Truth

Truth is only that which accurately describes existence in the past, present, or future.

We must never tire of pursuing the truth.

Trust is the Antidote to Worry

I think that a long time ago, we had a lot of implicit expectations when we trusted someone. Trust meant not just that person wouldn't harm us, but also that if we were in any sort of danger we would be warned. That something, anything, would be done to help if it were possible. 

Maybe it's still that way for children.  But for adults now, trust has to be a lot more specific and explicit. For example, when you connect to a website securely and you enter your username and password, you are trusting your computer to faithfully transmit what you type and not work against you, you are trusting the network between your computer and the server to carry your encoded messages to the correct destination, you are trusting the secure browsing protocol that nobody can eavesdrop on your username and password, you are trusting the website not to publish your password or other personal information or use it against you, and after all of that you are trusting the website to serve its intended purpose. Or similarly when you drive a car on the highway, you are trusting that your machine works, you are trusting that your skills of navigating and driving it are adequate to get you to your destination, you are trusting that the roads leading to your destination are passable, and you are trusting that the other drivers on the road will not bump into you. 

That's why we get so mad when a website sells or allows to be stolen its list of members and their personal information. It's a violation of trust. Or when a drunk driver hits another car. It's a violation of trust - and worse, it was a willful violation, because a person has to act to become drunk. 

When a person does not trust, a person worries. 

So if you find that you are worried a lot, it means you have lost a lot of trust. Maybe the loss was "earned" because of past mistakes or problems, or maybe its groundless. Either way, the only way to get it back is to experiment.  

Not sure if the road to where you're going is worthy? Start with a drive around the block. Then go a little farther. Ask people who have been there and maybe travel with friends to double check. 

A person who doesn't worry is said to be a person with a lot of confidence. But confidence just means firmly trusting. A person with confidence is a person with a lot of trust in himself or herself and in the world. That trust can be based on a person's beliefs or experience. I think the best confidence comes from experience, especially if it's experience using one's own skills because it combines a trust in the world and a trust in oneself. 

So if you are worried sick, you better find something to trust. You don't have to start by trusting the thing that makes you worried, because you can get to that later. Start with something easy, maybe something you already trust and just remind yourself... "I trust my chair to be sturdy, this table to be flat..." and work your way up to trusting enough to make your worry go away. 

Trust doesn't mean that everything will be okay. It means that the world will work the way it's supposed to. So the more you learn about the world, the easier it is to trust it.

Defense of Objectivism

I read "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand" by Leonard Peikoff and I really liked it because Rand's philosophy is clear and stands on it's own - a magnificent independent way to arrive at values, purpose, rights, and wrongs. As I became more interested in government and politics and what is the best way to run a country so that I can decide how to vote in election, my own thoughts over the years have been moving in this direction. Reading this book was like coming home to something familiar because Rand's insightful definitions gave me a strong base of validated concepts to which I can reduce all my thoughts and check their course.

Also, I think overall Peikoff did a great job of writing all of it clearly and in a well-organized book, but there are some mistakes that I hope can be corrected in a future edition. By pointing out the mistakes - whether Peikoff's or Rand's - I am defending Objectivism from criticism that it does not deserve:

1. In the chapter "Reality", in the section "The Metaphysically Given as Absolute", Peikoff writes: "The Objectivist view of existence culminates in the principle that no alternative to a fact of reality is possible or imaginable."  I agree that no alternative to a fact of reality is possible. I disagree that no alternative is imaginable. To the point: In the book Peikoff addresses several commonly held beliefs that are not grounded in reality. If no alternative to reality is imaginable, and people are able to imagine God, gremlins, dragons, Santa Claus, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars, then all those things must be possible in reality somewhere and somehow. This means anything man imagines is possible. This amounts to a primacy of consciousness view. The Objectivist view should be read as: "No alternative to a fact of reality is possible."

2. In the chapter "Reality", in the section "Idealism and Materialism as the Rejection of Basic Axioms", Peikoff illustrates that the idea of the supernatural is a rejection of the basic axioms of existence, identity, and consciousness by relating beliefs about God to the Objectivist viewpoint.

Peikoff writes: "Is God the creator of the universe? Not if existence has primacy over consciousness." I disagree here. The Objectivist philosophy does state that existence has primacy over consciousness - however, this can only be validated within our own existence. Our existence has primacy over our consciousness. If God created our existence (in the conventional sense as in created it out of nothing), it means God is outside of our existence. He therefore may have the power to manipulate it supernaturally. But this changes nothing - by definition, anything God makes happen within our existence is possible within our existence. And our existence, though manipulated by God, still has primacy over our consciousness. Could God's existence have primacy over God's consciousness? Since this question is regarding a subject matter outside our existence, Objectivism has nothing to say about it. Does God need a creator? Again, it's a question outside our existence. These questions presuppose ideas about something about which we don't have evidence and can never get evidence since it's outside of our existence. In Objectivism these ideas are called arbitrary because they are not rooted in our existence and therefore have no evidence that can be used to prove them true or false. Objectivism doesn't require a creator. Objectivism accepts our existence as primary and builds on that. The Objectivist view should be: "Is God the creator of the universe? This presupposes that God is outside existence and therefore it cannot be shown to be true or false. A question about the nature of God is outside the realm of Objectivism, because no amount of discussion of this idea can add to human knowledge unless it has its roots in firm evidence. Objectivism, being a philosophy rooted in existence, therefore regards this question as arbitrary."

