Thoughts on a Grey Day

If I were to add, "by Mrs. Scarrott," do I have a single reader who'd get the reference? Probably not. Or perhaps one. I'm lookin' at you, Ted. At any rate, one would have to be familiar with the 1972 album by a "Fleetwood Mac" that was quite distinct from both the early blues band led by the great Peter Green, and the later bland mega-pop outfit.  

The final track on Bare Trees is -- of course -- called Thoughts on a Grey Day. It isn't a song, but rather, "a recorded poem written and supposedly read by an elderly woman, Mrs. Scarrott, who lived near the band's communal home in southern England" (Prof. Wiki).  If I remember correctly, they stumbled upon an old tape Mrs. Scarrott must have left in the house, and appended it to the album as a kind of Pythonesque gag. 

Yes, they had good hash back then.

You can google the poem. Mrs. Scarrott seems to have been some kind of visionary mystic. Then again, they did have good hash back then:

Love; love. So great, so divine
Trees -- the grey day has changed everything
It's beautiful, just beautiful, so beautiful
This first grey day is ours

My loving child
By grace of God we live, my child,
And love...

God bless our perfect, perfect grey day
With trees so bare, so bare!
But O so beautiful, so beautiful!
The grey-blue sky
The world is here!
Ours, just, just ours
Our own

Hold us tight
I am yours, just a dream
And go on dreaming
May this joy of ours
Never, ever cease

But this isn't a grey day. Rather, slightly hazy and humid. Nor do I know why Mrs. Scarrott's poem popped into my head. Wait -- now I remember -- I had some random thoughts to offload on this... hazy and humid day:

A feminist is any woman who is emotionally fragile and ignorant of the facts of life. Any confrontation with these facts exposes and aggravates the fragility.

Today, transcendence is displaced to the political plane and called "liberation." Naturally, this cannot be attained via politics, which further fuels both the frustration and the hope for political amelioration. The vicious circle of liberalism -- and death cycle of the soul.

Ideology denies and drives out wrongthink, but the bad thoughts don't just vanish. Rather, a conservative is someone whose unwitting role is to harbor these bad progressive thoughts on behalf of the left. It's why we are seen by them as racists, fascists, misogynists, insurrectionists, greedy, etc.  

A relentless search for imaginary oppressors to explain one's real failings. A seductive program! 

When did the left become a revolt against math and literacy? Trick question!

Servitude to the progressive narrative is freedom. Liberation from it is slavery. In California, Larry Elder wants to put y'all back in chains! 

I don't object to teaching CRT to kids. So long as children are taught all the repulsive things about other races.

The free-floating boredom of the left is a consequence of hatred of reality. Unreality may not be true, but at least it's... interesting. 

Not to promulgate more oogily-boogily, but the relationship between conscious and unconscious, or ego and self, is not a duality but a complementarity.  I is to AM (being) as is particle to wave. We always live and have our being on no fewer than two planes.

Relativism, the sum of all heresies.

You can't buy IQ. Only its markers. The purpose of attending an elite university is to advertise intelligence without having to undergo the formality of possessing it. 

Hard work can compensate for a modest IQ, but the proper credential obviates the need for either. Cf. Obama, Biden, John Kerry, et al.

Of course they censor the controversy. The science won't just settle itself!

Eroding merit or undermining freedom is a false choice. The left is perfectly capable walking and chewing gum at the same time.

There's no IQ in equity. Oh, wait. 

Standardized testing was implemented to diversify the student body. Naturally, the left opposes it.

If you can't be happy here, you can't be happy.

Victimology is an inverse meritocracy; it fuels a race to the bottom. The last shall be first, good and hard.

Of course our privileged white elites are against standardized testing. It would both expose them and pose a barrier to the attainment and maintenance of their unearned privilege.

Low IQ imperialism: the conquest of the right side of the Bell Curve by the left. 

Universities are seminaries of evangelical stupidity. Our citizens are more educated but and therefore more stupid than ever.

Islam is one of two religious cults not content to be left alone. The other is progressivism.

Men are much greater and much worse than the left realizes. Our range runs from the diabolical to the saintly; the left's from who to whom, or from useless to useful idiots. "The poor" are simultaneously worthless and indispensable to the left's will to power.

Me? My talents are wasted on useful pursuits. 

Thoughts on a Grey Day

If I were to add, "by Mrs. Scarrott," do I have a single reader who'd get the reference? Probably not. Or perhaps one. I'm lookin' at you, Ted. At any rate, one would have to be familiar with the 1972 album by a "Fleetwood Mac" that was quite distinct from both the early blues band led by the great Peter Green, and the later bland mega-pop outfit.  

The final track on Bare Trees is -- of course -- called Thoughts on a Grey Day. It isn't a song, but rather, "a recorded poem written and supposedly read by an elderly woman, Mrs. Scarrott, who lived near the band's communal home in southern England" (Prof. Wiki).  If I remember correctly, they stumbled upon an old tape Mrs. Scarrott must have left in the house, and appended it to the album as a kind of Pythonesque gag. 

Yes, they had good hash back then.

You can google the poem. Mrs. Scarrott seems to have been some kind of visionary mystic. Then again, they did have good hash back then:

Love; love. So great, so divine
Trees -- the grey day has changed everything
It's beautiful, just beautiful, so beautiful
This first grey day is ours

My loving child
By grace of God we live, my child,
And love...

