Lazy man yawns - Mark Steyn - The Corner on National Review Online
Hey, why take my word for it? I lifted my utterly lazy offensiveness from the longtime prime minister of Malaysia (one of the least worst Muslim nations), Dr Mahathir Mohammed, :
“We produce practically nothing on our own, we can do almost nothing for ourselves, we cannot even manage our wealth,” he added… In spite of a number of Muslim nations being extremely wealthy, there is not a single one of them that can be classified as “developed” by any criteria. “[We are] lagging behind in modern knowledge, financial and technological skills and in many instances, effective governments,” he lamented. In addition to poverty, ignorance and instability have become such common features in the Muslim world that its detractors assume these afflictions are the natural consequences of following the teachings of Islam, Mahathir said.
The yap-dogs of the Islam-sucking PC media may not know what sort of utterly bankrupt cultures are constructed on the Islamic matrix, but some of the Muslims do. The truth is that if you build your nation on Islam first, it’s not inevitable that you will end up with a barely-civilized third world hell-hole, but that is the smart way to bet.
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
Many secularists I know begin with the syllogism that if there is no God, then all religions are totally false, and if all religions are totally false, then all are equally false.
However, this is fundamentally untrue, and it is untrue in large part because of the differences in world view that are derived in various faiths.
It is no accident that the Enlightenment derived from a faith that evolved to have the combined principles that God imbues each person with divine rights, the supremacy of free will to define one’s relationship with God, and that knowledge and understanding of God can come from knowledge and understanding of the workings of His world. This lead to embracing natural philosophy as a method of discovering God and the resulting dialectic between natural philosophy, revelation, scripture and tradition.
Further, Christianity is built on the recognition of ambiguity within its basic foundations — the nature of the divinity of Jesus, the existence and nature of the Trinity, even some of the basic concepts in atonement . Many Christians reject the concept of being “born again” in the current evangelical context, yet are still Christians. The development of Christian theology is again an ongoing product of this dialectic — some theologians believe that it this dialectic itself rather than any particular authority that is the “truth” within Christianity. Because it is a dialectic, this allows Christianity to accomodate new ideas, changing knowledge about the world, etc. Today’s Christians are different than those of the 1500s who are different than those of 500 AD who are different than those of 60 AD, and the Christians of 2500 will be very different than those of today. This is not to deny some basics that are present in all, but the application of those basics to the real world is profoundly diverse.
This is in stark distinction to Islam. I recently read a dissertation on the relationship between Islam and science. I apologize for not remembering the title. The author noted that, in contrast to the principles in Christianity, Islam is based on almost the opposite assertions. Islam specifically opposes the concept of individual rights imbued by the Creator. The value of free will is discounted. Most important, God’s will cannot be inferred from the observation of His works, or by individual enlightenment — that dialectic is not merely missing, but is heretical. There is only the Koran. Thus, the drive to understand Allah from his world is antithetical to the basic assertions of the religion itself.
Thus, this dissertation claimed, the great advances of the Golden Age of Islam — in empiricism, the development of mathematics, etc. — were in large part parasitic. Most of the great “Islamic” mathematicians and empricists were in fact not Moslem, but were dhimmi — Jews and Christians — who were first or second generation members of a subdued area. As the number of surviving Christians and Jews dwindled in the face of persecution, so did the appreciation of natural philosophy. As an area became more firmly Islamic, the more it abandoned such investigation.
According to this dissertation, the failure of enlightenment in Islam is constitutional, as was the development of it in Christiandom. The dissertation may be faulty, but the examples the author provided were convincing.
billo said:
I think this requires further analysis. It depends on what you mean by “false.” All religions are totally unprovable, and therefore, all religions are equally unprovable, as they all stand on their axioms, which are all, well, unprovable.
The problem is when you go from “all religions are equally unprovable” to “all religions are morally equivalent,” which is unfortunately what some of these secularists try to do. The problem with that reasoning lies in a sort of a reductio ad absurdum argument, which is that, if the fact that all religions are unprovable leads to the conclusion that all religions are morally equivalent, then it’s okay for me to torture and slaughter a million children — if the axioms of my religion support it.
This is repellent. But why? It’s because my I judge my actual axioms to have moral worth, even if they’re ultimately subjective and unprovable in a rational sense. I judge, different axioms have different moral worth, and which axioms you live by is your choice.