Peikoff writes: "Is God the designer of the universe? Not if A is A. The alternative to design is not chance. It is causality." This requires the same adjustment as the previous question. To design anything, one must exist before the thing is created. Even in the Objectivist sense of creation as the re-arranging of existents, this is an illogical leap because it attempts to answer the question about design before first establishing the facts: The question presupposes the existence of God. Since we have no evidence about the existence of God, this question is also arbitrary and cannot be shown to be true or false. While some people may claim to have evidence, these claims have been around for thousands of years of known history and still the evidence has not been sufficient for man to accept the existence of God as a fact the same way man accepts the existence of rocks as a fact.

Peikoff writes: "Is God omnipotent? Nothing and no one can alter the metaphysically given." This requires the same adjustment as the previous question. Even after acknowledging that this is an arbitrary question because it presupposes the existence of God for which we have no evidence, and suspending disbelief: if God does exist, if he designed and created the universe in the Objectivist sense of re-arranging existents, I think that would qualify as omnipotence... and yet those who believe in God believe that he is in some way responsible for the content of the Bible and that the content of the Bible is true, and there is plenty of "evidence" in the Bible in the form of things God says and does pointing to the notion that God is not omnipotent. All very interesting, but since Objectivism seeks to guide man's thoughts with a firm grounding in reality, this is all outside the realm of Objectivism. That's not to say it's outside the realm of discussion. It just doesn't add anything to man's knowledge about the world.

Peikoff writes: "Is God infinite? Infinite does not mean large; it means larger than any specific quantity, i.e., of no specific quantity. An infinite quantity would be a quantity without identity. But A is A... The actual is always finite." Again, questions about the nature of God are outside the realm of Objectivism and add nothing to human knowledge. I love the example though, and I think it should be rewritten as "Can anything be infinite? ..." because that is something people do wonder about. Infinity is a useful concept that allows us to compress our notations and refine our thinking, but it's not real.

Peikoff writes: "Can God perform miracles? A miracle does not mean merely the unusual. A miracle is an action not possible to the entities involved by their nature; it would be a violation of identity." Again, a question outside the realm of Objectivism. But I disagree with the definition of miracle here. I consulted various dictionaries and in all definitions a miracle is either something outside of the laws of nature that we know or can explain - this leaves open the possibility of re-arranging existents to create that effect. This is essentially a spiritual view of magic in the sense that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic to a person unfamiliar with its foundations - consider the magical talking mirror in the tale of Snow White, written before even the telephone was invented, and how our modern every-day ability of video chat would appear to a person of that time as a magical talking mirror. A person who believes in God and who believes that God either created or designed the universe must then also believe that God can perform miracles - and that many of his activities as told in the Bible are themselves miracles even if they are not explicitly described as such. A person who does not believe in God must not believe that God can perform miracles. But Objectivism? Objectivism doesn't care. Any person who wishes to use the wisdom of Objectivism must similarly suspend his questions about God while engaged in reasoning and learning about our world. Anything that we see and cannot explain should be noted and  the evidence preserved or recorded to the best of our capability so that other people may have a chance to discover something new about our world. If we cannot preserve any evidence, it's unreasonable to expect anyone to believe it. There's nothing wrong with saying that something is a miracle - it just means we don't have an explanation for it yet. We still have the choice to investigate it and learn something or leave it alone if we're not interested in learning anything new. Is it a coincidence that in a time when we know a lot more about nature than our ancestors, the number of miracles seems to be dwindling? But they will never completely disappear: As long as we don't know everything about the universe, there will remain a possibility for miracles.

Peikoff writes: "Is God purely spiritual? Spiritual means pertaining to consciousness, and consciousness is a faculty of certain living organisms, the faculty of perceiving that which exists. A consciousness transcending nature would be a consciousness transcending organism and object. So far from being all-knowing, such a thing would have neither means nor content of perception; it would be non-conscious." Again, the Objectivist answer must be: "A question about the nature of God is outside the realm of Objectivism, because no amount of discussion of this idea can add to human knowledge unless it has its roots in firm evidence."

So although I think Peikoff's example with God does a disservice to Objectivism by trying to reason about something that is arbitrary, he does clear up the matter soon after by writing: "There is no logic that will lead from the facts of this world to a realm contradicting them" and "If one is to postulate a supernatural realm, one must... rely instead on faith." This amounts to a clear separation of religion or any other mysticism from Objectivism. It's brilliant.