God bless our perfect, perfect grey day
With trees so bare, so bare!
But O so beautiful, so beautiful!
The grey-blue sky
The world is here!
Ours, just, just ours
Our own

Hold us tight
I am yours, just a dream
And go on dreaming
May this joy of ours
Never, ever cease

But this isn't a grey day. Rather, slightly hazy and humid. Nor do I know why Mrs. Scarrott's poem popped into my head. Wait -- now I remember -- I had some random thoughts to offload on this... hazy and humid day:

A feminist is any woman who is emotionally fragile and ignorant of the facts of life. Any confrontation with these facts exposes and aggravates the fragility.

Today, transcendence is displaced to the political plane and called "liberation." Naturally, this cannot be attained via politics, which further fuels both the frustration and the hope for political amelioration. The vicious circle of liberalism -- and death cycle of the soul.

Ideology denies and drives out wrongthink, but the bad thoughts don't just vanish. Rather, a conservative is someone whose unwitting role is to harbor these bad progressive thoughts on behalf of the left. It's why we are seen by them as racists, fascists, misogynists, insurrectionists, greedy, etc.  

A relentless search for imaginary oppressors to explain one's real failings. A seductive program! 

When did the left become a revolt against math and literacy? Trick question!

Servitude to the progressive narrative is freedom. Liberation from it is slavery. In California, Larry Elder wants to put y'all back in chains! 

I don't object to teaching CRT to kids. So long as children are taught all the repulsive things about other races.

The free-floating boredom of the left is a consequence of hatred of reality. Unreality may not be true, but at least it's... interesting. 

Not to promulgate more oogily-boogily, but the relationship between conscious and unconscious, or ego and self, is not a duality but a complementarity.  I is to AM (being) as is particle to wave. We always live and have our being on no fewer than two planes.

Relativism, the sum of all heresies.

You can't buy IQ. Only its markers. The purpose of attending an elite university is to advertise intelligence without having to undergo the formality of possessing it. 

Hard work can compensate for a modest IQ, but the proper credential obviates the need for either. Cf. Obama, Biden, John Kerry, et al.

Of course they censor the controversy. The science won't just settle itself!

Eroding merit or undermining freedom is a false choice. The left is perfectly capable walking and chewing gum at the same time.

There's no IQ in equity. Oh, wait. 

Standardized testing was implemented to diversify the student body. Naturally, the left opposes it.

If you can't be happy here, you can't be happy.

Victimology is an inverse meritocracy; it fuels a race to the bottom. The last shall be first, good and hard.

Of course our privileged white elites are against standardized testing. It would both expose them and pose a barrier to the attainment and maintenance of their unearned privilege.

Low IQ imperialism: the conquest of the right side of the Bell Curve by the left. 

Universities are seminaries of evangelical stupidity. Our citizens are more educated but and therefore more stupid than ever.

Islam is one of two religious cults not content to be left alone. The other is progressivism.

Men are much greater and much worse than the left realizes. Our range runs from the diabolical to the saintly; the left's from who to whom, or from useless to useful idiots. "The poor" are simultaneously worthless and indispensable to the left's will to power.

Me? My talents are wasted on useful pursuits. 

There's Only One Way to Skin a Catechism

Okay, let's circle back to Garrigou-Lagrange's The Philosophy of Being & The Development of Doctrine. We hadn't gotten very far, and left off with the claim that

there are fundamental metaphysical principles constituting the ground of enduring dogmatic truth, that people know without need for study. These principles allow dogmatic propositions to be ontologically understandable by all...

I want to say that there is metaphysical truth and theological truth, and that these two should be susceptible to harmonization, whether explicitly or (more likely) implicitly. Not only do we reject any "two truths" approach to science and religion, even moreso do we reject it with regard to the deeper science of metaphysics. 

For there is only One Truth; or, perhaps better, Truth is One, allowing for the multiplicity of truths that are only possible because each is anchored in the One and a reflection of it: at the center of everything is the Truth of its Being. Otherwise it cannot exist.

Truth is at once at the center, origin, and end of things. It's why everything makes so much sense without ever making Total Sense, which is reserved for God allone (or someOne who might as well be). 

It is also why atheism makes no sense except within its own projected artificial world -- like a blind man whose first principle is that color does not exist. As always, bad philosophy is just unwitting autobiography.

Now, most people are either incapable of, or not interested in, metaphysics per se. Nevertheless, metaphysics is always interested in you! 

For Homo sapiens is the metaphysical animal: the divide between animal and man is a metaphysical one -- or, more precisely, on one side of the gap is animality, on the far side our homoerotic sapience, AKA love of wisdom. The latter is a kind of "space," or better, spacetime, since it is also developmental and teleological. It's why we live in history and not just a sterile duration. Unless you're watching CNN. 

Note that -- obviously -- only a being who has transcended evolution can know about evolution. Conversely, if our thoughts are merely a function of evolution (or genes), then we are pulled back to the animal side. To a materialist, the human side is just an illusion.  

But matter itself is but an idea; and, thanks to God, a very good and fruitful idea! If you don't think so, let's see you figure out how to create a unity of material body and immaterial soul without reducing one to the other or resorting to a crude metaphysical dualism. 

Matthew Levering, in the foreword, states that while G-L

knows that a dogmatic truth cannot be reduced to its specific formulation, he sees that the crux of the debate is whether the Church has been given a knowable, propositionally enunciable deposit of faith.

In other words, must we just take the deposit of faith on faith, or is it possible to situate it within a translogical network of axioms, principles, and propositions?  

Well, we already know that fideism is an epistemological nonstarter. However, this doesn't necessarily mean it it inefficacious. Farfromit. It just means you have different intellectual needs, and that an implicit metaphysic works just fine for you.

