Left Out

Liberalism: The view that you're a bigot and I'm not.

Final Causal Hypocrisy

"Compared to the way in which final causality has maintained its grip on biological thinking in actual practice, the Darwinian revolution is a trivial blip on the continued silent and unacknowledged hegemony of Aristotle. The unhealthy fixation of Dawkins, Dennett, and Co. on the relatively insignificant Paley has kept them from seeing this fatal difficulty with their position. They have been frantically shooting their flit guns at a gnat even while an elephant grinds them into paste under its feet."

--Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, page 130.

Hidden Ghosts of Materialism 2

If thought is merely the motion of physical components in the brain (or anywhere else in the organism for that matter), how can I remember a previous experience? Once a motion becomes a past motion, it never recurs as the same motion. How could one know or even be aware of generic similarities between two motions? To classify two entities within the same genus, I must observe some similarity between them. But materialism claims that the thought "This motion and that motion are similar" would also itself be merely a motion. And before the motion of predicating that similarity occurs, the motion of the original experience and the motion of the alleged memory experience would be in the past, and no longer exist. And no motion could connect two motions that no longer exist. Consequently, for it to be even possible for me to think generically similar thoughts, which is necessary to remember anything, I must assume that materialism is false.

Hidden Ghosts in Materialism's Inferential Methodology Machine

1.  The very process of materialist theory development already involves its falsity.

To seek correlates in the brain and nerves of the organism to explain observed differences in how we perceive things such as colors---already assumes that:

(1 the conscious state is -something- distinct from the physical correlate one is seeking for it,

(2 the conscious state can pass judgment on physical reality and all distinctions and relations between objects (such as those between correlation and the objects correlated), and

(3 all physical correlates are necessarily insignificant to the most basic and transcendent universal judgments about the comparative status of conscious states, and judgments about conscious states, in relation to those physical objects.
--Highly redacted from Stuart Hackett, The Resurrection of Theism, 1957, page 222.

The Real Origin of Positive Thinking

Wisdom is always a crow feeding on dead bodies.
--Nietzsche

Analysis Predicts The Empirical

Computer simulations based on just 50 or 60 atoms are able to mimic the properties of real matter. If a small group of atoms is surrounded by other identical groups, every atom behaves as if it were part of a larger material. This makes it possible, for example, to simulate the behaviour of solids and liquids at high temperatures, and to study chemical reactions at surfaces to aid in the design of better analysis.

--Slightly redacted from the QPB Science Encyclopedia, "Quantum Simulation"

The Uninferable System of Inference

Any kind of distinction between what is and what is not empirical is *itself* a non-empirical object. Moreover, the necessary system of thought whose aim is necessarily truth, is uninferred. Not only that, it is uninferable in the strict sense of inferential sequence. But at epistemic rock bottom, that's really not a problem, due to two factors.


First, the definition of the system, in the nature of the case, epistemically exempts the system itself already, yet the reasons that *are given for that system---logic, general reason, and so on---still provide *some kind of justification on the basis of motives, which are in turn driven by values. The reason this is necessary is because the system already has a set of operating values in its standards of intellectual propriety, And because that propriety itself is made up of universals, that system necessarily predicates universal values.


Second, if you could infer this thought system, it would not be the system as defined, because it would itself be justified as true *only* by means of one or more premises that are even more epistemically basic, which contradicts the original definition of the system as the methodologically basic set of cognitive assumptions. If it's basic, it does not itself need a logical basis.


But the system does need an existential basis in motivation and values to be meaningfully preferred as the necessary means of purposive thinking in the pursuit of universal truth---or anything else for that matter. The system of inference is still operating in that sense, but on top of a set of background universal predications of both the rules of thought and basic values, including the values behind standards of intellectual propriety with regard to such universals---as well as those standards themselves.