate it, because it is entirely unobservable.
So, how do you, the savvy programmer build it into the simulation?
You will nod and smile, fake something, and collect your paycheck.

There is exactly the same problem when people talk about simulating consciousness. Because, you know, consciousness doesn't actually do anything. It just is. And this is why they tend to speak in terms of simulating the brain. Consciousness is somehow caused by the brain, so if done with sufficient attention to detail, then surely consciousness will inevitably (how could it not?) come about.

The trouble is this: when we simulate the heart with sufficient attention to detail, what inevitably comes about is simulated blood flow. Not true blood flow. When we simulate an entire human with sufficient attention to detail, what will inevitably come about is... simulated consciousness, which is nothing. (like the awesometron). What might come about is true consciousness, but to claim that true consciousness will inevitably come about, with out knowing anything at all about how it will happen, is totally without justification.

Later I'll try to put together an argument towards why we should positively expect consciousness to not come about when we simulate a brain.

Srinagar Day 3, More Dal Lake

Srinagar Day Two, Exploring Dal Lake

Srinagar, Kashmir

The White Mosque at the far end of Dal Lake







Nearby street









Typical Kashmiri houseboat on Dal Lake

Polo Match in the Himalayas

Dog








Donkey









This match suffered a number of interruptions including dogs, donkeys, packs of schoolchildren, and a monk speeding through on a motorbike.

Into Ladakh

This was about 15 hours into a 19 hour jeep ride.

Footnote to Cosm

1) If the universe is self-caused, then the universe is 'God'. A strange god, but the cosmological proof does not attempt to prove the Christian God, merely that there exists at least one thing which is radically unlike anything else in existence. Further note: Any two natural objects can be compared and determined to be similar or dissimilar with respect to given criteria. But the 'first-cause' of the cosmological proof is not simply in a normal, run-of-the-mill relation of dissimilarity to every natural object, because we are absolutely incapable of understanding something which is self-caused as a natural object. It is similar to natural objects in that it exists, and in no other way*. (Think of the way "the set of all sets" can't actually be a set. It just doesn't make sense and leads to contradictions within set theory. If we were beings that somehow subsisted wholly in the set-theoretic universe, we could still posit the class of all sets, but it wouldn't make sense to think of it as we think of our everyday objects. We might call it metanatural or even supernatural. )

*Of course, natural objects can be similar to God. Just not the other way round.

Using Heidegger to Solve Problem That's Been Puzzling Scientists for Millenia!

1. Dasein is the kind of being which I myself am. The intended meaning here is perhaps more clear with, “which I myself posess,” simply to avoid misunderstanding this as “I am a Dasein.” However, am in last analysis is the “action” proper to the way “I relate to” Dasein; I am Dasein in the same, not-exactly-grammatical sense that I see sight.

We must keep in mind section 25, and we allow that the “I myself” given above “no more than indicate[s an ontologically constitutive state],” and that it is far from sure that the “I” really discloses what Dasein truly is. Furthermore, we can in no wise “start with the formal givenness of the ‘I’,” because Dasein necessarily is-in-the-world, (i.e. the coin picture rather than the barbell), or, “a bare subject without a world never ‘is’ proximally.”

The ‘others’ includes ‘me’. This, again, is necessary because an isolated ‘I’ does not make any sense, or at least it is never fruitful to analyze such a thing. “It does not seek to establish ontically that factically I am not present-at-hand alone” means that the point is not just that I happen to not be alone on a desert island, but rather that “Dasein is essentially being-with,” that we in some way “expect” there to be Others. Others do not initially show themselves as ‘things,’ merely present-at-hand, then to be deduced, at some undetermined point, to be cases of Dasein. Thus Heidegger’s derision towards “Theoretically concocted ‘explanations’ of the Being-present-at-hand of Others,” i.e. attempts to show by a kind of Hume-ian induction why we interpret some ‘things’ as Others, or “like us”—the correct Interpretation is rather, as above, that Dasein is essentially Being-with.

One might want to say something to the effect that ‘the Others’ and Das Man are “coextensive.” In a vague sense this is valid, but we rather would like to point out that Others show themselves as cases of Dasein, but Das Man is never “this one, not that one, not oneself, not some people, and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is [rather] the neuter, Das Man”, and again, “It ‘was’ always the Das Man who did it, and yet it can be said that it has been ‘no one.’ In Dasein’s everydayness the agency through which most things come about is one of which we must say that “it was no one.”” On SZ 303 Heidegger says that “The phenomenon of the Self… needs to be defined existentially in a way which is primordial and authentic, in contrast to our prepatory exhibition of the inauthentic they-self.”

Heidegger’s methodology demands that he begin with everyday Dasein, rather than attempt a Cartesian blank slate. When he says on SZ 127 that “[publicness] never gets to the ‘heart of the matter’,” he is simultaneously a) speaking within his analysis of everyday Dasein, and b) speaking about the understanding of Being which his analysis has thusfar obtained. In this way, he can authentically hope to uncover those phenomena that he characterizes as “what is to become a phenomenon can be hidden…. Covered-up-ness is the counter concept to ‘phenomenon.’”