3. In the chapter "Reason", in the section "The Arbitrary as Neither True Nor False", Peikoff writes: "The reason that Objectivism rejects agnosticism should now be clear... Agnosticism is not simply the pleading of ignorance. It is the enshrinement of ignorance... The agnostic treats arbitrary claims as matters properly open to consideration, discussion, evaluation... He demands proof of a negative... in struggling to elevate the arbitrary to a position of cognitive respect, he is attempting to equate the arbitrary with the logically supported... In considering any issue, never permit ourself one minute in the quicksands of a baseless "I don't know". Instead, establish first that the issue is related to the realm of evidence and thus deserves consideration. Then study the evidence, weighing the possibilities in accordance with the principles of logic. Then make up your mind and take a stand... One can reach [truth] only by a process of reason."

I disagree with Peikoff's assertion that agnosticism is the enshrinement of ignorance. I think just as Peikoff's so-called objective treatment of God misapplies reason to an arbitrary claim, certain famous agnostics have misapplied their uncertainty about God to all other knowledge. I think Objectivism and agnosticism go hand in hand, they are two sides of the same coin. Objectivism is explicitly concerned only with things that are grounded in reality. Agnosticism is concerned only with things that are not grounded in reality: without evidence, we can never know with certainty if a claim is true or false. This is just a restatement of Objectivism's definition of arbitrary. Thomas Huxley, who invented the term "agnostic", certainly did not try to equate the arbitrary with the logically supported. To the contrary, he stated that before one can reason about any such questions one needs evidence. He wrote that the human intellect is out of its depth in these matters, that you can discuss them at length without arriving at any new knowledge. This agnostic viewpoint is the same as the Objectivist viewpoint: discussion of arbitrary claims cannot add to human knowledge precisely because they are not grounded with evidence. This applies to any claim from conspiracy theories to religion.

I do agree that agnostics who say that nothing is certain are practicing what Rand calls evasion: willfully disengaging their mind from examining the evidence available to them and reasoning about it, willfully avoiding the hard work of acquiring new knowledge. Applying agnosticism to alarm clocks and probabilities is a mistake: agnosticism is not uncertainty about the future, it's uncertainty about propositions that cannot be proven true or false because there is no evidence for either case. Regarding knowledge about our world, agnosticism amounts to scientific skepticism which is endorsed by Objectivism: "study the evidence, weighing the possibilities in accordance with the principles of logic [(such as the scientific method)]. Then make up your mind and take a stand... One can reach [truth] only by a process of reason."

Quite the opposite of "enshrinement of ignorance", Thomas Huxley who invented the term agnostic was active in the scientific community of his day. He was an early vocal and public supporter of Darwin's theory of evolution, but only after he reviewed the massive amount of evidence that Darwin had amassed.

The Objectivist viewpoint should be: "Objectivism and agnosticism are two sides of the same coin. Just as reason can be misused to give credibility to arbitrary claims, agnosticism can be misused to claim ignorance when evidence is available. While discussion of arbitrary matters can be very entertaining, it should be understood that without evidence, such discussion can never lead to new knowledge."

What The Bible Really Says About God

Is God all-seeing, everywhere and all at once all-being, all-capable, and infallible?

The religious answer is yes. But how do we know that? By reading the Bible? And can we trust what the Bible says, given that the Bible has some major contradictions in it?

Here are just two of the Bible's contradictions:

In Genesis 1:26 and other places, God is many because he says "us" and "our"; but in Exodus 3:6 and other places, God is one because he says "I".

In Genesis 1, God creates beasts and then man and woman. In Genesis 2, God places man in Eden and then creates the beasts and then creates woman from one of man's ribs - beasts after man instead of before him.

I wonder if someone has already published a longer list?

So the Bible has some contradictions in it.  Do the contradictions, and also the presence of several distinct writing styles, mean that people wrote the Bible as we know it?  If God really did give us the Bible as it is, and if God is infallible, then God must have meant to include the contradictions for some reason. Otherwise he is either fallible or he did not give us the Bible as it is.

Regarding the contradictions I have two broad views: if they are intentional, the Bible either intends to confuse man's mind and therefore control him with irrationality, or they are intended to help us grasp something deep, or it's a sort of time-lock so that the Bible can guide men's actions until such a time when they are wise enough to understand why they should live a certain way and then discard the Bible because of its flaws. Or, if the contradictions are not intentional, they are evidence that God is fallible (if he wrote it), or that the entire thing was written by men and God never existed at all, or that God exists and doesn't care that we are messing things up.

Since I can't outwardly observe God and ask him what is the truth, all I can do is review Exhibit A and draw my own conclusions...

Exhibit A: The Bible

The Bible offers us three distinct kinds of information about God:  what God says, what God does, and what people believe about God. Also, what God says can be divided into two sub-categories: waking stories and dreaming stories.