Therefore I am at war with those who choose axioms that I find morally repellent. I am also at war with those who would — either stupidly or cynically, I don’t know — judge all religions to be morally equivalent just because they are equally logically unprovable.
As a side note, I think I would agree with both billo and Bill Quick that different religions have different observable consequences, and when followed lead to worlds with different characters (as best as we can rationally tell, anyway). Our judgement of the characters of these different world-outcomes, when starting living by different axioms and religions, is a large part of how we decide which axioms and religions are more morally worthy.
So, yeah, all religions are subjective. Good is subjective, and so is objectivism (if only at a Cartesian level). But you know what? I’m cool with that. Murder is bad, subjection of human freedoms is bad, and if someone wants to say that I have no moral high ground on those judgments, because it’s all subjective, then fine, I have subjectively decided to be at war with that person, because they’re evil as far as I am concerned.
As another aside, I believe this is entirely consistent with Heinlein’s “rational anarchist” contention that “blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else.”
This seems very odd to me. By what process would an axiom be judged to have moral worth? By what standard of moral worth would an axiom be judged? And how would such a standard of moral worth be established? By some axiom?
AFAIK, an axiom (in the philosophical sense) is a statement of a self-evident (or better, irrefutable) truth. So, it seems to me, axioms cannot be judged to have moral worth.
AC, your questions are too difficult for alcohol to unravel. Only hallucinogens can get to the heart of the matter. Alas, because of the US War on Some Things a Nominally Free People Put in Their Bodies, your questions cannot legally be answered.
Moral worth can only come from the judgement of an individual; there is no other source.
There’s no other way. There are many irrefutable statements (in the sense that they cannot be logically disproven), but there are no irrefutable truths, unless you choose to treat them as true and leave it at that. That’s what an axiom is. Then, axioms are judged to have moral worth by the individuals who judge them to have that worth, by a process that is ultimately subjective and incommensurable.
There are axioms that, to a greater or lesser degree, when you live by them, appear to have repeatable consequences in what appears to be our shared experience of existence. But, you know, I could choose to believe that I’m in the Matrix, my five senses be damned. Or something even more bizarre.
I stand with you all (more or less) because I judge good the same things you judge good. There is no objective way to get there that doesn’t ultimately require reliance on some unprovable axiom. When “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” we mean to say that we have all agreed that it is self-evidently good to believe in these truths, based on the shared human experience that we all choose to believe is real.
If you would like to define the word “axiom” as “irrefutable truth,” that’s fine. But, in my philosophical understanding, just because you can’t refute something doesn’t mean it’s true, i.e. you can prove it. It’s your truth because you chose it, not because it had any objective, a priori truth outside of your choice.
I think it’s important to acknowledge this and embrace it. Because subjectivism cannot be disproven, moral-inequivalence subjectivism is the only rational defense against moral-equivalence subjectivism.
Here’s an axiom, CR: You think.
Now, given that you can’t even consider that notion without, well, thinking about it, I’d say it is a self-evident axiom.
Close, but then…
isn’t even close.
Your use of the word axiom here is, again, very odd. How does one ‘live by an axiom’? My guess is that what you choose to call an axiom, I (and many others, I suspect) would call a principle.
An example of an axiom: Existence exists.
An example of a principle: One ought to be honest.
It’s not my definition. See, for example:
[1] (philosophy) A self-evident and necessary truth; a proposition which it is necessary to take for granted; a proposition whose truth is so evident that no reasoning or demonstration can make it plainer.
[2] A self-evident and necessary truth, or a proposition whose truth is so evident as first sight that no reasoning or demonstration can make it plainer; a proposition which it is necessary to take for granted; as, “The whole is greater than a part;'’ “A thing can not, at the same time, be and not be.'’
Again the odd use of the term axiom. An axiom does not need to be proved because any attempt to deny it necessarily implies it is true. Thus, reliance on ‘unprovable’ axioms is the objective way to get there
Self-refuting baloney.
OK, fine, I’m using the wrong word. I’m willing to abandon the use of the word “axiom,” and use the word “principle” for my construct instead, and use the definition Alfred quoted for “axiom.” That’s fine.