Schuon has something important to say about this. The question is, where among these 20 or 30 titles? 

Ah, here, in an essay called Vicissitudes of Spiritual Temperaments: "Human nature is made in such a way that it tends to enclose itself in some limitation" -- as illustrated above in the example of the blind man enclosed in his limited vision -- "and this tendency can only be accentuated in an age that is everywhere engaged in destroying the framework of universality" -- AKA, the understanding that Truth is One. 

Now, a purely fideistic approach to God generally has much in common with a bhaktic one that emphasizes devotion over intellection, or love over knowledge. Not only is there nothing wrong with this, but knowledge without love of Truth is a roadmap to hell. 

Nevertheless, good luck explaining this faith to a cynical, worldly, and credentialed yahoo whose social standing depends partly on being too sophisticated for Imaginary Sky Gods and Flying Spaghetti Monsters. There's a way of talking about religion that makes it easy for such midwits and mediocretins to ridicule and reject it. Our trolls never stop reminding us of this ironyclad principle.

Schuon compares a faith without intellect to a body without a skeleton, while a purely intellectual approach is like a skeleton with no flesh. In order to stand up on our own two wings, we need both:

Metaphysics is beyond charity, it is true, but a metaphysician without charity seriously risks compromising the doctrine because of the indirect repercussions of his vice on the workings of his intelligence.

Why is this? Again, because of Oneness: love + intellection are unified in God but separable down here. Consider: "it is not enough to be 'harmless as doves,' it is also necessary to be 'wise as serpents.'" Put conversely, do not be like the tenured, who are wise as pigeons and harmless as rattlesnakes.

Secular humanism. What could possibly go wrong (asked the serpent)? 

"humanitarianism" in fact puts itself forward as a philosophy founded on the idea that man is good; but to believe that man is good is almost always to believe that God is bad.... It is a satanic inversion of the traditional axiom that God is good and man is bad (Schuon).

Even Pope Francis (quoted in the foreword) agrees that "love requires truth. Only to the extent that love is grounded in truth can it endure over time, can it transcend the passing moment.... Without truth, love is incapable of establishing a firm bond."

One last quote from the foreword: "dogmatic formulations rely upon 'the underlying realities of universal human experience' as cognitionally available to everyone, philosopher and non-philosopher."

Let's conclude by suggesting that metaphysics gives us the widest possible horizon of being, and that God himself is always just over that horizon. And revelation is the link between.

There's Only One Way to Skin a Catechism

Okay, let's circle back to Garrigou-Lagrange's The Philosophy of Being & The Development of Doctrine. We hadn't gotten very far, and left off with the claim that

there are fundamental metaphysical principles constituting the ground of enduring dogmatic truth, that people know without need for study. These principles allow dogmatic propositions to be ontologically understandable by all...

I want to say that there is metaphysical truth and theological truth, and that these two should be susceptible to harmonization, whether explicitly or (more likely) implicitly. Not only do we reject any "two truths" approach to science and religion, even moreso do we reject it with regard to the deeper science of metaphysics. 

For there is only One Truth; or, perhaps better, Truth is One, allowing for the multiplicity of truths that are only possible because each is anchored in the One and a reflection of it: at the center of everything is the Truth of its Being. Otherwise it cannot exist.

Truth is at once at the center, origin, and end of things. It's why everything makes so much sense without ever making Total Sense, which is reserved for God allone (or someOne who might as well be). 

It is also why atheism makes no sense except within its own projected artificial world -- like a blind man whose first principle is that color does not exist. As always, bad philosophy is just unwitting autobiography.

Now, most people are either incapable of, or not interested in, metaphysics per se. Nevertheless, metaphysics is always interested in you! 

For Homo sapiens is the metaphysical animal: the divide between animal and man is a metaphysical one -- or, more precisely, on one side of the gap is animality, on the far side our homoerotic sapience, AKA love of wisdom. The latter is a kind of "space," or better, spacetime, since it is also developmental and teleological. It's why we live in history and not just a sterile duration. Unless you're watching CNN. 

Note that -- obviously -- only a being who has transcended evolution can know about evolution. Conversely, if our thoughts are merely a function of evolution (or genes), then we are pulled back to the animal side. To a materialist, the human side is just an illusion.  

But matter itself is but an idea; and, thanks to God, a very good and fruitful idea! If you don't think so, let's see you figure out how to create a unity of material body and immaterial soul without reducing one to the other or resorting to a crude metaphysical dualism. 

Matthew Levering, in the foreword, states that while G-L

knows that a dogmatic truth cannot be reduced to its specific formulation, he sees that the crux of the debate is whether the Church has been given a knowable, propositionally enunciable deposit of faith.

In other words, must we just take the deposit of faith on faith, or is it possible to situate it within a translogical network of axioms, principles, and propositions?  

Well, we already know that fideism is an epistemological nonstarter. However, this doesn't necessarily mean it it inefficacious. Farfromit. It just means you have different intellectual needs, and that an implicit metaphysic works just fine for you.

Schuon has something important to say about this. The question is, where among these 20 or 30 titles? 

Ah, here, in an essay called Vicissitudes of Spiritual Temperaments: "Human nature is made in such a way that it tends to enclose itself in some limitation" -- as illustrated above in the example of the blind man enclosed in his limited vision -- "and this tendency can only be accentuated in an age that is everywhere engaged in destroying the framework of universality" -- AKA, the understanding that Truth is One. 