Going back to the contradictions, in Exodus 3:6, God tells Moses: I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. He then continues speaking and uses the word "I" to refer to himself. So this implies God is one. But in Genesis 1:26, God says "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness". Also in Genesis 3:5 the serpent tells Eve to eat the fruit so she can "be as gods" - who later, in Genesis 3:22 say, "behold the man is become as one of us". And in Genesis 11:7, God says "let us go down and confound [man's] language". So this implies God is many. These are supposedly direct quotations from God. It's plausible that anything God told man was passed down through generations as a great story. But who was there to hear God say "let us make man in our image", or to know anything about creation for that matter? 

In Genesis 25:23, God answer's Rebekah questions about her unborn children, but does not use any noun or pronoun for himself, so it does not imply either God is one or God is many. It cannot be assumed either way from such verses.

In Genesis 3:9 God is walking in the Garden of Eden and calls to Adam "where are you?". If he is all-knowing, he would already know where Adam is and he would already know that it was the serpent who convinced Eve to eat the fruit and that it was Eve who then gave the fruit to Adam. But God asks anyway. Why? Did the honest answer change the consequence? We cannot know. When in Genesis 2:27 God told man not to eat the fruit, if that was important then God could have made two separate gardens or he could have put the guardian angel next to the tree from the start instead of letting man eat the fruit then kicking man out and then putting the guardian angel at the entrance to the garden to keep man from coming back... after it's already too late because man already ate the fruit.  

In Genesis 3:22-23, God kicks man out of the Garden of Eden so he won't eat from the tree of life and become immortal. And in Genesis 6:3, God says that man is mortal and his life is limited to 120 years. Yet in Genesis 9:5 Adam dies at 930 years, in Genesis 9:29 Noah dies at 950 years old, in Genesis 11:32 Terah dies at 205 years old, in Genesis 25:7 Abraham dies at 175 years old. In Deuteronomy 34:7, Moses dies at 120 years old - in the last book of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. The only person born after Moses who lived beyond 120 is Jehoiada the priest, who dies at 130 years old in 2 Chronicles  24:15, but this is a book not part of the Torah. So are all the lifespans greater than 120 from Adam to Moses a contradiction of God's decree? Or are they evidence that through a deliberate process the maximum human lifespan was being reduced to 120 years?  And by deliberate I mean, The longest-living person in modern history was Jeanne Calment, a French woman who was born in 1875 and died 122 years old, but after her the second longest-living person was Sarah Knauss, an American woman who was born in 1880 and lived to be 119 years old. Do we chalk up Jehoiada and Jeanne Calment as outliers to God's general rule? Why did it take 27 generations (if you believe the Bible story) for man's maximum lifespan to be reduced to 120 years? If God is the one who imposed the lifespan limit in some way does this mean his method has limits? Or is God did not impose the limit himself and was merely remarking on it how did God know what would happen to man's lifespan in the future? Or has man's maximum lifespan always been 120 years and the ages in the Bible are incorrect? It wouldn't be the last time that someone "fudged" the data to support a desired conclusion.

In Genesis 18:21, God says that he will go to Sodom to see how bad things really are. Needing to go there means that God has a limited perception that must be focused. Therefore his knowledge is limited.

In Genesis 6:11-17, God says the earth is corrupt and full of violence and for that he will destroy everything, and he instructs Noah to make an ark so that he can escape the destruction. Causing a world-ending flood is very powerful - but it's not all-powerful. God has tools and methods and although they are very powerful, they have limits and he has to work within them.  If God is all-powerful, could he not have simply caused all the violent men and beasts to die? Could he not have created a world without the violence he hates? He obviously didn't get it right on the first try. And does he even have more than one try? There are plenty of references in the Bible to God knowing or predicting the future, but none of him going back into the past to change anything. I also have some ability to predict the future. My children will grow (I know this because I studied biology) and they will graduate high school (I know this because I intend to be a good parent) and they are going to face challenges (I know this because I have experienced life) and they are going to overcome them and fall in love and have children (I know this because I understand human nature and statistics). So it makes sense that, if God knows the nature of man, he can predict many things. And since there is rarely a time limit on his predictions, they all eventually come true because they are all consequences of man's nature. 

In Exodus 12:7, God tells Moses to tell all his people to put lamb's blood on their doorposts so that later in Exodus 12:23, when God moves to kill all the Egyptian first born, he will recognize the houses of Israel by the blood on the door posts and skip or "pass over" them. Does this show that God is not all-knowing? If he were all-seeing or all-knowing he would know which houses belong to his people. 

If God is not all-seeing and all-knowing, then God cannot be all-powerful. In the Exodus example, an all-powerful God would be able to strike down Egyptian first-borns without needing his people to mark their own houses for him first. Since he needed the marks, he has limits. Having limits means he is not all-powerful - not to the extreme that religious people make him out to be. The story certainly shows that he cannot be everywhere at once throughout all time because if he could then he would already know which house is which because he would know who lives there and where they came from. 