Then I ask both of you: By Alfred’s quoted definition, what qualifies as an axiom, other than your assertion that you experience your own existence? For example, it is not necessary to take for granted that your sensory inputs are providing you with accurate information.
Easy there, smart guy. There’s no need to be rude. So far you have contributed little to the discussion besides a semantic correction, however correct.
Quite right. My apologies.
This claim:
is objectively nonsense.
I’m not sure what to do with this axiom. Very few of my logical models touch the question of whether or not CR thinks.
Presumably, this axiom is an instance of an axiom schema of some sort, but I’m not sure how to replace the constants in it with variables to get the schema you use. My first guess is that it would be “(∀x)x thinks,” but in that case I’m not sure what the domain of the quantifier is.
Even once we have this much, I’m not sure what it means to “think.” Oh sure, I’ve got a vague idea of what activities are and aren’t thinking. However, this idea isn’t rigorous enough for me to say that other, similar notions are nonsense.
Cayley’s post, above, is a perfect example of why I regard almost all formal philosophy including the application of mathematically derived logic as being meaningless gibberish and irrelevant to humans living in the real world.
I’m quite sure that one can “prove” by some method or other that humans don’t think, or that thinking isn’t thinking. or some other such bullshit. I don’t care. Never in all of history has such a proof had any meaning or relevance to humans, life, or reality.
It can all quite safely be entirely ignored.
Logic classes in engineering school are different. (Twenty years ago, anyway; perhaps they’ve been dumbed down since.) The focus was on doing practical stuff with formal logics, such as showing how truth tables map to digital electronic circuits. There was a bit of philosophical screwing around, but not too bad.
When I was in grad school, one of the profs on my advisory committee used to have some fairly harsh things to say on the subject of “pure” philosophy and the “study” thereof (I know because the lady of my “closest acquaintance” at the time was a PhD candidate in Philosophy, and said prof found this out)…
Among other statements, he claimed that, while many mammals exhibited creative thought processes, humans were the only ones that devoted any apparent thought to philosophical theories - and were also the only ones that seemed to have any need to do so.
He also once stated that “pure” philosophical thought should be considered mental masturbation - without any climax…
One could easily make a logical model wherein it would be a contradiction for something to simultaneously hold the properties of “human” and “thinking.” However, I wouldn’t use this model to describe humans or thinking if you paid me. In this hypothetical logical model, “human” and “thinking” are just names (and poorly chosen names, at that). Not caring about this model is probably the best thing to do with it.
I don’t think you recognize what it is these logical models are supposed to do. I suspect this is because you had a bad experience with someone who insisted on clinging to a logical structure after it became clear that it didn’t model the phenomenon it was supposed to model.
There are many, many examples of patently false conclusions being reached from reasonable-looking axioms. My favorite example is the Banach-Tarski Paradox, which shows how to cut a sphere up into a finite number of pieces and then rearrange these pieces — without stretching or squashing or any other funny business, just isometries — into two spheres of the same volume as the sphere you started with. I can understand why these sorts of results would put one off the prospect of formal logic. However, all of these sorts of paradoxes — from Zeno to Russell to Skolem — have satisfactory resolutions that come from peering closely at the axioms and discovering that they didn’t really apply. In the case of the Banach-Tarski Paradox, the assumption is that it is possible to assign a “volume” to every subset of three-dimensional space. The construction in the Banach-Tarski Paradox requires dividing the sphere into pieces that cannot be assigned a volume. The formalizations that led to this realization make up what is known as Measure Theory, which makes up the theoretical foundation of Probability Theory.
The point of making formal logical models is so you can figure out what conclusions you actually can reach from your assumptions. What I was setting out to do in comment #10 above was not to “”prove” by some method or other that humans don’t think.” What I was trying to do was show that the statement “You think” isn’t very useful as an axiom for reaching conclusions. This doesn’t mean that the real phenomena the statement is trying to axiomatize doesn’t exist; I fully believe that it does. However, the statement encodes very little information about what the phenomena are like. Even if the phenomena entail the conclusions you draw, the statement describes so little of the phenomena involved that I can’t figure out which phenomena you’re talking about, so I can’t tell if these phenomena entail these conclusions.
I disagree. In the classroom that axiom may be arguable. In the real world, it is not. Further, nobody makes actual decisions based on the notion that humans don’t think at all - ie, are similar to rocks. We have a name for people who think people and rocks are similar: We call them “crazy.”