Now, a purely fideistic approach to God generally has much in common with a bhaktic one that emphasizes devotion over intellection, or love over knowledge. Not only is there nothing wrong with this, but knowledge without love of Truth is a roadmap to hell. 

Nevertheless, good luck explaining this faith to a cynical, worldly, and credentialed yahoo whose social standing depends partly on being too sophisticated for Imaginary Sky Gods and Flying Spaghetti Monsters. There's a way of talking about religion that makes it easy for such midwits and mediocretins to ridicule and reject it. Our trolls never stop reminding us of this ironyclad principle.

Schuon compares a faith without intellect to a body without a skeleton, while a purely intellectual approach is like a skeleton with no flesh. In order to stand up on our own two wings, we need both:

Metaphysics is beyond charity, it is true, but a metaphysician without charity seriously risks compromising the doctrine because of the indirect repercussions of his vice on the workings of his intelligence.

Why is this? Again, because of Oneness: love + intellection are unified in God but separable down here. Consider: "it is not enough to be 'harmless as doves,' it is also necessary to be 'wise as serpents.'" Put conversely, do not be like the tenured, who are wise as pigeons and harmless as rattlesnakes.

Secular humanism. What could possibly go wrong (asked the serpent)? 

"humanitarianism" in fact puts itself forward as a philosophy founded on the idea that man is good; but to believe that man is good is almost always to believe that God is bad.... It is a satanic inversion of the traditional axiom that God is good and man is bad (Schuon).

Even Pope Francis (quoted in the foreword) agrees that "love requires truth. Only to the extent that love is grounded in truth can it endure over time, can it transcend the passing moment.... Without truth, love is incapable of establishing a firm bond."

One last quote from the foreword: "dogmatic formulations rely upon 'the underlying realities of universal human experience' as cognitionally available to everyone, philosopher and non-philosopher."

Let's conclude by suggesting that metaphysics gives us the widest possible horizon of being, and that God himself is always just over that horizon. And revelation is the link between.

Logic, Meta-logic, Infra-logic, and the Seven Sacred I Wannas

Before circling back to The Philosophy of Being, I read something this morning that parallels Gödel's bottom-line insight into his own theorems, that

there are forms of Reason that bypass reason, and yet are perfectly reasonable and comprehensible. 

(Warren, https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2021/08/13/what-does-god-say/?utm_source=The+Catholic+Thing+Daily&utm_campaign=8d2a82a351-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_12_07_01_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_769a14e16a-8d2a82a351-244304881.)

It seems that a lot of folks conclude the precise opposite: that the theorems imply that we are forever confined to our own formal systems, with no possibility of knowing the "truth." Well, Gödel may have been crazy but he wasn't stupid: he knew there are truths that are surely true despite being unprovable. 

Which brings to mind a wisecrack by Schuon to the effect that things aren't true because they are logical but logical because true; in other words, truth is a priori, and logic is just an indirect means of demonstrating it. But it is hardly the only possible demonstration, for (among other reasons) some of the most important truths are self-evident.  

This is why we begin with doubt, or skepticism, or the senses, but we do not end there, for the intellect is ordered to reality, not to ignorance. Nevertheless, the majority of readers well understand how modern philosophy so easily degenerates 

into an existentialism in which logic is no more than a blind, unreal activity, and which can rightly be described as an “esoterism of stupidity.” When unintelligence -- “worldly” intelligence -- joins with passion to prostitute logic, it is impossible to escape a mental Satanism which destroys the very basis of intelligence and truth.

Thus we see how modern philosophies -- which are at least wrong -- culminate in a contemporary postmodern insanity that isn't even wrong. 

Which is again why it is so fruitless to argue with postmodern progressives. For them, truth and reality are entirely beside the point. We understand them (insofar as it is possible to understand absurdity) while they never stop proving that they have no idea what we're talking about.

The craziness is pervasive here where I live in Blue Heaven, right down to our local weekly rag, the Agoura Acorn. Check out this doozy from a couple days ago: "We cannot employ colorblind ideology in a society that is far from it." Which is like saying "we cannot incarcerate murderers in a society with so many murders." 

Which they also believe, come to think of it. Which only demonstrates how

logic can either operate in accordance with an intellection or on the contrary put itself at the disposal of an error, so that philosophy can become the vehicle of just about anything (ibid.).

Yes, anything -- for if you believe men can get pregnant and give birth, there is nothing you can't believe. Likewise, if you believe math is racist or that reading standards discriminate against Africans, you're waaaaaay out there where the Buses of Reason don't run.  

Not only does man have direct contact with truth, but this is because the very substance of the intellect is truth (i.e., the image of God yada yada). However, 

when man has no “visionary” -- as opposed to discursive -- knowledge of Being, and when he thinks only with his brain instead of “seeing” with the “heart,” all his logic will be useless to him, since he starts from an initial blindness....

The fact that the philosophic mode of thought is centered on logic and not directly on intuition [falsely] implies that intuition is left at the mercy of logic’s needs (ibid.).

Back to the essay by Warren. Which I haven't actually read yet -- only the first sentence. So, wait a moment while I finish it, and with any luck it will confirm the celestial hunchwork outlined above.

Okay, this is way over the line. What's with the unchecked aggression? THE SUPREME COURT HAS ROUNDLY REJECTED PRIOR RESTRAINT!  

A jackhammer, or a buzz saw, or an electric guitar, can make a noise, but not music. Indeed, the development of "rock music," and further degeneration beyond punk, represents something different again: I would rather not give it a name.