There are stories in the Bible of God having much knowledge and power, but not of being all-seeing, all-knowing or all-powerful. There are verses in the Bible that say he is these things - but these verses are found later, many in Psalms and in the New Testament, and all the ones that I have reviewed have been men speaking their opinion about God. I can see how, given the things God did do, he may have appeared to man to be very powerful, and given man's propensity to make connections and exaggerate, it was only natural for man to declare that God is all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful... but that in essence is a fact about man, not about God. It is man who needed God to be all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful. 

So if God is not all-seeing, everywhere and all at once all-being, all-capable or all-powerful, and infallible, WHAT IS HE? 

Genesis tells us that God is someone who is part of a group. God has identity but wants to keep it secret: [3:14]. There may be one God, but he is not alone - in the same way that there is just one me, but I am not alone. God is someone who created humanity to be like his group [Genesis 1:26]. God is someone who has children [Genesis 6:2] who are sexually compatible with humans [Genesis 6:4]. God is someone who wants mankind to grow and to control his environment [Genesis 1:28]. God is someone who makes mistakes [Genesis 2:17 and 3:24]. God is someone who repeatedly makes covenants with man [Genesis 9:11 and others]. God prefers meat over fruit or vegetables [Genesis 4:4-5]. God asks rhetorical questions [Genesis 4:9]. God wants man to be mortal [Genesis 3:22 and 6:3]. God wanted man to be conquerable [Genesis 11:6-7] but changed his mind - since he didn't stop us from building nuclear weapons or space stations. God walks with humans - Adam, Enoch, Noah, and Moses. God changes his mind [Genesis 8:21 and Genesis 18:26-32]. God uses tools to do his work [Genesis 19:24]. God uses reason [Genesis 11:6-7]. 

God seems very much like us, which makes sense, since either he created us to be like him [Genesis 1:26] or we invented him and because God is our invention he naturally has a very human twist even when we try to make him something more. 

One way God could be present everywhere at once, including the past, present, and future, is if he exists outside our existence. Not necessarily another dimension or another universe, but just outside of our existence. Ideas about our universe being an artificial reality such as portrayed in "The Thirteenth Floor" or "The Matrix" concretely show how a God outside our reality would be able to see everything and be everywhere at once. Interestingly enough, in those two stories the men (or machines) running the simulations still have a limited capacity to see and to do things within the simulation although, compared to the men living inside the simulation their power is still very great. With enough computing power, the scientists in "The Thirteenth Floor" could have paused the simulation at any moment, rewound it to some past state, and replay it from the past and interfere and change things. To see how the future unfolds they could simply let the simulation run. If they are not satisfied they can then return it to a past state, warn people about the future, or make changes to alter the future. 

We can never have any evidence that God exists outside of existence, because if it were true then by definition the evidence wouldn't exist here. God could even appear himself and tell us all about it and we still wouldn't have any evidence - because we would be seeing and hearing him in this existence. Any evidence God brings into existence to show us that he is also outside of it will necessarily become part of our existence and therefore fail as proof that there is something beyond. We may choose to believe but we can never have proof.  Also, if God exists outside of our existence there are absolutely no consequences for us. Nothing changes - that we know of. Life continues as it has been, as he has allowed it to be. We make choices as we have been. The meaning and purpose of our life does not change. If God wants to do something, he only has to appear and say it. I think if he appears with a show of force most people would be afraid enough or inspired enough to obey immediately. 

Whether God is limited or unlimited, existing only in this world or also outside of it, we have our lives to live and our choices to make. 

I think most people want to have a good life whether God exists or not. And I know that there are people who, regardless of whether they believe in God or not, say the hell with it and they are going to have a lot of fun and do anything they want regardless of the consequences to them in this life or beyond it. They don't care what happens to them and they place their whims before any other cause. Are these people a problem? If they act irrationally but they hurt only themselves they should be free to do that. But if they act to hurt other people, we have each other for defense. 

Maybe the promise of fruitfulness in the covenant is fulfilled when we follow God's teachings. His commandments tell us about authority, government, society, the good merit of study, how we should work for ourselves and together, how we should relate to each other. 

Whether or not other people believe in God, my own actions will be consistent with my values. And whether or not I believe in God, something I do value is my life and my actions will be consistent with that. 

The weird stuff happens when people believe in God and they do evil. Does that mean God is a bad idea? I think given all the good people in the world who believe in God we cannot say that God is a bad idea. I think that people who believe in God and do evil should be judged for what they do, not for what they believe, the same as with any other idea such as capitalism, human rights, communism, fascism, environmentalism. Some ideas more than others may facilitate warped values that encourage evil action and this should be evidence for us that those ideas are not good for us. But it's not as simple as saying belief in God is good or bad. It's what you believe about God that can warp your values. Even if we could identify every person whose beliefs and values will lead to evil, we cannot convince them all of this. We just have to deal with it with it happens. 