2. The last primate before the first man had no concept of the present-at-hand. Through pure instinct he used the things of the world as befitted his natural design. With the dawn of reason and the ability to “custom-fit” ‘things’, a striking distinction between the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand was rifted. All equipment, in its very Being, is “in-order-to” something. But if hammering nails were not an issue for Dasein, hammers, though they may just as well be present-at-hand, would not be ready-to-hand. The in-order-to of the ready-to-hand presupposes a state of Being ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ one hammers, and this state of Being is a way of Being-in-the-world (e.g. “not getting wet when it rains”), and thus the chain of ‘in-order-to’s always leads us to some understanding of the Being of Dasein.

3. “As understanding, Dasein projects its Being upon possibilities…. The projecting of the understanding has its own possibility—that of developing itself.”
“This development of the understanding we call ‘interpretation.’”
Note that Interpretation is not the understanding’s projection of itself onto the possibility of development, but rather it is the development itself. The former is still simple understanding, though in particular it is understanding of the possibility for understanding. It will become clear that there is no way to explain how Interpretation arises without recourse to another phenomenon: discourse. But first we outline the process of interpretation.
For example. Suppose that there is a case of Dasein whose ontical understanding of a hammer is limited to its standard role (i.e. pounding in nails). Heidegger would say then that Dasein’s capability for projecting the hammer onto possibilities is limited to the possibility of using it in this one function. Suppose, then, that a situation arises wherein a hammer could be used to a different end, for instance, in breaking a window. We presuppose, of course, that Dasein is concerned with this possibility, that the broken window has already been understood as being for-the-sake-of a way of being that Dasein has care for. We need to determine how understanding could develop to include the capability to project the hammer onto the possibility of using it to break the window. We cannot just say that Dasein understands the development of its understanding, for this would just say that it is capable of projecting its capability for projecting the hammer onto possibilities, onto the possibility of including this new capability. This clearly does nothing to shed light on the phenomenon of how this ‘new capability’ enters in to the picture, even though the above quotation implies that a certain ‘understanding of the understanding’ is requisite for its development. So far, though, the only plausible meaning of this is that we have a vague understanding of the mere, undetermined possibility for development of the understanding. Further analysis is needed to see how a definite capability can be ‘grasped.’
This grasping of the new capability is called interpretation; Heidegger has on SZ 148 that “Interpretation [is not] the acquiring of information about what is understood; it is rather the working-out of possibilities projected in understanding.” That is to say, the “information” is already presupposed to lie in the understanding, and constitutes the fore-having upon which interpretation is grounded. In our example, what is already had is the understanding of the typical usage of a hammer and some understanding of the broken window as in-order-to something. If Dasein is facing the problematic window with nothing disclosed to it as in-order-to break the window, Dasein looks around, and in our example, sees a hammer. The fore-sight of Interpretation has been half-blindly searching “with a view to a definite way in which [an entity] can be interpreted.” This ‘definite way’ is the being of in-order-to break the window. Now it fixes upon the hammer which is initially ready-to-hand in-order-to pound in nails, and takes ‘the first cut’ out of the fore-had understanding of the role of the hammer. The fore-grasp which “can force the entity into concepts to which it is opposed in its manner of being,” can be nothing but “the definite way” of interpretation with a view to which fore-sight searches, which forces the hammer out of its Being as ready-to-hand in-order-to pound nails, and thus the totality of the fore-structure allows the understanding of the hammer and of the window to be articulated in such a way that the hammer may be allowed to Be ready-to-hand in-order-to break the window.
Now, Heidegger says that interpretation is the development of the understanding, so we should expect that something else underlies interpretation, since as I said above, the phenomenon of understanding, as unveiled in section 31, does not suffice to explain the phenomenon of the development of the understanding. In the previous paragraph, we outlined the process of interpretation. Note that this entire process is one of communication; Dasein puts questions to entities in the world, tests them out, picks them up and projects them against the boundary wall of disclosedness. The entities, in turn, respond with some result which brings with it a new batch for the ‘totality of involvements’ that Dasein is interpreting.
4. The ahead-of-itself of Dasein as care is seen, for example, in Dasein as concern in the above section 3. Dasein is concerned with the window, because of some care for its own most-potentiality-for-being. For example, Dasein cares for its wealth and so it concerns itself with breaking into houses and takes jewels, and so it is concerned with the unbroken window. The care Dasein has is the end towards which it projects itself, but it can only project itself in so far as it can project the entities around it, concernfully. It can only be ahead of itself caringly if it is amidst entities concernfully. The latter are that with which Dasein deals directly. Thus on SZ192, “ “Being-ahead-of-itself” does not signify anything like an isolated tendency in a worldless ‘subject’, but characterizes Being-in-the-world.”
The Being-already-in-the-world of Dasein as care, is manifest in that we are attuned to the world in a certain way that effects what it is that we are presently concerned with. Thus concern is derivative of care.
5. Consider first the discussion of ‘Meaning’ in the section on Articulation. “Meaning is an existentiale of Dasein, not a property attaching to entities, lying behind them, or floating somewhere as an ‘intermediate domain’. Dasein only ‘has’ meaning…” This discussion has followed upon an exposition mostly of ontical understanding and interpretation. Things only ‘mean’ something if we notice them as in-order-to something, or if they manifest a deprivation of in-order-to. Thus a word only ‘means’ something, if the word is in-order-to communicate some entity which is in-order-to something we are concerned with. (what we have absolutely no concern for is invisible to us).
At the ontological root of this is the relationship between truth and care. The only things we can say are true are those which are disclosed to us, and they are only disclosed insofar as they concern us, which relates ultimately to care. In other words, if we do not care about something, it is utterly invisible to us. Conversely, if we say it is true that stars existed long before humans, it is only in so far as we could possibly care about this proposition; that is, only because it could be disclosed as false.

