onlythoughts83

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Comments on Theism from an Agnoiologist.

The God of Abraham (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) is the sole master of all things. He is that he is, and with this necessary self-existence comes the classical vision of the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God. Generally understood, this means God has no limits. However, is this the correct way to understand God?

Agnoiology, the sister science to epistemology, was named by James Frederick Ferrier in 1854. Epistemology is the well-known study of theories of knowledge. Agnoiology is the largely unknown study of theories of ignorance (ironic). Epistemology concerns itself with what can be known and how we can claim to know it successfully. Agnoiology concerns itself with what if means to be ignorant and what, ultimately, will always be unknowable. That agnoiology has been ignored by modern scholarship isn't surprising. We are, as a culture, primarily scientific positivists. Therefore, the idea that something could be genuinely unknowable is deeply unsettling to us.

So, what does agnoiology have to do with God? The answer is that if something really is ultimately, absolutely unknowable, it can be unknown to an all-knower without contradiction.

But to be omniscient is to know everything! Surely, nothing is unknowable to God! Wrong, even God doesn't know a triangle with 4 sides because such a thing must be unknowable because it is impossible. Impossible? Surely, that can not be because God is omnipotent. Nothing is impossible for him. Yet mutatis mutandis, if omniscience can not know the unknowable, omnipotence can not do the impossible.

To be all-knowing is to have all the knowledge, but there is no knowledge to be had of that which cannot be known. To be all-powerful is to have all the power, but power is limited by the impossible. And all-goodness ought to be incapable of willing evil for its own sake, yet what happens when goods conflict in a tragic dilemma?

Of course, an omniscient and omnipotent being would have limits well beyond anything we can do, but that is not to say there are none. As the goddess of the underworld said to Parmenides, "the only knowledge that can be had of non-being is non-knowledge." If there are such things as the unknowable and the impossible, only God, at the maximum of capabilities, can truly know what they are.

Knowledge and ignorance relate to each other by a matter of degree. The pursuit of knowledge is also the escape from ignorance, but sometimes only the acceptance of ignorance in the moment can bring about knowledge. In asking if we can accept that something may be unknowable, which, like the claim that it is knowable, is not one we can ever be entirely sure about, it would do us good to remember that even omniscience does not contradict the possibilities of ultimate mysteries.

[onlythoughts83]

Step it up lads.

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On Animism and Moral Worth

What makes something worthy of moral consideration? Or in simpler terms, who, or what, is morality for? When developing ethics, at some point, this question is going to rear its head. There have been many answers given. "Can it suffer?" Asks John Stuart Mill, for utilitarianism concerns the minimization of pain as the end of a moral action, and thus anything that is pained must be morally considerable. "Is it rational?" Asks Immanuel Kant, for his deontology requires a being capable of reasoning through the legislation and acceptance of moral laws. "Does it have a polis?" Asks Aristotle, for to be in an ethical system is to partake of a political community with a common end for which virtuous citizens are most excellent. Each attempt aspires to define what is an acceptable thing to concern oneself with and what isn't. Each attempt fails, specifically because of what is left out.

Any attempt at morality that defines some things as morally considerable and others as not morally considerable exposes itself to a category mistake. What if something one thought was unworthy is revealed to be worthy by later discoveries? The horror of this kind of realization permeates much of our discussion around imperialism. Colonial cultures saw indigenous peoples as less worthy. Therefore, they could take over their land and destroy their "inferior" cultures in the service of a "better" world.

Consider John Stuart Mill: the capacity for suffering is enough to bestow moral worth to something. It seems simple enough. Certainly, it must be fair. But suffering only makes something considerable, not sovereign. Whose suffering is most important? An animal is considerable for it suffers, but is its suffering worth more or less than a human? Does it apply to any and all kinds of suffering? The pain of a cut is different than that of a heartbreak. It ought to be that both are to be avoided, but the greatness of suffering is difficult, if not impossible, to measure between them. How much heartbreak is a paper cut worth? How much is a dismembered limb? Moreover, that which does not suffer is not morally considerable at all. However, when does something not suffer? Do plants suffer?

Consider Kant: If rationality is constitutive of personhood, anything non-rational is what Kant calls a thing. A thing lacks reason, it cannot decide on ends, and thus, it has no ends to protect. Consequently, a thing can be used as a means to any person's end. Person's, however, are rational. To be rational is to be able to choose your own ends and thus have something to protect. If another uses a person as a tool, they have detracted from that person's ends. Person's must be convinced that either their ends will be furthered by supporting another, or they must be persuaded that their ends are inappropriate by another. However, what does this make of animals? How rational is rational? Kants writings on race were made doubly horrific by the perspective of his ethics. In these writings, Kant all but argues that some ethnicities aren't persons. But if some human beings aren't persons, then humanity and personhood are not equivalent, and anyone could be declared "not a person."