I think the best way to deal with is to talk in terms of what they have done and our need to defend ourselves from them. Just be objective. 

In Numbers 35:15-28 God says we should have places for people who are accused to hang out until their guilt is determined, and that if they are guilty they should be punished, and that if they don't want the protection of the sanctuary they are on their own. In Numbers 35:30-32 God says we should not testify falsely and we should not take any pleasure in punishments - do what you have to, get it over with, and move on.

The Bible says that God values human rights, including our right to life and liberty and property, and that he advocates self-defense and punishment (which he does not reserve) in order to enforce those rights. So go and live a great life and do great things and respect other people's human rights. You have permission!

Philosophy

I've been reading about philosophy and I got annoyed by these two examples I read on wikipedia:

Kant claimed that dialectic method was sterile because it led to contradictory conclusions? The dialectic method as it is was used by the famous philosophers itself was not the cause of the contradictions. The cause must have been undetected errors in the logic of the arguments presented within that method. Just like our more modern scientific method for arriving at actual physical knowledge doesn't work if you don't reason well within each step.

I read that in Hegel's "The Logic", Hegel talks about how quality and quantity are related, using the temperature of water was a really bad example. Clearly the fact that the water changes from liquid to steam at a 100 degrees Celsius does not stem from the relationship between quality and quantity, it stems from the nature of water. Would he have come to a different conclusion if he had instead used the number of molecules of water as the quantity to change instead of temperature?

Reason is a tool, but you get out of it what you put into it... if your facts or premises are faulty, or if your connections are faulty because you're not diligent at checking for contradictions or gaps, you will arrive at faulty conclusions. Reason is just a process. To use reason reliably we need to take careful steps and check each other's work critically.

Reason is a team sport!

Anarchism in Action is Bogus

Here is a commentary by Des McCarron that discusses what the author considers a successful anarchy in Spain in the 1930's.  Here is an excerpt from the article:

The individualists were left to their own devices though the collectives were under no obligation to give them any aid (in practice most did). However they were totally forbidden from employing workers and they lost automatic inheritance rights. Many individualists did eventually go over to the collectives and they were usually won over by example and not forced.

Clearly, the collectives had rules, which included rationing food to members. The members of the collectives were not really free from government. They were still being governed by the rules of the collectives. And the collectives even imposed rules on non-members! How else can it be explained that individuals not in the collectives were forbidden from employing workers and lost inheritance rights and? Shouldn't the so-called anarchy of the time have allowed them to do pay others for work done and to pass on their possessions to their children? Even the most oppressive societies in the world today generally allow their citizens to hire others and to pass on possessions to their children. 

It wasn't anarchy. It was organized. Some people made rules, others followed them. The anarchy label being applied to that is purely propaganda.

Friedrich Nietzsche Is Wrong About Human Rights

An excerpt from Wikipedia article on anti-humanism:
For Friedrich Nietzsche, humanism was nothing more than a secular version of theism. He argues in Genealogy of Moralsthat human rights exist as a means for the weak to constrain the strong; as such, they deny rather than facilitate emancipation of life.


I agree that human rights are a means for the weak to constrain the strong. The entire concept of human rights arose because of an endless array of tragedies in human history involving strong people trampling on the lives of weaker people. But the concept of weak versus strong has to be expanded to include docile versus ruthless and unarmed versus armed. So when I say "strong" here it also applies to "the man with the gun", even if physically, mentally, and emotionally he is weaker than his prey. 


I strongly disagree that human rights deny rather than facilitate emancipation of life. 


First, rights are only a zero-sum game in situations with acutely limited resources and unequal rights. For example, granting everyone the right to vote does not limit anyone's right to vote in normal situations. Granting certain people the right to haul water from a specific well but not granting that right to other people will potentially deny freedom to those others to haul water when there is a large demand by people with rights that causes a long wait for people without rights. But granting everyone the right to haul water from a specific well does not deny anyone freedoms - they all have the same opportunity. 


Second, to suppose that a strong person's emancipation somehow hangs on his ability to trample on the lives of others is ridiculous. Can you imagine what new entries the Guinness Book of World Records might hold in this situation?  How about "Most 5-year-olds decapitated in a 2-minute period" - can you imagine someone being free to do that? And then someone else trying to beat their record? All in the name of being free to do whatever?  Of course, in a world where nobody has even basic human rights, there's no need for a justice system, because there's nothing to enforce. So when your 5-year-old gets decapitated by the Nietzsche fan you would be just as free to round up your friends and retaliate against him without fear of paying any consequences other than having to later defend yourself against HIS friends. This is anarchy.