Conclusion: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Trick question!!! Yayy!

I love libraries. It might not be mutual.

BlocksNumber of Blocks: 44
Current Balance: $3,789.00

Reason Title or Message Amount Date Reminder Notice $0.00 07/20/2006 Reminder Notice $0.00 10/26/2006 Reminder Notice $0.00 02/01/2007 Reminder Notice $0.00 04/26/2007 Lost Recall Ancient Christian writers. $100.00 05/11/2007 Lost Autobiography; the complete and authorized text of L'histoire d'une âme. $100.00 04/23/2007 Fine Automata and computability / $3.00 10/16/2006 Lost Back to bataan $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Basic oppositions in logical theory. $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Being and some philosophers. $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Cajetan responds : a reader in Reformation controversy / $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost A catch of anti-letters / $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Contemplation in a world of action. $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost The degrees of knowledge. $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Die Winterreise $150.00 05/18/2007 Lost Disputed questions. $100.00 04/23/2007 Fine Don Giovanni K. 527 / $53.00 03/09/2006 Lost Don Giovanni K. 527 / $150.00 05/18/2007 Lost Recall Dragon the Bruce Lee story / $100.00 04/27/2007 Lost The end of faith : religion, terror, and the future of reason / $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Everything is illuminated $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Fact, fiction, and forecast / $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost General legislation on indulgences, $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Indulgences : their origin, nature & development / $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Integral humanism; temporal and spiritual problems of a new Christendom. $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Language and mind. $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Language and problems of knowledge : the Managua lectures / $100.00 04/23/2007 Fine Mendel in the kitchen : a scientist's view of genetically modified foods / $66.00 04/28/2007 Lost Nocturnes. $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost On being and essence (De ente et essentia) $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost The Philosophy of language / $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Philosophy of logic $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost The practice of the presence of God, $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Religion and the decline of magic $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost The return $100.00 04/23/2007 Fine Set theory and metric spaces / $3.00 10/16/2006 Lost Seven great encyclicals. $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost The splendor of truth : veritatis splendor, encyclical letter / $100.00 04/23/2007 Fine Topology / $39.00 01/29/2007 Lost Universe / $125.00 04/23/2007 Lost Vasya $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Veritatis splendor : American responses / $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost The works of Voltaire : a contemporary version / $100.00 04/23/2007 Lost Writings: [The fount of Knowledge] $100.00 04/23/2007

To be and To be

The first formulation is the most natural expression of what it is I mean to say. The third is parallelized. The second is the mean.
To be me is not the same as for my body to be.
Being me is not equivalent to my body being.
The being of me is not equivalent to the being of my body.

The significance of the first is quite natural and pre-philosophic knowledge for any man. There can be no honest denial of the valid epistemological category for subjective being-- "what is it like to be....in paris? a drunkard? a newt?" But most of all, of course, "what is it like to be you?"--"What is to be you?" I am not asking about the being of your body, if I were I would be much better off asking a physicist or a biologist.

I know that this sort of being-talk is reminiscent of the modern phenomenologists, and I grant that they have true things to say. But they, in particular Heidegger, fail and fail consistently and fail to the point of slander to understand or even try to understand the pre-moderns. Similarly, this article at Vox Nova gives way too much credit to Descartes, and his so-called subjective turn. Maybe I'll get around to a full critique.