I'll give it a name -- indeed, I'll give it seven names, the seven sacred I Wannas of Joey Ramone:

I Just Wanna Have Something To Do

I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend

I Don't Wanna Grow Up

I Wanna Live

I Wanna Be Sedated

I Wanna be Well 

and of course

Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue

Warren is out of his element. True, God is the guest of silence. But not only silence. For while it is true that 99% of everything is garbage, this applies equally to the electric guitar as it does to theology, art, literature, blogjammin', whatever.

My only point -- Gödel's point, rather -- is this, and we'll have to put off The Philosophy of Being until the next post:

even in our most technical, rule-bound thinking -- that is, mathematics -- we are engaging in truth-discovering processes that can't be reduced to the mechanical procedures programmed into computers....  

Gödel's theorems don't demonstrate the limits of the human mind, but rather the limits of computational models of the human mind (basically, models that reduce all thinking to rule-following). They don't leave us stranded in postmodern uncertainty but rather negate a particular reductive theory of the mind (Rebecca Goldstein).

That's all I wanted to say. FINISHING MY COFFEE now. 

Logic, Meta-logic, Infra-logic, and the Seven Sacred I Wannas

Before circling back to The Philosophy of Being, I read something this morning that parallels Gödel's bottom-line insight into his own theorems, that

there are forms of Reason that bypass reason, and yet are perfectly reasonable and comprehensible. 

(Warren, https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2021/08/13/what-does-god-say/?utm_source=The+Catholic+Thing+Daily&utm_campaign=8d2a82a351-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_12_07_01_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_769a14e16a-8d2a82a351-244304881.)

It seems that a lot of folks conclude the precise opposite: that the theorems imply that we are forever confined to our own formal systems, with no possibility of knowing the "truth." Well, Gödel may have been crazy but he wasn't stupid: he knew there are truths that are surely true despite being unprovable. 

Which brings to mind a wisecrack by Schuon to the effect that things aren't true because they are logical but logical because true; in other words, truth is a priori, and logic is just an indirect means of demonstrating it. But it is hardly the only possible demonstration, for (among other reasons) some of the most important truths are self-evident.  

This is why we begin with doubt, or skepticism, or the senses, but we do not end there, for the intellect is ordered to reality, not to ignorance. Nevertheless, the majority of readers well understand how modern philosophy so easily degenerates 

into an existentialism in which logic is no more than a blind, unreal activity, and which can rightly be described as an “esoterism of stupidity.” When unintelligence -- “worldly” intelligence -- joins with passion to prostitute logic, it is impossible to escape a mental Satanism which destroys the very basis of intelligence and truth.

Thus we see how modern philosophies -- which are at least wrong -- culminate in a contemporary postmodern insanity that isn't even wrong. 

Which is again why it is so fruitless to argue with postmodern progressives. For them, truth and reality are entirely beside the point. We understand them (insofar as it is possible to understand absurdity) while they never stop proving that they have no idea what we're talking about.

The craziness is pervasive here where I live in Blue Heaven, right down to our local weekly rag, the Agoura Acorn. Check out this doozy from a couple days ago: "We cannot employ colorblind ideology in a society that is far from it." Which is like saying "we cannot incarcerate murderers in a society with so many murders." 

Which they also believe, come to think of it. Which only demonstrates how

logic can either operate in accordance with an intellection or on the contrary put itself at the disposal of an error, so that philosophy can become the vehicle of just about anything (ibid.).

Yes, anything -- for if you believe men can get pregnant and give birth, there is nothing you can't believe. Likewise, if you believe math is racist or that reading standards discriminate against Africans, you're waaaaaay out there where the Buses of Reason don't run.  

Not only does man have direct contact with truth, but this is because the very substance of the intellect is truth (i.e., the image of God yada yada). However, 

when man has no “visionary” -- as opposed to discursive -- knowledge of Being, and when he thinks only with his brain instead of “seeing” with the “heart,” all his logic will be useless to him, since he starts from an initial blindness....

The fact that the philosophic mode of thought is centered on logic and not directly on intuition [falsely] implies that intuition is left at the mercy of logic’s needs (ibid.).

Back to the essay by Warren. Which I haven't actually read yet -- only the first sentence. So, wait a moment while I finish it, and with any luck it will confirm the celestial hunchwork outlined above.

Okay, this is way over the line. What's with the unchecked aggression? THE SUPREME COURT HAS ROUNDLY REJECTED PRIOR RESTRAINT!  

A jackhammer, or a buzz saw, or an electric guitar, can make a noise, but not music. Indeed, the development of "rock music," and further degeneration beyond punk, represents something different again: I would rather not give it a name.

I'll give it a name -- indeed, I'll give it seven names, the seven sacred I Wannas of Joey Ramone:

I Just Wanna Have Something To Do

I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend

I Don't Wanna Grow Up

I Wanna Live

I Wanna Be Sedated

I Wanna be Well 

and of course

Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue

Warren is out of his element. True, God is the guest of silence. But not only silence. For while it is true that 99% of everything is garbage, this applies equally to the electric guitar as it does to theology, art, literature, blogjammin', whatever.

My only point -- Gödel's point, rather -- is this, and we'll have to put off The Philosophy of Being until the next post:

even in our most technical, rule-bound thinking -- that is, mathematics -- we are engaging in truth-discovering processes that can't be reduced to the mechanical procedures programmed into computers....  

Gödel's theorems don't demonstrate the limits of the human mind, but rather the limits of computational models of the human mind (basically, models that reduce all thinking to rule-following). They don't leave us stranded in postmodern uncertainty but rather negate a particular reductive theory of the mind (Rebecca Goldstein).