Consider Aristotle: at a glance, this likely seemed the weakest. Suffering is a worldly constant and reason is a nigh universal characteristic of human beings. To have a polis or city-state/political community hardly makes sense in comparison. Yet that community constitutes a project, it has a goal, and the moral consideration of being part of that community comes with contributions to that goal. One is as morally worthy as they deserve to be based on the extent to which they excel as a member of their community. The goods accumulated in pursuit of the communal project often have universal moral worth, but they aspire only to worth within their context. However, what happens to one who is outside the community or can not contribute? In here comes Aristotle's belief that some people are "natural slaves." Barbarians are lesser because they lack a polis. Thus, they will be unable to contribute to one. A barbarian in a city-state is to be despotically reigned over, for they literally don't know "what is good for them." Yet how did people come to be in a polis then? This omission of the historical dimensions renders Aristotle's account incomplete, and indeed later writers, like Macintyre, find ways to fill these gaps. To fail ones community by not being good enough raises the question of whether such a person should be allowed to act autonomously. After all, left to their own devices, their contributions are harmful.

All of these attempts fail, I hope this is evident based on our current ecological predicament. Overhyped as it often is, fake it is not. The predicament is born of the mechanistic worldview we inherited from recent prior centuries. The world's resources are elements in a machine, material for our use, and perfection. However, it is perverse perfection indeed.

Opposed to the mechanistic worldview, where reality is an explicit machine, and much of it is permissibly exploitable, is an animistic worldview. Animism comes from the Latin Anima, which means soul. Animism is the cultural belief that all things are ensouled. It is to ascribe humanity to the inhuman. To breathe animation into the inanimate. To attribute life to everything and all things.

The natural world was not considered to be of any or comparable moral worth to our growth. The result is that we are currently crashing into an unsustainable condition. But if we had held onto an animistic worldview, one that the morphology of Plato or Aristotle (especially Plato) could've sustained, we would not be here. The mechanistic worldview is killing the world because ecosystems are alive. Animism is not susceptible to the same category mistake made by the theories above. That Aristotle named Pleonexia a vice is evidence to me that he knew acquisitiveness was a detriment to human societies. Although it appears he did not grasp the full extent.

That mechanism has its merits can only be evidenced by its material dominance in the world today. The mechanist societies make up those imperial powers and their descendants that have driven animist societies to nigh obliteration. The only safeguard against the acquisitiveness born of mechanism is to annihilate the possibility for a category mistake entirely. Imperialist racism defined human societies as being of less moral worth. Modern consumer capitalism defines the natural world as being of less moral worth. It's gotten worse, not better. The only true guard against pleonexia is to not see the world as mere objects.

[onlythoughts83]

Just little babs

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The real secret to being an effective activist isn't to hate yourself. It's learning to love and cherish everyone. You must learn to appreciate everyone's humanity, to make yourself able to see their potential and their inherent deservingness, and to value their perspectives and their feelings. You must learn how to lift up the marginalized, not put yourself down.

[onlythoughts83]

AI chat bots are taking over the internet, and Grok is off the rails. We're in danger.

[onlythoughts83]

A diatribe on Hope and Tragedy.

For a long time, I would openly declare that I didn't believe in hope. Such an odd thing to say in hindsight, and yet I know why I was saying it. Hope to me at this time was little more than wishful thinking. To hope, as I would've said back then, is to believe that things are going to turn out for the better, that there's progress being made to a better tomorrow. On both accounts, I still think these attitudes are a bit defective. However, what I called hope back then is certainly not what I mean by hope now.

I thought hope was a fruitless emotion because I believed in the tragedy of the human condition. I still believe in the latter, but now I hold the former to be an integral part of what makes the latter what it is. Without hope, there is no tragedy, only cruelty and horror. I fear many people today are falling into a kind of pessimism resonant with the hopelessness that I've outgrown.

So what is hope? And why is it important? In the Middle Ages, hope was presented as one of the three theological virtues alongside faith and charity. Perhaps I will write more on them another time, but it is important to know that the theological virtues were integral to each other at the time. To have hope was to hold true to faith in salvation from a charitable God. This is not readily available to our culture anymore, although by no means is one required to discard it. However, as religion is no longer a bonding agent of our culture, we have cause to ask what to make of hope without it.

One thing about hope as a theological virtue that can be made more widely intelligible is that hope is a virtue. Therefore, to be a hopeful person is to have achieved an excellence of character. If hope is a virtue, it certainly has vices. One of deficiency, to have too little hope is called pessimism. And one of excess, to have too much hope, is called optimism. To consider the modern perspective of hope it will do us some good to consider a school of thought that believed itself hopeful, but was really just optimistic.