Subjective Experience and the Immaterial

Had a long debate two nights ago about the unobservability of subjective experience. For simplicity's sake, call it consciousness. My argument is that one can only gain objective knowledge of an observable object, indeed, its observability is what makes it an object. Now, I can observe a rainbow. I can observe the Sun rising and setting. I can observe a human. I can observe the human reacting to a stimulus. I could in principle observe a signal traveling through the human's nervous system, reaching the brain, setting off a storm of activity, I can observe the chain of cause and effect and (in principle) understand how it results in a signal being sent out again, and how that signal results in the exclamation "Ow!", and how another signal is sent out, and how that signal results in the hand being retracted from the hot surface. I can continue observing and (again, in principle) understand why this results, five days later, in a complicated series of signals and how they result in the telling of a story about the stimulus that occurred five days ago.
I cannot observe, in any of this, the fact that there is a consciousness there that experiences--as its subject--the stimulus, and that experiences--as its subject--the reaction to the stimulus.
The existence of consciousness will never, ever be explained physicalistically. For this to happen, there would have to exist an observed phenomenon that logically forces the positing of consciousness. Don't these people realize, that their own doctrine insists that all physical phenomena can be explained physically, i.e. in terms of other physical phenomena? So then imagine you have a human in front of you; in the laboratory, under dissection, or otherwise being studied and observed. This human is a physical object. What can you hope to find in your observation, but more physical objects? Imagine you have spent a lifetime observing the brain. Imagine you are approaching a perfectly complete knowledge of all the physical processes therein. When do you suppose you will come across something that will force you to say, "Ah-hah! This could only be caused by consciousness." Doesn't that seem to be most un-scientific-- doesn't it seem that whatever you find there is just going to be like anything else in the physical universe, an object with an objective cause...

Arrrgggg! What really frustrates me is that all of this ranting is totally unnecessary. All that is necessary is the following: Solipsism is always possible and logically consistent with every possible set of objective statements (to see this, consider how you would convince a solipsist that he is wrong).

So:
A) No amount of material observation will convince me that subjectivity (a consciousness, if you will) exists.
B) Nevertheless I am intellectually certain that at least one subject exists, and by the way, morally certain that many subjects exist.
Therefore, to allow subjectivity to be theoretically intelligible I must posit the category of the immaterial.

Okay, so this doesn't prove that physicalism is false, just that it is unintelligible. I.e., although it might still be asserted that all things are material (including consciousness), this does prove that it is impossible for us to ever understand all things as material. So if you are a fan of intelligibility, you should start considering the immaterial world. If on the other hand you prefer the unintelligible to the mysterious, well, go ahead and subscribe to physicalism.

Next up: Moving from the immaterial consciousness to the immaterial soul. And maybe a bit more about unintelligibility and mysteriousness, two categories I have been thinking a lot about recently.

Arm the unborn

From a good article by John Zmirak over at Taki's Top Drawer, http://www.takimag.com/site/article/arm_the_unborn :

We know that if Giuliani wins the Republican nomination—even if he goes on to lose, as almost any Republican who supports the Iraq War is doomed to do—this will mean the end of the prolife dominance over the party. The power in party circles will shift back to the dusty old Rockefeller wing, the elitists who sniff disdainfully at us “rednecks” for voting on the social issues, who have wet dreams about sterilizing the poor. This faction, shoved aside by the advent of Ronald Reagan, and the millions of Catholics and Evangelicals he led for the first time in history into the Republican party, will take power once again. It will be as if Ronald Reagan had never existed.
Think that’s impossible? It’s what happened to the Democrats—who as recently as 1973 were largely prolife. It was not a massive shift of opinion among Democratic voters that turned the party of Al Smith into the party of Gloria Steinem; it was women like Bella Abzug, ideologues who worked behind the scenes and used internal maneuvers to quash every prolife candidacy, to starve prolifers of funds, and rig primaries to close avenues of advancement to prolife Democrats. Indeed, by 1992, a prolife governor of a major electoral state, Pennsylvania, was not even permitted to speak at the Democratic Convention.
The same thing could happen to the Republican Party. Even now, the Bush machine uses internal power in this way to keep out candidates who want to build a border fence, or enforce employer sanctions on those who employ illegals. If a pro-abortion candidate wins the nomination—not to mention, God forbid, the White House—he will use the levers of party power to marginalize and quash social conservatives at every turn. And then we will have no political representation in America. We’ll be relegated to backing third-party candidates, or begging for pitiful crumbs like “parental notification” and a ban on partial birth abortion—rife with exceptions, of course, for things like a woman’s mental health. We will be left in the wilderness, like supporters of Prohibition, black separatists, neo-Confederates, and those who still believe that Dwight Eisenhower was part of the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy. That is where the socially liberal Republican elites think we belong.
Such an outcome is far more dangerous to the prolife and the conservative cause than the election of Barak Obama or Hilary Clinton. Those Democrats just want to beat us in an election. Men like Rudolph Giuliani want to destroy us. The Democrats of this world are merely our opponents. The Giulianis are our enemies.

I dunno though. I feel like the Republican Party would implode within a decade without support from social conservatives. And that would be a good thing--we've been allied with these stupids for way too long.

