Gravy Train for the Mindless

Postulation has all the advantages of theft over honest work.


Bertrand Russell

Pulmonary Metatheoretics

When I realize that my own reasoning involves the use of principles and categories that make my own thinking possible, I inevitably come back to the raw confidence that the foundations of truth and knowledge for all of us are immediately accessible in the structure of our own conceptualizing, and therefore are at least as close to us as the air we breathe.

Stuart Hackett, 1984

Open Secret

The collapse of verificationism was undoubtedly the most important philosophical event of the twentieth century. Its demise meant a resurgence of metaphysics, along with other traditional problems of philosophy that had been suppressed.

William Craig

The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, 2007

The Mathematics of Free Will

A computer simulation shows a particle bouncing around inside an equilateral
triangle. The trajectory of the particle appears to curve slightly,
particularly when the particle approaches one of the vertices of the triangle,
but in fact the motion is purely inertial|the particle always moves exactly
straight ahead, only the space inside the triangle is `negatively curved', which
is what makes its trajectory appear curved.

When I say that the particle moves exactly straight ahead, I mean ab-
solutely exactly. No matter how long the simulation proceeds, the particle's
trajectory as portrayed on the screen will never deviate by even so much as
a pixel from the true portrait of a particle moving absolutely straight ahead.
Because this is a classical system, observing the past motion of the particle
would allow you to predict its future motion|up to a point. Because of the
pixellation of the screen, there is some imprecision about where the particle is,
and has been. And since you don't know the past motion precisely, you can't
predict the future exactly. In fact, you can't predict even gross, qualitative
features of the future motion more than a few seconds in advance, even if
you have observed the motion on the screen throughout its entire in nite
past. (Of course, the particle doesn't have an entire in nite past, because
the simulation hasn't been running forever|but it might as well have been,
for all the good it would do you.)

Now you might choose to assume that while your knowledge of the past
motion of the particle is limited by the pixellation of the trajectory on the screen,
the particle nevertheless has an absolutely precise position and direction
at any time, and if you only knew the exact state of the particle,
you would be able to predict its entire future exactly|and to reconstruct
its entire past, as well. Nothing about the motion of the particle will ever
contradict this assumption. Every move this particle will ever make will
be consistent with its having at any instant an absolutely precise position
and direction, which completely determine its motion throughout the entire
future. However, this is not the case. I know, because I wrote the program.

The way this program works is that at any point, the particle's state is
only determined to the precision necessary to determine exactly the trajectory
shown on the screen. Most of the past and future is there for anyone
to determine. The way you do this is by pressing one of two buttons. Pressing
the button on the right directs the particle into a regular motion at the
center of the triangle, bouncing o each of the three sides of the triangle in
succession. Pressing the button on the left directs the particle into an `erratic'
motion, where the sequence of `cushions' it hits is completely random,
subject only to the constraint of not hitting any side twice in succession.

These two buttons do not steer the particle: The particle always proceeds
exactly straight ahead. These buttons direct the particle by determining
its future. Pushing the right button gives the particle a simple, orderly
future. Pushing the left button gives it a random, disorderly future. Note
that the decision can be reversed at any time. Push the left-hand button
and within a few seconds the particle will be bouncing around at random,
even after the particle has been bouncing in an orderly way around the
middle of the triangle for an hour|or for an eternity. Push the right-hand
button, and within seconds the motion becomes orderly, even though the
particle may have been careening around at random for in nitely many years.
Alternate between the buttons|not too rapidly|and the character of the
motion changes back and forth between order and disorder.

In this system, anything that can happen, may happen. The future remains
always unwritten|and the past as well, for that matter. Put that in
your determinist pipe and smoke it!

"The Mathematics of Free Will"

Peter G. Doyle

Version dated 22 September 1997

GNU FD*

*Copyright (C) 1997, 2006 Peter G. Doyle. Permission is granted to copy, distribute
and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,
as published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover
Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.

The Silent Crypt of Destiny

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. . . . Our whole culture has been moving for some time now toward catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects---that is afraid to reflect.

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1888

Social Networking

One is known by the company one avoids.

A Note on Postmodernism

If all linguistic utterances are power plays, then that utterance itself is a power play and no more likely to be proper than any other. It prejudices all discourse. If all discourse is equally prejudiced, there is no reason to use one rather than another. If personal freedom to intensify pleasure is the primary value, this is falsified by the reduction of all values to power itself. If all discourse is a masked power play, then that statement itself is merely a masked power play. It denies in fact what it affirms in theory. If we are only products of blind forces of nature and society, then so is that view that we are merely the product of blind forces of nature and society.

The question, "Is postmodernism true?" raises criterial questions that postmodernism itself simply cannot handle without resorting to the same dismissiveness for which it has condemned modern philosophy.

Furthermore, the rejection of all metanarratives is itself a metanarrative. The idea that we have no access to reality---that there are no facts, no truths-of-the-matter---and that we can only tell stories about reality, cannot account for itself as an idea, because that idea itself tells us something that, by it's own account, we cannot know.

These are all statements that implicitly claim to be true, but that on their own accounts, cannot be true.

Deconstruction's view that language is indeterminate, that any text can be read in multiple ways including contradictory ways, raised the question of how the deconstructionist's own statements are to be understood. This is using language to claim that language cannot make unambiguous claims.

Postmodernists naively treat their own discourse as if it is outside the philosophical situation they are describing. In this way they avoid the question of whether one can accept their own account of intellectual activity and yet still continue to practice it.

Adapted from The Universe Next Door, by James Sire