It was Alasdair Macintyre, may he rest in peace, whose work After Virtue has come to define my thoughts so strongly in recent times. The arguments of After Virtue are compelling, the history Macintyre painted shows so clearly to me where modernity is doomed to moral failure. Hope is one of modernity's greatest weak points. I mention Macintyre because at the end of After Virtue, he provides a damning moral critique of Marxism. Marxism, Macintyre reflects, is a deeply optimistic philosophy. Having read Marx myself before, I quickly realized what was being said. Dialectic materialism argues that in pursuit of profit, the capitalist will push for more and more efficient means of production until eventually he undoes himself by making production so efficient that he is rendered unnecessary. When this time comes, there will be nothing left to do but to take the capitalists' property by force and have everyone share im this new, readily available mode of production.

What is it about the story told by Marxs dialectic materialism that makes it optimistic? It's the belief that we will be able to make ethical and efficient use of this hypothetical means of production. Within capitalism, there is, according to Marx, all the necessary tools being amassed for a better and nobler world. However, capitalism, according to Marx, exploits the workers and alienates them from their labour and thus themselves. Is the man of tomorrow really going to be the exploited and alienated proletariat? What ethical tools does this person inherit from their liberal capitalistic order? The unfortunate reality is that capitalism does not provide the ethics of utopia. There is no better world waiting in the destruction of a corrupt one.

The assumption of dialectic materialism is that the death of capitalism will give rise to the communist society that is characterized by a universal brotherhood of true equals. However, if you pay close attention to the world today, what kind of equality and fraternity are coming about? It's no accident that Marx believed that capitalism would end in violence, for he had the optimism to believe that violent revolution against the bourgeoisie would destroy the only remaining barriers to true prosperity. However, if the fraternity and equality Marx promises are absent from the corrupt system that must come before the ideal one that is characterized by them, where do they come from?

I put it to you that Marxs critique of capitalism was not born from a pursuit of fraternity and equality, but from the recognition that these things were missing in the world he observed. He believed they had to be restored by any means necessary and overlooked that by the time it'd be possible, there'd be nothing to restore. This is what it means to exceed hope into the vice of optimism. Optimism is to hold that the future is destined to be better, regardless of the direction the present is clearly taking us. Sometimes, things really do have to get worse before they are better, but that is not a self-fulfilling goal.

What the optimism of Marx shows us about hope is that hope needs something viable to believe in. If the desire for a better tomorrow is not sensitive to the tragedies of today, it is not hope but optimism. For the Medievals, their hope was grounded in a belief that reality was crowned by a philanthropic God who meant the best for us. To accept the Christian ontology is to recognize that God is an immutable wellspring of goodness in the world. If Abrahamic Theism is justified, hope is unconditionally vindicated.

However, it is important to understand that there were conditions integral to the Medieval Christian worldview that made hope invaluable. What Christianity had that Marxism lacks is tragedy. The human condition was a fallen one from Adam and Eve onwards. The Christian person is corrupt in a way the Marxist person could never be. The Christian hope was in forgiveness for an ancient sin, Marxist optimism is in the belief that present suffering is but a prelude to future prosperity. As I said earlier, without hope there is no tragedy, this is also true vice versa.

Tragedy entails us being cut off from the ultimate good. Hope is the virtue of facing tragedy. To be in a tragic condition is to be unable to do everything one ought to do. Classic moral dilemmas like the trolley problem are tragic conditions. Either one kills one person to save five or leave five to their death to avoid killing. No matter what one does, they succeed at one thing they ought to do, saving lives or not killing. However, they also fail to do something they ought to do, saving lives or not killing. Hope involves facing the tragedy of such situations without succumbing to a kind of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't fatalism. For the medievals, hope intersects charity in these moments in that one hopes they will be forgiven by God for the tragedy of the world. On its own, hope entails not denouncing the tragedy of ones act. One is to acknowledge what they had to fail at by making the most of their success.

Hope and tragedy are thus born of a world which is inherently unsatisfactory. To have hope is to believe that one can accept tragedy, to not be paralyzed by dilemma, but to not deny there is one altogether. Hope is to believe the world is worth enduring despite its failings.

[onlythoughts83]

Some thoughts on recklessness and polarization

I have discovered in my exposure to modern discourse that many people are constantly accusing others of being afraid to debate.

For a long time, right and left wing thinkers both have accused one another of being unwilling to debate each other and frankly I find it fascinating that it somehow manages to look like they're both being honest. How does that make any sense? Well, firstly, they're not being honest, but with algorithm induced echo chambers having become the norm of social media, this truth becomes easy to avoid.

I want to draw attention to how this phenomenon in our culture indicates how accusations of cowardice have become a nigh universal characteristic of today's social, moral, and political discourse. The problem I have is that to make this phenomenon intelligible, two possible explanations appear. The first is that we are all cowards. Yet in the era of polarized politics, often turning to violence in shrill protests that feel off. The second, and I think, more likely explanation, is that everyone has been led to believe everyone else is a coward by those aforementioned echo chambers, and this has in turn cultivated recklessness in our culture.