That's all I wanted to say. FINISHING MY COFFEE now. 

Even Paranoids have Real Friends

Let's complete our Journey to the Edge of Reason before circling back to The Philosophy of Being -- bearing in mind that a comprehensive philosophy of being is a journey to the edge of reason and beyond. 

In other words, no philosophy that confines itself to the necessarily circular and ultimately tautologous domain of reason is going to be complete. Which is indeed Gödel's whole point. 

Now, not everyone gets the point, including -- or so we have been told by the wise-in-their-own-eyes -- many experts. One such expert is Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote a popular book called Gödel-Something-Something way back in the disco era. But unlike the Bee Gees, it hasn't aged well. 

Here is an extract from the previous post, followed by a comment that cuts my coondle to the quick:

--The mind is not a computer. Sure, a lot of experts talk about artificial intelligence, but this is only because they are genuinely stupid. Or at least ignorant of Gödel.

You do know that the leading popularizer of Gödel in recent times, Doug Hofstadter, is an AI researcher?

Yes, we are aware of the book. In fact, it's buried somewhere in our vast Closet of Unnecessary Books. To be sure, these books are not totally unnecessary, as I will eventually get around to inflicting them upon the local library for profoundly serious reasons of tax avoidance.

At any rate, Gödel was a persistent Platonist (not that there's anything wrong with it), certainly not any kind of materialist. As it pertains to the possibility of artificial intelligence, he concluded that that the theorems are "decidedly opposed to materialistic philosophy," and that our intuition is "a more magnificent thing than what any machine could duplicate" (Budiansky). And 

If the mind is not a machine, then the human spirit cannot be reduced to the mechanistic operation of the brain, with its finite collection of working parts consisting of neurons and their interconnections (ibid.) 

Conversely, according to the always-untrustworthy-so-who-really-knows? Prof. Wiki, Hofstadter argues that consciousness -- not just his, but ours too! -- is but

an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain.... he draws an analogy between the social organization of a colony of ants and the mind seen as a coherent "colony" of neurons. 

In particular, Hofstadter claims that our sense of having (or being) an "I" comes from the abstract pattern he terms a "strange loop", an abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video feedback he has defined as "a level-crossing feedback loop". The prototypical example of a strange loop is the self-referential structure at the core of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. 

Now, his ant colony is undoubtedly bigger than mine, but that doesn't make it truer than mine. Hat size correlates with intelligence, but only in the range of r = .2 to .4. 

But let's not make an ontos out of an anthill. According to Gödel, "My theory is rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, and theological." "It is," writes Budiansky, "committed to accessing the immaterial world of higher philosophical truths" -- truths which are again discovered, not invented, whether by us or by any conceivable number of tenured worker ants. 

Besides, ant is to queen as is many to one. And human image to divine likeness. Sort of. The point is, there's always a telovator to the top floor. 

"There are," wrote Gödel, "worlds and rational beings, who are of the other and higher kind"; these latter are "connected to other beings by analogy, not by composition."  

Moreover, "There is a scientific (exact) philosophy (and theology)" that "deals with the concepts of the highest abstractness."

Because even paranoids have real friends.  

Even Paranoids have Real Friends

Let's complete our Journey to the Edge of Reason before circling back to The Philosophy of Being -- bearing in mind that a comprehensive philosophy of being is a journey to the edge of reason and beyond. 

In other words, no philosophy that confines itself to the necessarily circular and ultimately tautologous domain of reason is going to be complete. Which is indeed Gödel's whole point. 

Now, not everyone gets the point, including -- or so we have been told by the wise-in-their-own-eyes -- many experts. One such expert is Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote a popular book called Gödel-Something-Something way back in the disco era. But unlike the Bee Gees, it hasn't aged well. 

Here is an extract from the previous post, followed by a comment that cuts my coondle to the quick:

--The mind is not a computer. Sure, a lot of experts talk about artificial intelligence, but this is only because they are genuinely stupid. Or at least ignorant of Gödel.

You do know that the leading popularizer of Gödel in recent times, Doug Hofstadter, is an AI researcher?

Yes, we are aware of the book. In fact, it's buried somewhere in our vast Closet of Unnecessary Books. To be sure, these books are not totally unnecessary, as I will eventually get around to inflicting them upon the local library for profoundly serious reasons of tax avoidance.

At any rate, Gödel was a persistent Platonist (not that there's anything wrong with it), certainly not any kind of materialist. As it pertains to the possibility of artificial intelligence, he concluded that that the theorems are "decidedly opposed to materialistic philosophy," and that our intuition is "a more magnificent thing than what any machine could duplicate" (Budiansky). And 

If the mind is not a machine, then the human spirit cannot be reduced to the mechanistic operation of the brain, with its finite collection of working parts consisting of neurons and their interconnections (ibid.) 

Conversely, according to the always-untrustworthy-so-who-really-knows? Prof. Wiki, Hofstadter argues that consciousness -- not just his, but ours too! -- is but

an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain.... he draws an analogy between the social organization of a colony of ants and the mind seen as a coherent "colony" of neurons. 

In particular, Hofstadter claims that our sense of having (or being) an "I" comes from the abstract pattern he terms a "strange loop", an abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video feedback he has defined as "a level-crossing feedback loop". The prototypical example of a strange loop is the self-referential structure at the core of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. 

Now, his ant colony is undoubtedly bigger than mine, but that doesn't make it truer than mine. Hat size correlates with intelligence, but only in the range of r = .2 to .4. 