Controversy

I recently posted on a controversial topic. I've deleted those posts because a higher up has informed me that they were insensitive. Perhaps so.
But where do we set the bar for sensitivity? With this particular topic, I think the bar is all-to-frequently set ludicrously high, even among those that agree with my point of view, and the demand is made that in setting forth any opinion on the matter, one must equally intersperse substantive statements of truth--those statements that actually function towards advancing what it is you mean to say--with statements of an altogether different sort. Statements that qualify and roll back the argument, statements calling for the reader to get in touch with their inner marshmallow, statements assuring the reader that nothing is really being said. It is demanded that every single time we open our mouths on the subject, we must spend the vast majority of our effort making new and ever-cleverer assurances that we are not bigots. This is absurdly frustrating, but I suppose I can see why it is necessary.

Who needs classical music?

Everyone nowadays feels compelled to take pains to clarify that they are not saying anything is better than anything else. Since however, the plain fact of the matter is that in reality some things do deserve to be called “good” and others “bad”, this can only be achieved by constantly shifting the debate away from the thing-in-itself.

For example, to say (as we are told we must) that humans really are just animals—no better, no worse, mind you—we must strive to put out of our minds and forget what we in our innermost subjective experience know human nature to be, we must forget that the experience of love, of holding a lofty ideal or having a lofty idea, of appreciating beauty—we must forget that these things have a definite reality that we know and hold very dear, far more precious than the reality of any object “out there”, “in the world”, and we must talk about these human things as they are not. In particular, we must talk about chemical processes and neurons firing. Now, these sorts of formal, scientific objects contain a certain amount of truth, but it is only truth about what is “out there” and “in the world”. It is a truth about the brain under an MRI scan or under dissection; and we cannot help but notice that these are all things that we are not, and that cannot provide truth about the reality we are most concerned with on a day to day basis—the definite reality of subjective experience. The truth of these scientific objects is a truth that satisfies our intellect’s appetite for objective truth, but not our souls yearning for knowledge about what we ourselves are. To say otherwise is to truly forget oneself, and a world that demands we forget ourselves has truly gone mad.

So much for my diatribe on physicalism. Now, I will try to relate this example to what is more relevant to the question at hand, the question about classical music. First of all, let me say that I am personally disinclined to accept the thesis that the achievements of all cultures are “equally good”. In particular, I am disinclined to accept this thesis with respect to European classical music. However, I also think that those with an inclination towards cultural relativism tend to act on good faith—for certainly, our civilization has succumbed in the past to a great deal of self-fetishization that we would do well to correct. But over and above that concession, I must say that the attitude that really desires in an envious way that all achievements should be leveled is a dangerous one; in other words, it is one thing to conclude after an exhaustive and honest analysis that Bach’s musical virtue is comparable to that of Brittany Spears, and it is another thing altogether to set out with a hatred of greatness or a perversely compromising ecumenism to achieve a preconceived plan of relativization. As I said above, I think that some things really can be said to be better than others, and the case of Bach vs. Spears is about as clear cut a case as I can imagine. I reapply the principle I asserted in my first example: that the only way this relativization can happen and these two “musicians” be put at the same level is to ignore what music really is, in-itself, and focus on considerations that in truth are irrelevant but can be made to seem plausible, especially those inclined to swallow the relativist rhetoric; we must talk, for example, about the subjectivity of personal taste, about arbitrary social constructs and norms, we must note that the two are equally popular among their peers and since all people are equally people, and music is for the enjoyment of people, how can we say that Bach’s music that is enjoyed by this group of people is any better than Spears’ music that is enjoyed equally by that group of people? Notice that no discussion has been made of the music in-itself, although this line of reasoning claims to state a truth about the music in-itself.

I must attempt now to develop some sort of explanation of music as it is in itself. However, I will not be speaking of the particulars of the musical craft, but rather of the theoretical, ontological standing of music. I will begin with commonly accepted facts and then attempt to refine them in order to approach some ultimate truth.

First, that music is a form of communication. But Man is a social animal, and almost anything he does that is of any importance can be called communication at some level of abstraction, can be called communing, or sharing life. When I say “That car is green”, I share knowledge about a certain car. When I make a purchase, I share a portion of my labor and the vendor shares a portion of his. When I laugh or cry out in pain I share knowledge of my subjective state. Even when I think, to myself, I’m usually using words and in some way rehearsing a possible future communication, because anything worth thinking about is also worth sharing with others, if we truly understand what it means to live life properly. Where does music fit in with all of these sorts of communication?