That’s what I mean when I say such arguments are irrelevant to dealing effectively with reality.
Fine, refute it then.
Or, discard it, and let me try to explain again. What I am really interested in discussing is that I don’t think we can logically disprove moral equivalence, certainly not on purely formal grounds, and probably not even with, say, Bill Quick’s previously stated five (objectivist?) principles. Let me go into more detail (sorry, long).
Practically, I do think it’s in fact very useful for us to agree on certain first principles, even if they can’t be proven in the classroom. For example, we can probably reach a consensus about what our separate sensory faculties tell us about, say, the laws of physics, and then agree to treat certain laws of physics as though they were axioms. They’re not really axioms, because they could be challenged by a sufficiently determined subjectivist. To wit: You could all be hallucinations, and so could the laws of physics.
Now, maybe that’s “crazy.” But it’s a little less “crazy” than “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes talked in terms of levels of doubt, in terms of how far you have to go from perceptions to disagree with a principle.
So: I assert than any statement, of the libertarian-type philosophy that we all tend to share, will at some point be based on some other moral claim or group of claims, at a higher level of doubt than Bill’s five previously-stated low-level-of-doubt principles. I suspect that said moral claim(s) will be abstractly akin to, say
(Obviously said measurements would be contentious but I don’t think it matters for the larger argument.)
Anyway, I believe that one will not be able to formally prove anything like these moral, with only Bill’s previously mentioned five principles. I think one would have to resort to some other unprovable moral statement that is at a higher level of doubt than these principles.
This is the first part of what I was trying to say, that AC first called “baloney” and then “nonsense.” And the rest of what I was trying to say is that I think this is all okay. I think we really should judge some moral systems (e.g. Jefferson) as superior — good — better than — some other moral systems (e.g. Rawls), even though I’m thoroughly not convinced that we can prove them, based on easy-to-agree-upon, low-level-of-doubt, first principles. I think that some moral systems really are “more good” than others, and I think we should embrace that, because (at present, anyway), I think we are forced to.
And, therefore, the other part of what I was trying to say: I think we should judge against moral equivalence philosophizing as a form of evil, because it takes as a principle that if you can’t formally prove the moral superiority of a system, it has no worth.
If you still think that’s nonsense, perhaps you could do me the courtesy of trying to refute it in any way. I think the burden of proof is on anyone who thinks they can prove the superiority of a libertarian-like system on any sort of low-level-of-doubt first principles. Perhaps Rand or someone has already tried to do so, and if so, I’ll take a reference and go read it myself.
If AC still doesn’t want to take this seriously, he can be my guest, but I won’t reply to the next brush-off. I have better things to do.
You’re not disagreeing with me. I’m not arguing that the axiom is false. I’m arguing that the statement doesn’t encode all of the information that you seem to think it encodes.
There are many different-but-similar phenomena that you could be talking about when you use the term “thinking.” For example, you could be talking about
Concept Formation, or the specific concept formation method known as Reason, or the process of proving something, or one of many specific processes for proving something known as Logic, or perhaps something which integrates these (or other) concepts into a single concept. I suspect you’re either using it to describe either the type of process used to determine if a given logical model models reality, or a specific process of this type that works best.
However, I don’t know which of these concepts you’re referring to when you use the statement “You think;” all I know is that I do it. The thing is, in addition to thinking, I eat, breathe, sleep, imagine, take up space, etc. With the addition of the statement that “Rocks don’t think,” I can rule out the phenomenon of “taking up space” from the set of possible phenomena referred to when you use the term “think,” but I can’t rule out the others. I highly doubt you’re referring to them, but I can’t derive this from the information given in the statement “You think.”
I should note that I’ve been using the term “axiom” the way Mathematicians use it, which seems to be more like the way Objectivists use the terms Irreducible Primary, Proposition, or Definition. The Objectivist definition of axiom seems to apply specifically to syllogisms of systems of logic, but I’m not quite sure. At any rate, I’m still not sure what things can be proved from the statement “You think.”
I don’t have to. The term moral-inequivalence subjectivism supposes that which it denies. It is self-refuting.
Try this: Viable Values
And then this: Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist.