Third, if we try to adopt only those rules that make life better for society as a whole, then a set of basic human rights are naturally the first rules that should be adopted. Look at Myanmar. A country of 55 million people, most of them oppressed by just one million in the employ of the government (military, police, bureaucrats, informers) who are themselves controlled by just a few thousand people who can be said to comprise the elite who are topped by the single military dictator. That country has no human rights. Millions suffer for the benefit of a few. Ending the oppression and suffering of those millions would clearly cause a lot more happiness than is currently enjoyed by the strong few who rule them, because all human hearts are similar in size. 


Fourth, not all people are created equal. We are not all the same. But we all share similarities, and it's each person's unique differences from others that gives the potential to succeed where others fail. For the sake of the survival of the human species, we should preserve the potential to use our differences for our common good. But allowing the strong to trample the weak erodes that potential. We need human rights so that all humans will be treated equally in certain situations in order to overcome the fact that we are not all equal. I believe this creates more liberties than it denies, and I believe that enforcement of human rights is one of the most noble things that can be done.

Relativity of Simultaneity

So I read Relativity of Simultaneity on Wikipedia. The "train-and-platform" thought experiment is supposed to show how two events can appear to be simultaneous from one frame of reference while not appearing simultaneous in another.

Setup quote: "A popular picture for understanding this idea is provided by a thought experiment consisting of one observer midway inside a speeding traincar and another observer standing on a platform as the train moves past".

Observer on the train: "A flash of light is given off at the center of the traincar just as the two observers pass each other. The observer onboard the train sees the front and back of the traincar at fixed distances from the source of light and as such, according to this observer, the light will reach the front and back of the traincar at the same time."

BUT, I propose there's more to this observer-on-the-train scenario than was discussed. The observer can't actually know when the light hit the front and back of the traincar until the light reflects back from those surfaces and returns to the observer.  Therefore the observer's measurement of when the light reached the front of the car is the time it took the light to reach the front plus the time it took the light to return from the front to the observer.

Let the first observer in the traincar be oC and the second observer on the platform be oP.
Let rCF be the ray moving from the center of the traincar, the location of oC, to the front of the traincar.
Let rCB be the ray moving from the center of the traincar, the location of OC, to the rear of the traincar.

If the car is moving forward, then the front of the car is actually moving away from the light, and so the light rCF will take longer to reach the front of the car.  Let tF be the time required for the light to move a half-traincar-length in the same direction the traincar is moving. On the other hand, the light moving toward the back of the car rCB has less distance to travel because the back of the car is also moving toward the source of the light so it will get there faster.   Let tB be the time required for the light to move a half-traincar-length in the opposite direction the traincar is moving.

However, once the light moving forward rCF is reflected, it will have less distance to cover on the way back since the middle of the car is moving toward it,  and when the light originally moving toward the back rCB reflects it will then take longer to reach the middle because the middle will be moving away from it.

So the total time for the light moving toward the front to return to the observer is tF + tB,  while the total time for the light moving toward the back to return to the observer is tB + tF.  The total is the same.

The net effect is that the light moving forward and backward will appear to reach the ends of the traincar at the same time because the reflected light will reach the observer at the same time.

Now the observer on the platform: "The observer standing on the platform, on the other hand, sees the rear of the traincar moving (catching up) toward the point at which the flash was given off and the front of the traincar moving away from it. As the speed of light is finite and the same in all directions for all observers, the light headed for the back of the train will have less distance to cover than the light headed for the front. Thus, the flashes of light will strike the ends of the traincar at different times"

That's right, but that's not any different than the first half of the solution for the first observer.  Since the second observer is not moving with the train, the second half of the solution is different - the second observer will see light reflected from the back and from the front of the traincar toward him. The light reflected from the back will reach the observer first because it will have less distance to travel than the light that is reflected from the front of the traincar.

BUT, what isn't accounted for in the second observer's story is the fact that the in the second half of the solution, the light rays start at different distances from the observer.  This is because the light that moved from the center of the traincar toward the front actually moved more than one half traincar lengths forward before it reflected (let this be dF), and the light that moved from the center toward the back actually moved less than one half traincar lengths backward before it reflected (let this be dB).  So the rays of light are no longer the same distance away from the second observer when they reflect.

The ray reflecting from the back of the traincar will reach the second observer faster because it has less total distance to travel from its origin to the back of the car than the ray moving forward travels from the origin to the front of the car, and in addition because the car has been moving forward, the back of the car is moving closer to the second observer so that the ray moving toward the back has less distance to travel from its reflection point toward the second observer than the ray that moved toward the front does when it reflects.

So while the second observer perceives rCB first, he will also observe that the origination point of rCB is closer to him than the origination point of rCF, and if he calculates the time it took rCB and rCF to reach him from their origination points he will also note that rCB started moving toward him before rCF. And he will be correct, because if you recall from the first observer oC's story, rCB did actually reach the back of the traincar and reflected before rCF reached the front of the traincar and reflected.

In other words, the "simultaneous" nature of the two events reaching the second observer is a complete misconception. While the origin of the two rays at oC was simultaneous, their reflection times and locations sending them on their path toward the second observer oP were neither simultaneous nor equidistant from the second observer oP.