A basic distinction that can be made at the outset is that between art and language, and we can trace the development of these two distinct modes of communication from the very beginning of life. A newborn baby cries for any number of specific reasons, but they all boil down to “Something is wrong.” Crying is an instinct, for sure, but since it is clearly communication we should be able to class it either as art or as language. I make the claim that crying is the first example of language, rather than the first example of art. Consider, theoretically, what would constitute the purest, most artless use of language. Would it not be that sort of talking that hardly requires thought? For example, when I said “That car is green”, I did not need to weigh any synonyms and choose my words carefully. I did not need to give several rewordings to be sure that my meaning was clear. Rather, it was quite automatic and wholly artless. Of course this language needed to be learned, but no art was required in employing it to convey the simple idea that a car is green. The idea was without art, it was as clear cut as can be imagined. Now, a newborn’s cry exactly fits this bill. He does not yet know that with a little art, a cry can be faked and can earn some attention, but rather simply he “knows” to cry exactly when this one idea of “something is wrong” needs to be expressed. Compare this with a parent’s communication with this newborn. Sure, parents use words—at times—so that a child can eventually learn language, but what is with all of that sing-songy gibberish? It is clear at least that it is not meant as language—which I am now in a position to define: it is not meant to refer to an idea whose symbolic representation has already been decided and agreed upon. Rather this “parentese” is a very artful attempt to convey an idea that cannot be expressed with the newborn’s one-word vocabulary (the one word = the cry), an idea of comfort.
I say Art, then, is in the business of fashioning ideas, of attempting to mold the recipient’s immediate consciousness to match the idea that is present in the artist’s mind but that cannot be merely stated with language because most likely the recipient has never had this idea before, and language requires this in order for a symbolic representation of the idea to be decided and agreed upon. Relating this back to the given example, we can say that a baby’s mind is innately capable of being comforted—of holding the idea of comfort—but this state of mind or idea can only be forged by the particular art of parenting.

What sort of ideas does art communicate? Art might of course communicate an idea that is not intrinsically beyond the reach of language. For example, the mere act of naming some object that has never been thought of before would fall under my definition of art. To see what I mean, consider the word “Ulecephaly,” which means nothing to you now, but let me define it for you: the type of head movement exhibited by an owl. You have certainly seen an owl’s head move before, and thought of this movement of an owl’s head, but quite possibly you’ve never thought of it as a type of head movement, you’ve never thought of it as an attribute that could be singled out, abstracted, and thought of on its own or attributed to something other than an owl. Perhaps you’ve never thought to call someone “Ulecephalous.” Well, now with my artistic description of this thought-object-as-attribute you have a new idea, and I’ve provided the service of naming it for free.

But is this all art can do? That is to say, can art only achieve things that language can also potentially do? Of course not. For although I can describe a painting to you with the utmost attention to detail, you will always experience something new when you actually see it. Even supposing I were able to describe it in such detail that the painting could be copied identically from my instructions, the painting would not be experienced until these instructions had actually been carried out, which would be an artistic act and not a linguistic one. And even supposing that you had mental powers sufficient enough to imagine perfectly my linguistic instructions being followed perfectly, you would again be performing an artistic act mentally, which is different from performing a linguistic act mentally. The two things, “Art” and “Language” are therefore not coterminous.

One might be tempted at this point to interject and claim that musical norms have to be decided arbitrarily just as in language. I must say that it does seem to me at the outset that when my music teacher in the first grade played a major chord and said it was “happy” and a minor chord and said it was “sad”, that I knew immediately exactly what she meant and did not have to struggle to remember this, as I would if it were an arbitrary norm. I’m willing to grant however, that this might simply indicate that the norm had already by this time in my life been deeply enough engrained in my mind from listening to happy children’s songs in major keys. However, this is beside the point. First of all, there are certain aspects of music that simply cannot legitimately be claimed to be arbitrary norms, because their affective power is so clearly rooted in the objective quality of their perception. For example, a slow rhythm cannot evoke speed and movement like a fast rhythm, for obvious reasons, and polyphony can not evoke the idea of simple unity as can monophony, although the former can evoke the thought of aggregate unity, or unity amid disunity, in a way that the latter cannot. In a more indefinable way we are capable of perceiving differing degrees of harmony, although the norm of what is considered ‘allowable dissonance’ may change. Returning to the example of “parentese,” we must admit that we are born with an innate sensitivity to the artistic communications of our parents, for otherwise the practice of parentese would have no reason to survive evolutionarily. Secondly, the fact that some musical norms might be arbitrary convention does not negate the fact that these norms can be utilized to create novel musical ideas, in the same way that even pure language can be used artfully to describe something no one has ever thought of before.

But what sort of ideas? This is of course the central question: what sort of ideas are communicated by music-as-art, in particular? This is also the question that we expect musicians, in so far as they are artists, to be asking themselves and answering with their work. In fact, we cannot accept that a musician is an artist unless it is the case that he has asked this question, and we cannot accept that his art is essentially musical unless he conceives his answer to be musical. For this reason, by way of example, we can exclude the army’s drummer boy. For he is not asking this question, but rather he is using music to perform a function other than the artistic communication of ideas; we must say that his function is inherently linguistic, because a correspondence between his drum taps and the march of the army has been decided and agreed upon, and his communication results in an automatic referral to this established rubric. Not even the man who came up with the march system can be called a musical artist, because the ideas he wishes to communicate are not considered by him to be musical, but military. He may very well be called a military artist, simply working with music as a medium for his own particular brand of art.