But let's not make an ontos out of an anthill. According to Gödel, "My theory is rationalistic, idealistic, optimistic, and theological." "It is," writes Budiansky, "committed to accessing the immaterial world of higher philosophical truths" -- truths which are again discovered, not invented, whether by us or by any conceivable number of tenured worker ants. 

Besides, ant is to queen as is many to one. And human image to divine likeness. Sort of. The point is, there's always a telovator to the top floor. 

"There are," wrote Gödel, "worlds and rational beings, who are of the other and higher kind"; these latter are "connected to other beings by analogy, not by composition."  

Moreover, "There is a scientific (exact) philosophy (and theology)" that "deals with the concepts of the highest abstractness."

Because even paranoids have real friends.  

My Kingdom of Logic is not of this World

Is it ironic that the 20th century's greatest logician went insane? 

Or would it be ironic if he hadn't gone insane? 

Either way, the 21st century would surely have pushed him over the edge. At least the previous century was characterized by a lot of wrong ideas. Now they're not even wrong.  

Which is one of the left's patented tirade secrets: their ideas provide no sane person with a coherent or consistent toehold in reality. Arguing with a progressive is like trying to play basketball without gravity: there's nothing stable to push off of. More generally, follow any leftist argument to its conclusion, and it ends in either absurdity or self-contradiction.

Example: why do black lives matter? Because all men are created equal! Okay, so all lives matter. RACIST! Or, here's a progressive conundrum: if you place "trans-women" in a female prison, how did the females get raped and impregnated. Although it sounds impossible, keep pondering. There is a correct answer!  

Anyway, over the weekend I read this new biography of Gödel, Journey to the Edge of Reason. I enjoyed it, although there's really only so much one can say about his personal life. You could say he lived a dual existence, one side dwelling in the purest realm of abstract logic, the other in a messy haze of concrete delusions. He was only 25 when he made his most important discoveries. Then he lost his mind. End of story, more or less.

After the age of 27 the mind came and went, but when he died in 1978 it was definitely gone. As was his body; indeed, he weighed just 65 pounds. Why? Well, he had a lot on his mind. In addition to longstanding fears of his food being poisoned, the Nazis were doing their best to have him declared mentally incompetent, and had already recently sent his brother to a concentration camp. Moreover,

people hated him, he was a terrible person, the doctors were all imposters, evil spirits had removed from his desk a letter about his unfinished essay on Carnap [I hate when that happens!], and his friend Abraham Wald had actually not died in a plane crash nearly thirty years earlier but had survived and was secretly living in the Soviet Union (Budiansky).

So, he had a lot on his plate. No wonder he couldn't clean it.

Now, I saw my share of paranoiacs over the years, but then I decided to stop watching MSNBC.

The Paranoid Mind. That subject could easily hijack the rest of this post, but I think I'll leave it alone. Suffice it to say, it is fruitless to argue with paranoid types, especially when they are intelligent, which they often are. They exhibit a kind of watertight hyper-logic that can always cherrypick sufficient factual trees to support the delusional forest. It's how the media discovered Trump was a Russian spy, or how our intelligence community found out Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation.

I'm going to highlight a number of passages that arrested my attention for one reason or another. There's nothing complete or consistent about them. Or, perhaps there will be once we specify them; in other words, maybe we'll discern a pattern. 

Starting with the theorem(s), they represent "the most significant mathematical truth of the century," the "staggeringly brilliant and paradoxical proof" to the effect that -- wait for it -- "no formal mathematical system will ever capture every mathematical truth within its own bounds."

I'm no doubt missing something, because this strikes me as common sense, and I'm no logician, let alone brilliant, although I have been known to stagger.  But if you know what the soul is and the intellect does, obviously they transcend any mathematical or computational system. The mind is not a computer. Sure, a lot of experts talk about artificial intelligence, but this is only because they are genuinely stupid. Or at least ignorant of Gödel.

Speaking of which, although the theorems were published in the early 1930s, there was no popular book on the subject until the late 1950s. Then they were used by anyone and everyone to prove anything and everything (similar to how people take the Theory of Relativity to mean everything's relative, when it implies the opposite). Deepak no doubt uses Gödel to prove that our minds create reality. 

More generally, there are people who loved the implications and people who hated them, but both camps tended to misunderstand them.

Although Gödel was a member of the famous "Vienna Circle," he ended up placing intellectual dynamite under its absurdly pretentious and narrow-minded empiricism and positivism; although he mostly kept it to himself, he inclined to

the deeper conviction that there were truths to be found not just in the empirically perceivable, but perhaps more beautiful and enduring ones in the realm of abstract conceptions, where they awaited human discovery not through tangible perception, but by thought alone.

Okay, prove it!

The rest is history. Although his proofs still haven't managed to vanquish scientism, reductionism, materialism, Marxism, atheism, naturalism, humanism, evolutionism, et al. To be sure, they've been defeated, only they don't yet know it and don't want to know: matter over mind!

For Gödel, mathematics is not a human invention but a human discovery, a proposition that has literally infinite pansophical implications. "Mathematical objects and a priori truth were as real to him as anything the senses could perceive." Same. Well, maybe not the former, since I'm no math wiz. But a priori truths are as real to me as reality, since there is no reality without them.

Gödel regarded mathematics as "a search for truth, and more specifically a search for pre-existing truths that inhabited a reality separate from the human mind."

What?! A reality separate from the human mind? Yes, it's called reality for short. It's that thing that doesn't go away even when progressives refuse to acknowledge it.