And let's consider a third story that wasn't mentioned on Wikipedia:  Let's assume that by some arrangement, the light originating at the center of the traincar the moment that oC and oP pass each other is equidistant from oC and oP.  This could be done if we acknowledge the traincar has width and we assume that the light source is on the platform side of the car while oC is standing in the center of the traincar length-wise but on the opposite side of the traincar, one traincar-width away from the light source, while oP is standing on the platform one traincar-width away from the light source as well.

In this third story, we consider the path of two additional rays of light:  rC traveling from the light source to the observer on the traincar oC, and rP traveling from the light source to the observer on the platform oP.  Obviously since the traincar is much longer than it is wide, rC will reach oC much faster than either reflected ray. And since light travels the same speed regardless of of the velocity of its source, rP will reach oP at the same time that rC will reach oC's original position, because oC's original position and oP are the same distance away from the light source.  Of course, because oC is moving forward with the traincar, it won't be at its original position when the light reaches it.  In fact, the ray of light rC that was headed from the light source to oC's original position will never reach oC, it will simply hit the side of the traincar behind oC.  Another ray of light, rC', headed at an angle somewhere between directly at oC and directly forward, is the one that will reach oC.  This ray of light rC' will travel a distance longer than one traincar-width to reach the forward-moving oC because it's moving along the hypotenuse of a triangle that has its right angle at oC's original position.  Because rC' travels a longer distance than rP, rC' will take longer to reach the first observer than rP will take to reach the second observer.

The origin of the light was simultaneous but the two observers will not observe the light at the same time because in fact it does not travel the same distance to them.  If they compare notes on the event they will be able to calculate the speed of the traincar by using their known starting locations and the times at which they observed the light rays rC' and rP.

This explanation works for any speed of the traincar from 0 m/s up to and including the speed of light.

At the speed of light, there are some interesting results: When the traincar moves at the speed of light then rF never reaches the front of the traincar and never reflects, and rC' also never reaches oC because they start at the same time from the same track position and they're both moving at the same speed c so rC' would end up missing oC, and oC will not see any beam of light at all from the source as long as he's moving at the speed of light.  Then again, as long as oC is moving at the speed of light, he won't be able to communicate with oP to compare notes on the timing of the light rays.  After oC slows down or stops, the light ray rC' will catch up with him and oC will have a time measurement to compare with oP. When they calculate the speed of the traincar, the result will be below the speed of light and this accounts for the moments in which oC was slowing or stopping from the speed of light to allow rC' to reach him.

My physics teacher in college convinced the entire class that time has somehow passed more slowly for the traveler, and this is the origin of science fiction tales in which a space traveler arrives at a distant future where the world has aged faster than he.  In reality, light takes longer to reach the traveler because it has to travel a much larger distance to reach him when he travels at nearly light speeds. Now, how might a traveler might cope with the fact that light doesn't even reach him from the other side of the traincar? I propose that the speed-of-light scenario isn't even possible, that only light can travel at the speed of light, and that if you want to travel at the speed of light, the universe won't let you be anything else but light.

Society

I define a society generally as a set of values and rules for people.

What makes societies different than other associations is that membership is not entirely optional -- a person who lives in a village is part of the society of the village just by being there. If that person breaks the rules he will be punished or exiled. The historically accepted way to opt-out of a society is to impose exile on oneself and leave. If a person stays then he or she will be held accountable to the society's values and rules.

I think the sharp difference between society and slavery is that a society will allow a person to leave whereas slavery does not.

In our society we value life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In our society we value a person's freedom of movement, but we don't guarantee it.

In our society we generally like to shelter people who are escaping other societies that oppress them. However, we need to be clear about one thing:  we can only give asylum to people whose values are compatible with our own society. Anyone else who seeks shelter here must be denied.

A concrete example of this is a person who is known to have criminally murdered someone in another country and has escaped that country's authorities by entering the United States. Forget what you know about international treaties and so on for now. Can we give asylum to this person?

Let's assume the criminal murder is a known fact and not just alleged nor was it self-defense etc. We know the person has murdered someone and we know that our first value is life. Therefore this person's values are not compatible with our own. We have only two according options: to refuse asylum and force the person to leave the country, or to punish the person as if the crime was committed in our own society. The first option, to refuse asylum, will likely be appreciated by the society from whence the person escaped because they will likely take the opportunity to catch him and punish him. The second option may be appreciated by the other society if our punishment for this person is the same as theirs. However, if our punishment is different than theirs, or if they simply want the satisfaction of punishing the person themselves, our choice to keep and punish the person can cause tension between our society and the other society.

What if the criminal murder is not a known fact? It may not have been criminal, or it may not have happened at all. If, other than the alleged murder, the person's values are compatible with our society, we  have two according options: to value the person's life and let him stay without punishment, or to refuse asylum.