Author: J.C. Cross

Philosophy 101: Bacon

From “The Great Instauration”

Bacon broke ground with the emergence of the Enlightenment. The tenets are:

1. Severe criticism of the previous philosophic tradition.
2. The consequent need for a new philosophic foundation.
3. The new foundation seeks to command nature through production and science. Bacon was a father of scientific technology and his philosophy aimed at relief from want and suffering. His idea of the “New Atlantis” represented a foundation that could not be overcome.
4. Bacon also promoted a new way of knowing, a turn in epistemology. He philosophy was severely critical of natural knowing.

The Novum Organum
1. The end of philosophy will be different; it will command nature.
2. The order of demonstrations reject demonstration by syllogism. Instead, induction will be based on actual observation of nature.
The scholastic flew from observation to general propositions. But the new, scientific philosopher needs to stay close to observation that leads to facts.
3. A new form of induction:
a. Analyze experience by analyzing a whole that is greater than its parts. It takes things down to their constituent pieces.
b. We cannot base common knowledge on trust. We must establish all knowledge scientifically.
c. Information of the senses deceives. True sense is undermined.
d. We need experiments to establish knowledge.
i. Bacon was called a priest of the senses.
ii. We must be aware of the cost of vanity and idols.
iii. Sound science is without fables. Medicines, technology, and epistemology itself must be established through the criticisms of the senses.

Philosophy 101: Aquinas

RE: Exitous in Summa Article I

Continuing on Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas spoke of the Good being desirable and its privation as evil. Blindness is an example of a material evil. But non-material evil is parasitical.

A ruler’s law is base on his reason, while divine reason is an eternal direction for us.

Aquinas wrote of the Natural Law: free will and reason is juxtaposed with instinct. As rational creatures, we are participants in God’s governance of the natural order. We understand and cooperate in this order. Through Human Law, humans are authorities and creators.

Aquinas also saw Divine Law as coming from divine revelation. This law is opposite grace — which gives us faith, hope, and charity. God made us for a supernatural purpose. Divine law can take us beyond our nature and beyond nature itself.

However, Aquinas also asserted that we can’t know everything without a written law, like the 10 commandments. Humans disagree about natural law, and human law only directs external actions. It cannot punish all evil; that is the domain of God.

In Article II, Aquinas writes of Natural Law as Practical versus Speculative; these are self-evident. We are rational and self-governing (ex nihilo neo fit, nothing new comes from nothing). With Speculative Reason, the first precedent is Being. With Practical Reason, the first precedent is the Good. All human action is toward achieving goods, the things we seek after. Man’s “thou shalt nots” protect the Good. We identify rules secondarily to nature, but responsible freedom and will preserve them.

Philosophy 101: Plato and Aristotle

The Philosopher King, the poet, tells us about the true form of beauty, that is, the Good. In this world, light and the sun are examples of this good. We learn about the three divisions of philosophy:
1) Ontology – the principles of the nature of reality.
2) Epistemology – the principles of the nature of knowing.
3) Metaphysics – the first principles that cannot be proven but are self-evident, like the law of noncontradiction.

Sufficient reason is the reason for everything, which states that from nothing nothing comes. These are how we understand:
1) Inductive reasoning – probability versus universal reasoning/truth of being a bridge to reality.
2) Deductive reasoning – for example, the argument (syllogism) shows that if a major premise is true, and the minor premise is true, then its conclusion is true (an immediate inference). For example:
a) God is the greatest that can be conceived.
b) Existence is greater than non-existence.
c) Existing God must be greater than non-existing God.
3) Dialectical reasoning is not based on proofs, and must be intelligible (look at it this way).
4) Informal fallacies. For example:
a) Ad hominem
b) Straw man
c) Correlation -> causation

How to handle disputations:
Pose a question -> State your objections -> Then state the contrary -> Then give your reasons -> And then reply to objections.

In the well-known parable of the cave, Plato represents those famous prisoners in the cave being subject to the imagemakers behind them.
The Good:
a) The useful
b) The pleasurable
c) The beautiful

The rational soul is a living entity, a directing process for understanding reality. As we ingest food and make it part of us, through intellect we can understand what is outside of us and make it part of us as knowledge, which is spiritual. Using logic we can get to right reasoning.

The ultimate good of Happiness comes from the complete way of a full life. Virtue arises from the practice of perfecting one’s character. Through excellence, we can grasp the good and create the moral life, which is beauty. The moral life is the mean between excess and deficiency; God-like contemplation–or magnanimity–is the most important thing.

The prime mover is the final cause. It elicits love and exists for itself. (From nothing, nothing comes.) But beyond being just the prime mover, God is the Creator with interest in creation. The providential, personal God is being in itself: the IAM, the judge, Providence and nature’s God. This law of nature gives us the moral law.

Administrative Problems

The scandal of the Secret Service’s ineptitude (or worse) is a sign of a creeping administrative state that is unelected and accountable. It’s been said lately that part of that problem is the hiring practices of the diversity crowd. I don’t want to go into depth on DEI. Plenty of other people have said enough.