But in what way do the shrill accusations of cowardice permeating public discourse prove we are victims not of a deficiency of courage but an excess? The answer is that we are constantly being fed confirmation bias instead of dialogue. Media on both sides picks and chooses what of the other side it is willing to display. I've seen left-leaning documentaries display right-wing crowds by picking out the obvious crazies. However, I've also seen right-wing influences show off their intellectual superiority, picking arguments with random students on university campuses. Combine this with social media only ever showing people what they want to see, and the result is that the only thing you see of your adversaries are radicals and fools.

But what happens if you never see your opposition at their best? If all you see of them are people whose views lack good reasons, should they have reasons at all, who seem to prefer imposing their will with violence or who vilified their opponents before arrival. The result is that one comes to think their position is obviously superior. Once one believes this much, any debate with their opponents becomes not only unnecessary but inappropriate. The other is either an imbecile or a lunatic. Arguing with them is like debating a seagull.

It is this attitude, one i discovered in myself, and now in people close to me,that I've come to be most afraid of in watching our politics unfold. And it is this attitude that i call reckless. How is it reckless? Because it has the effect of destroying reason. People don't avoid debates out of cowardice, like everyone wants you to believe about their adversaries but not themselves. Rather, debate is considered pointless. It is not feared but derided. To be willing to debate is to give the other side space to speak, and 'obviously', they're evil.

Aristotle argued that recklessness was the excessive vice that corresponds to the virtue of courage, or Andreia in Greek. For all Aristotles faults, his theory of virtues stands as one of his strongest contributions to philosophy. However, now I must critique Aristotle, for he argued recklessness was closer to courage than cowardice, the deficiency vice. Modern discourse shows that this is an untenable conclusion. It was likely Aristotles elitism, an attitude that cripples much of his thought, that led him to conclude what he did about recklessness. From an aristocratic standpoint, engaging conflict is always better than fleeing from it. However, the recklessness of modern democracy shows that it is not less distant to courage than cowardice.

Recklessness is present in modern discourse because the danger is no longer being observed but assumed. People lash out at Phantoms, to say anything at all is to invite attacks from those who are constantly on the defensive. We do not hear what each other says. We anticipate enemies. We do not debate because we believe there is no debate with the others. Their ideas are unconditionally dangerous, they can't be argued with, they simply must be fought. Modern discourse is civil war by, for now, less violent means.

I warn you all against viewing those you dislike this way. Do not strip people of their voice no matter how wrong they are. The desire for understanding withers, but there is still time. You do not have the luxury of pessimism. Remember that it's ultimately about fostering kindness, empathy, respect, responsibility, and, above all, others, charity. We do have evils to battle, but let them fight us in the day, for monsters hide in the dark.

[onlythoughts83]

Based Kent

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Actual pain

@adelinejclose

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"learn to be bored" "being bored is good for you" "be at peace with yourself" NO! 4 SCREENS AT ONCE!!!!!!

[onlythoughts83]

warhammer is so fucking awesome

i love how the tau are imperialistic xenophiles with an oppressive caste system.

i love how the admech are a cult of tech-worshippers who believe invention is heresy.

i love how theres a faction of revolutionaries who are simply dooming themselves (and its still often considered to be a good choice).

i love how theres a god of change and hope who is morally fucking awful

the various subversions of tropes that warhammer has is so sick and it always pains me when the only thing people take out of it is "fascism cool actually"

[onlythoughts83]

Rule makers when particular cases happen 😯

I do enjoy how taking a milquetoast "everything is okay as long as it's not hurting anyone!" axiom as your ethical starting point inevitably leads to litigating the definition of harm like we're a bunch of Three Laws compliant robots. Like, it's absolutely not productive, but it appeals to me aesthetically.

[onlythoughts83]

In conjunction with the point in my intro post about the virtue of being able to discern the episodes of ones own life. The point made by Aristotle, who is a font of philosophical inspiration despite many of his more controversial opinions, illuminates further why it wasn't the time to do it. The self as I envisage it is, like Aristotles, ultimately relational. Consequently, the practice and acquisition of this virtue requires dialogue alongside introspection.

“Friends hold a mirror up to each other; through that mirror they can see each other in ways that would not otherwise be accessible to them, and it is this mirroring that helps them improve themselves as persons.”

— Aristotle

[onlythoughts83]

Aristotles conception of friendship, genuine friendship that is, involves a shared conception and pursuit of the good. Good friends are those people who you can work towards Eudaimonia (flourishing) with. You share your life with good friends, work towards a common goal, and support each other's efforts. That you can only keep a few of these people in your life should be fairly obvious.

“A friend to all is a friend to none.”

— Aristotle