AC said:
Again with the semantics. There are multiple common definitions for “subjectivism,” and the above statement is not true of all of them, only the one you picked.
I’m not exactly sure what you get out of sniping at imperfections in word choice. I don’t find it productive, but then, I would assume you believe that (Rand):
So, I doubt you care whether I find it productive. That’s cool. If you actually want to engage on any level other than your opinion that I picked the wrong word, I’m sure you’ll let me know.
Anyway, it’s the above quote I want to talk about. While I may or may not choose to embrace that principle, I don’t see it as a self-evident principle — an axiom? — at the level of cogito ergo sum. Rand’s principle seems to me to be at a higher level of doubt, even, than what Bill said a few weeks ago:
If anyone thinks the quote from Rand follows formally from those five principles, I’d like to hear it. On a brief look, Rand does claim that,
I’m not convinced there is a tight argument from a to b. (Nor am I convinced, for that matter, that reason is man’s only means of perceiving reality, but that’s a whole other can of worms.) Anyway, I’ll certainly peruse the sources AC recommends. In the meantime, my sense is that “man…must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.” is a moral choice — a principle, not an axiom.
Therefore, I’ll stick to my guns on my larger assertion even if AC thinks I’m using the wrong words. To wit: I still think it’s true that, when we disapprove of things like collectivism, we ultimately have to concede that to do so is a moral choice. This choice defies a logical proof solely from truths that even all non-crazy humans would call self-evident.
Some people really do choose to believe that a man can be a means to the ends of others, and must sacrifice himself to others, or others to himself. I choose to call that morally wrong, I think. Nevertheless, if all you admit are irrefutable axioms (using the definition of “axiom” AC sites), I don’t see how I can formally prove that it’s morally wrong.
Well. I expect that my choice of some word has again been imprecise, and soon, I’ll be told, and then, I’ll try to fix it and repeat the argument yet again.
The nice thing about formal logic is that, in addition to proving that there is a “tight argument from a to b” when there is one, it’s also often possible to prove that there isn’t a tight argument from a to b when there isn’t one. The way one does it is by constructing a logical model that satisfies a but not b; the most common technique for doing so is called a “forcing argument.”
Remember, this doesn’t prove that b is false; it just proves that the a doesn’t imply b.
How wonderfully consistent! I suppose that, in keeping with subjectivism, no such definition actually express an objective definition but rather expresses a feeling or an attitude?
This is great stuff, CR. You’ve made my day!
AFAIK, neither did she. Rather, what she called “rational selfishness” is a consequence. Here’s a taste from “Viable Values”, p155:
Assuming I’ve understood the original quote correctly:
I would venture to guess that CR would say “No; some of these definitions actually express objective definitions. Further, the philosophical practice I’m identifying with the term `subjectivism’ does not hold that all definitions express feelings or attitudes. However, some people (apparently including you) reserve the term `subjectivism’ only for those philosophical practices that insist that no definitions express objective truth but rather express feelings or attitudes.”
My apologies to CalmRising if I have butchered their philosophy. I haven’t followed your comments on other posts perfectly, so I don’t know too much about you (although I have it on good authority that you think).
Good, although not divine, authority, CG.
CG, as this discussion involves morality, it seemed reasonable to me to assume that, by subjectivism, CR means ethical subjectivism which, AFAIK, is the meta-ethical position that there are no objective moral truths or facts. Put another way:
Or another way:
Or yet another way:
What is your notion of subjectivism in this context? CR, what is yours?
I would venture to guess that my clearly lame attempt to lighten up this thread has failed miserably.
Not if morality is properly defined and understood. What is morality and further, why be moral? Some ‘philosophers’ claim that the question ‘why be moral’ is incoherent. To try to give a moral reason to be moral begs the question and a nonmoral reason cannot explain why one should be moral.
Rand’s account of morality, OTOH, turns on the concept of values which in turn depends on the objective fact that organisms face the fundamental alternative of life or death and that, in the case of man, there is a fundamental pre-moral choice: To live (as a human - a rational creature) or to die (as a human - to live as an irrational animal). Having made that choice, one must act to sustain his life (as a human) and for that, according to Rand, one needs a code - a moral code.
So, to disapprove of collectivism, to judge collectivism as immoral is, on Rand’s account, an “objective evaluation of the facts of reality” - the reality that collectivism is anti-life.