I have a dream of a new liberalism that stresses a new citizenship, unity over diversity, and civilization-building over inward-looking self-destruction. Family, friendship, and commonalities over superficial physical features.

The New Values
– Education focused on how to think not what
– Production from the supply chain to the citizen that is secure and optimized for less waste
– Energy policy that sensibly leverages fossil fuels while being forward-looking with nuclear
– Technology that serves the individual and provides communitarian tools
– Agriculture as the bread basket to the world
– Wealth and opportunity for all

The meritocratic corporation can be an answer.

NATO warns China

China has been warned by NATO leaders that its strategic economic and industrial partnership with Russia cannot continue without consequences:

“The PRC cannot enable the largest war in Europe in recent history without this negatively impacting its interests and reputation.” (NATO on China the enabler)

This support of Russia probably has some reciprocity in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. While one war is on Biden’s watch, another may start because of a lack of response.

Xi and Putin don’t care who’s woke.

Deaf and afraid

“Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me. The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.”
– Isaiah 1:2-3

“When the great moment came and the Beasts spoke, he missed the
whole point; for a rather interesting reason. When the Lion had first
begun singing, long ago when it was still quite dark, he had realised
that the noise was a song. And he had disliked the song very much. It
made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel. Then,
when the sun rose and he saw that the singer was a lion (“only a lion,”
as he said to himself) he tried his hardest to make believe that it
wasn’t singing and never had been singing — only roaring as any lion
might in a zoo in our own world. “Of course it can’t really have been
singing,” he thought, “I must have imagined it. I’ve been letting my
nerves get out of order. Who ever heard of a lion singing?” And the
longer and more beautiful the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew
tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring.
Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really
are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did
hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song. Soon he couldn’t have heard
anything else even if he had wanted to. And when at last the Lion
spoke and said, “Narnia awake,” he didn’t hear any words: he heard
only a snarl. And when the Beasts spoke in answer, he heard only
barkings, growlings, bayings, and howlings. And when they laughed
— well, you can imagine. That was worse for Uncle Andrew than
anything that had happened yet. Such a horrid, bloodthirsty din of
hungry and angry brutes he had never heard in his life.”
– The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis

2024 China shenanigans, part 23

So what’s going with the totalitarians over there right now?

– EU tarrifs on Chinese EVs are making the CCP unhappy and Beijing is discouraging other countries from going to the Global Peace Summit in retaliation. It is promoting a Ukrainian-sponsored peace plan instead.
– The PLA has deployed J20 fighters around the border with India.
– China has been accused of selling more garbage counterfeits goods, this time (intentionally?) to Boeing and Airbus.
– New Zealand is having to deal with security interference and intimidation of Chinese ethnicities in New Zealand.
– PLA is still continuing its expansion into the South China Sea with building up its island bases and nuke vessels of deterrence.

Besides that, they’re “friends.”

The Inbetween Times

“Oh that’s fake.”

Needs some repeating: Deepfakes and fake video are on the edge of indiscernibility. It’s a sea change coming. We won’t know disinformation when we see it.

The public may not be thinking of the immensity of this. “Oh, it’s just online memes.” Memes aside, real news and information are closer to truth oblivion. It’s still a fiction thing. AI has moved beyond audio; AI video will be widely available.

Concomitant with this is the normalization of insularity due to the pandemic’s effects.

Please, get outside. I’ll join you.

Try as you might, the out there becomes life

Neil DeGrasse Tyson brings the truth, the need for reconciliation of the biblical world and science. You can’t be afraid. 13.8 billion years ago the fire brought galaxies to bear.

How can we speak to those who are sold out on the scientific method. Why is this even a concern? The gravity of discussion calls to that high place where we can say “I don’t know.” But fear erupts when we see the whittling away of supposed biblical narrative. But those in the peer-reviewed community don’t get a satisfactory answer to their questions.

I’m not sold, I can’t be. Everything should go on as needed. Everything should cause us to welcome questions.

The new immigration

Recently seen more on European immigration. The scale is very similar to ours. But the type of immigrant is different from the past. How is the West going to survive in the same way at these levels? We and the Europeans were previously able to absorb and integrate people much different than us. In Italy for example, the population has dropped precipitously and other ethnicities are changing the fabric. Culture is changing in each Western nation. It’s a brave new world and I can’t see where it’s all going.

Calling all aliens

The problem of authority.

With models like Google Gemini and ChatGPT how can we determine 1) what is just nonsense, 2) when user generated content is helpful, and 3) when we need guardrails?

First, we need some level of “normalcy.” What do we appeal to? Second, we need to separate user opinion from relation of fact from perhaps, “private journalism.” Third, normalcy and fact checking need to guard against extremes.

The need for nonpartisanship is apparent. We need gatekeepers, but who are they? We need an alien intelligence.