In this way we are forced to conclude that the vast majority of humans who might deserve the label “musician” by the mere fact that they peddle in music, do not thereby fully deserve the label “musical artist”, which only applies in so far as one is 1) an artist by virtue of their music, and 2) a musician by virtue of their art. To be absolutely clear, we can expand these criteria as follows: 1) by making music they fill the definition of artist (their music aims to communicate ideas) 2) The ideas that they thus communicate artistically, are musical ideas. Again, we here are faced with the problem of what exactly counts as a musical idea—but really, this is only something that the musician-as-artist can answer, in the very act of doing the work proper to his particular genius. His task is to create new ideas that have never been musically expressed, and so it is impossible for us to provide, ahead of time, what these ideas might consist in. It might seem that we have made no progress whatsoever, but in actual fact, I have already demonstrated with the drummer-boy example how the framework I’ve laid out can be used to exclude certain musical activity without needing a precise definition of what can be called a “musical idea”. It is indeed clear enough when an “artist” is merely using music for a purpose external to music rather than to contribute to mankind’s growing body of musical knowledge, for he himself admits to this fact.

I must momentarily cast some doubt on the conclusion of the preceding paragraph in order to avoid a possible misapplication of my theory, but this excursus will end in reconfirmation of what has been already stated. The difficulty arises in attempting to define what we should consider a “purpose external to music.” If taken too strictly and naively, we are forced to exclude any music that has any ties to anything. For example, the purpose of medieval church music is to beautify and express the liturgy, which is an purpose external to music. This also goes for a great deal of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc. We might say that the purpose of opera is to tell a story, and the purpose of folk music is folk dancing. Really the only music that seems above this “criticism” is the highly rarefied, abstract and even aleatoric music of the twentieth century, which truly is only concerned with itself even to the exclusion of being readily enjoyable! Be assured, this is a very real problem, and is not simply a quirk arising from the way I have set about defining music. For although the requirement that music be pure and detached from anything external to music seems to tend towards a very unmusical music, it is also clear that we need some sort of purity requirement in order to exclude the drummer boy.
To resolve the problem, we must recognize a very important fact: although we are incapable of strictly defining the range of possible artistic ideas, we can at least say that Art must aim to communicate ideas that are human, that are grounded in some understanding of the human person. This fact is certainly an obvious one, but so far I haven’t incorporated it into my theory, and it turns out to be essential. It makes the solution to the problem clear, for it allows for music to be concerned with any aspect of human reality, while still disallowing music to be unconcerned with its own reality. For example, it allows dramatic music (opera) to be considered art because drama is very clearly grounded in humanity, but it disallows the drummer-boy’s march because although it is interested in the human activity of marching, it is thoroughly uninterested in itself as a human activity.

I really find the parent-baby relationship to be a useful one, so I hope I may be permitted to return to it once more. The foregoing discussion has excluded from the domain of Art any activity that is wholly concerned with its effect and wholly unconcerned with itself. So, with respect to the art of calming and comforting an infant, something like feeding it Xanex or a sip of whiskey would have to be excluded. Although such an action certainly affects the mental state of the infant, it cannot be called Art because the action is not concerned with itself, only with its effect. The effect is certainly a human effect, but the action is not innately human because it is not an object of interest for its agent. Compare this with the artful comforting of a loving parent, which not only seeks to affect the infant’s mental state but is also concerned with its own quality. It is in this respect a thoroughly human activity because it is something humans innately care about, for the reason that the quality of this activity affects the quality of the parent-child relationship.

In summary, Art is a skillful attempt to forge a new mental state for its recipient, and it must view both the attempt and the mental state as valuable—as good—in a thoroughly human sense. By this dual humanity on both sides—that of the artist and that of the audience—a very real and deeply human communication takes place.

We can indeed, at this point, provide some justification for our evaluation of the relative merits of Bach and Spears. It should be clear that I would like to put the former as close as possible to the “Art” end of the spectrum, and Spears as close as possible to “non-Art.” Even now, though, we cannot escape the need to make some judgment calls, and since the purpose of this essay is simply to provide a rational framework within which to compare the quality of various music, we will not attempt to justify our judgments that lie beyond the scope of this purpose. We condemn the music of Spears on three counts. First, there is precious little “new” in its effect on the recipient. While we are not suggesting that novelty is in itself a good, its absence indicates that an “artist” is either unaware of or incapable of achieving his or her main task which is ‘to forge new mental states for the recipient’. Second, the ideas that Spears does manage to communicate are almost totally lacking in human value. Third, the process of creation of such popular music is altogether far too bound up with the process of money-making and marketing, to the point that its concern with its effect is in disproportion to its concern with itself (as in the case of the drummer boy).