Gödel once made a gag that "It's just as hard to be wrong about everything as it is to be right about everything."

St. Thomas would approve, for it is only possible for man to be right about anything because he cannot in principle be right about everything. The first follows from the second; ideologies that pretend to be right about everything (e.g., Marxism) are inevitably wrong about everything, or at least the most important things.

This post has gone on long enough. It's not complete, but I think it's pretty consistent.

My Kingdom of Logic is not of this World

Is it ironic that the 20th century's greatest logician went insane? 

Or would it be ironic if he hadn't gone insane? 

Either way, the 21st century would surely have pushed him over the edge. At least the previous century was characterized by a lot of wrong ideas. Now they're not even wrong.  

Which is one of the left's patented tirade secrets: their ideas provide no sane person with a coherent or consistent toehold in reality. Arguing with a progressive is like trying to play basketball without gravity: there's nothing stable to push off of. More generally, follow any leftist argument to its conclusion, and it ends in either absurdity or self-contradiction.

Example: why do black lives matter? Because all men are created equal! Okay, so all lives matter. RACIST! Or, here's a progressive conundrum: if you place "trans-women" in a female prison, how did the females get raped and impregnated. Although it sounds impossible, keep pondering. There is a correct answer!  

Anyway, over the weekend I read this new biography of Gödel, Journey to the Edge of Reason. I enjoyed it, although there's really only so much one can say about his personal life. You could say he lived a dual existence, one side dwelling in the purest realm of abstract logic, the other in a messy haze of concrete delusions. He was only 25 when he made his most important discoveries. Then he lost his mind. End of story, more or less.

After the age of 27 the mind came and went, but when he died in 1978 it was definitely gone. As was his body; indeed, he weighed just 65 pounds. Why? Well, he had a lot on his mind. In addition to longstanding fears of his food being poisoned, the Nazis were doing their best to have him declared mentally incompetent, and had already recently sent his brother to a concentration camp. Moreover,

people hated him, he was a terrible person, the doctors were all imposters, evil spirits had removed from his desk a letter about his unfinished essay on Carnap [I hate when that happens!], and his friend Abraham Wald had actually not died in a plane crash nearly thirty years earlier but had survived and was secretly living in the Soviet Union (Budiansky).

So, he had a lot on his plate. No wonder he couldn't clean it.

Now, I saw my share of paranoiacs over the years, but then I decided to stop watching MSNBC.

The Paranoid Mind. That subject could easily hijack the rest of this post, but I think I'll leave it alone. Suffice it to say, it is fruitless to argue with paranoid types, especially when they are intelligent, which they often are. They exhibit a kind of watertight hyper-logic that can always cherrypick sufficient factual trees to support the delusional forest. It's how the media discovered Trump was a Russian spy, or how our intelligence community found out Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation.

I'm going to highlight a number of passages that arrested my attention for one reason or another. There's nothing complete or consistent about them. Or, perhaps there will be once we specify them; in other words, maybe we'll discern a pattern. 

Starting with the theorem(s), they represent "the most significant mathematical truth of the century," the "staggeringly brilliant and paradoxical proof" to the effect that -- wait for it -- "no formal mathematical system will ever capture every mathematical truth within its own bounds."

I'm no doubt missing something, because this strikes me as common sense, and I'm no logician, let alone brilliant, although I have been known to stagger.  But if you know what the soul is and the intellect does, obviously they transcend any mathematical or computational system. The mind is not a computer. Sure, a lot of experts talk about artificial intelligence, but this is only because they are genuinely stupid. Or at least ignorant of Gödel.

Speaking of which, although the theorems were published in the early 1930s, there was no popular book on the subject until the late 1950s. Then they were used by anyone and everyone to prove anything and everything (similar to how people take the Theory of Relativity to mean everything's relative, when it implies the opposite). Deepak no doubt uses Gödel to prove that our minds create reality. 

More generally, there are people who loved the implications and people who hated them, but both camps tended to misunderstand them.

Although Gödel was a member of the famous "Vienna Circle," he ended up placing intellectual dynamite under its absurdly pretentious and narrow-minded empiricism and positivism; although he mostly kept it to himself, he inclined to

the deeper conviction that there were truths to be found not just in the empirically perceivable, but perhaps more beautiful and enduring ones in the realm of abstract conceptions, where they awaited human discovery not through tangible perception, but by thought alone.

Okay, prove it!

The rest is history. Although his proofs still haven't managed to vanquish scientism, reductionism, materialism, Marxism, atheism, naturalism, humanism, evolutionism, et al. To be sure, they've been defeated, only they don't yet know it and don't want to know: matter over mind!

For Gödel, mathematics is not a human invention but a human discovery, a proposition that has literally infinite pansophical implications. "Mathematical objects and a priori truth were as real to him as anything the senses could perceive." Same. Well, maybe not the former, since I'm no math wiz. But a priori truths are as real to me as reality, since there is no reality without them.

Gödel regarded mathematics as "a search for truth, and more specifically a search for pre-existing truths that inhabited a reality separate from the human mind."

What?! A reality separate from the human mind? Yes, it's called reality for short. It's that thing that doesn't go away even when progressives refuse to acknowledge it.

Gödel once made a gag that "It's just as hard to be wrong about everything as it is to be right about everything."

St. Thomas would approve, for it is only possible for man to be right about anything because he cannot in principle be right about everything. The first follows from the second; ideologies that pretend to be right about everything (e.g., Marxism) are inevitably wrong about everything, or at least the most important things.

This post has gone on long enough. It's not complete, but I think it's pretty consistent.