Finally we can ask, who needs classical music?

Classical music is not the first music on the scene. It is predated by traditional music. I have the utmost respect for traditional music, because it very clearly achieves the task of forging a peculiar mental state for the listener. What could possibly be more ineffable than the difference between say, Irish and Indian traditional music? Or between Russian and Chinese? This music is grounded in thoroughly human purposes such as dance and religion, and is always, in every culture, seen to be a valuable human endeavor in itself. Needless to say, it fills all the requirements to be considered art. In Europe, however, something strange and unique happens, and musical activity takes off—it gets out of the traditional rut and develops, conquering new and ever-changing styles at a breakneck pace. We have also in Europe the phenomenon of the musical genius—a true artist who fills all the requirements for my definition by himself. And this is the fundamental difference—for while traditional music was certainly art, it had achieved that status corporately by means of a slowly developing tradition. Art at this stage of development is in some way unaware of itself as Art—it has no self-consciousness—and cultures whose art is not self-aware must view their Art as something like a plant that simply needs to be watered. Traditional Art certainly forges ideas that are linguistically inaccessible, but the ideas and the Art are taken for granted and this process of forging is not recognized clearly in itself, and not imagined to have endless possibilities.

This is why we need classical music. It is music that has become fully aware of its potential to chart unknown territory, it is music that is downright excited and optimistic about itself—and this is a message we desperately need today, we who live in a culture that views itself as dying, commonly resigned to the fact that its best days are behind it and that it can look forward to nothing but a drab future of steadily increasing materialism, consumerism, immorality and decreasing vitality, love, hope, and humanity. If we could somehow get off our feet again, take a long look in the mirror—if we could see once again what makes life worth living—I think we could once again make music that could hold a candle to our predecessors. Until then, we simply must not let their memory die.

The 'God' Illusion

'God' is an illusion. This can be stated truthfully by all, believer and non-believer alike. The difference is that the non-believer believes that the 'God' illusion is caused by something lesser, worse, less perfect than 'God'. The believer believes that his imperfect conception of God, 'God', that he holds at any given time, is caused by something greater, better, more perfect, "the real God".

Naturalistic Accounts

We pray because we believe the Divine Will recommends and demands it. The possibility for a naturalistic account of the psychological benefits of prayer is not a problem for us; for although we tend to speak of prayer in terms of the divine--e.g. that God wants us to pray, that God communicates to us in prayer--we do so because such and only such is our belief, not because it is also our belief that a complete knowledge of the human mind would reveal some miraculous subversion of the natural order during prayer.

Consider analogously our tendency to speak of the commandments in terms of Divine Will, even though we do not believe we obtain the knowledge of particular commandments by a miraculous infusion. On the contrary, the prohibition of murder for example is the clearest case of natural law. Hence naturalistic accounts of the genesis of this and other moral norms are not problematic by their possibility, and by their actuality can even be, while not the whole truth, at least wholly true, in so far as they are properly naturalistic. That is, so long as they remain positively natural and not negatively supernatural.

Cosm

The point of the cosmological proof is not to show that a personal deity exists, but merely to show that at least one thing exists that is not natural. An atheist may even grasp the validity of this proof but fail to grasp the full import of this supernatural unknowability. He readily grants that we will never know the "cause" of the big bang, but he nevertheless imagines that this cause is still simply on the order of (similar to) the objects of science, and he is deluded in this way because he can explain its unknowability in physical terms i.e. the loss of information at a singularity. But to be deluded in this way is to fail to recognize that the cosmological proof performed this exact same function with mere medieval science--explaining the unknowability of the root cause of existence simply from the readily available facts of the physical world, the natural facts of cause and effect. It is also to fail to understand that human knowledge of the natural world is utterly dependent on causation, and where the rules of causation can be shown not to apply, therein the human intellect is brought to its knees before a terrible unsoundable mystery.

The cosmological proof is a proof in the truest sense of the word--it is not an argument. Rather it is a distillation of an argument to its clearest and most rigid essentials. The argument it distills is the same one that most with any philisophical inclination will tend to use to explain and justify their belief in God--starting with something like "I cannot explain my own existence," or "I know I did not create myself," and continuing with the observation that objective scientific knowledge does nothing to satisfy one's innermost desire to explain one's own existence because one's own existence is so radically unlike any sort of objective existence that may fall under the scope of science. Here, the careful will be sure to note that it is not merely "a psychological hole" that begs to be filled blindly, but rather an intellectually honest demand that there should be an explanation for this mystery that cannot be scientifically objective because the mystery cannot even be framed in scientifically objective terms--and yet it most certainly remains. Furthermore, for those truly honest withemselves, there is no psychological comfort whatsoever to be found in the mere blind acceptance of a God whom others claim to fill the missing knowledge of their origination. We really need to know--for sure--the relation between the cause of our existence and our existence. Is it on our side? Can we sympathize with it? Does it sympathize with us??