🧵 Having been one for 27 years, I can tell you that far-right people almost uniformly have a deep inferiority complex towards mainstream society.'nThey know that their beliefs are either unprovable or disproven.
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🧵 Having been one for 27 years, I can tell you that far-right people almost uniformly have a deep inferiority complex towards mainstream society.
They know that their beliefs are either unprovable or disproven. But they want to believe anyway. Thus, they seek to destroy objective knowledge.
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🧵 Having been one for 27 years, I can tell you that far-right people almost uniformly have a deep inferiority complex towards mainstream society.
They know that their beliefs are either unprovable or disproven. But they want to believe anyway. Thus, they seek to destroy objective knowledge.
Reactionary intellectualism is completely impoverished. The atheists like Curtis Yarvin are puerile, and the theists are still serving up CS Lewis's gruel.
NYT columnist Ross Douthat wrote a book trying to convince people to believe in religion, but it appears to be nothing more than a distended version of Pascal's wager, an argument debunked centuries ago. https://archive.ph/bkp8c
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Reactionary intellectualism is completely impoverished. The atheists like Curtis Yarvin are puerile, and the theists are still serving up CS Lewis's gruel.
NYT columnist Ross Douthat wrote a book trying to convince people to believe in religion, but it appears to be nothing more than a distended version of Pascal's wager, an argument debunked centuries ago. https://archive.ph/bkp8c
@mattsheffield The thing I like about Pascal's Wager is how do you know you've bet on the right god?
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@mattsheffield The thing I like about Pascal's Wager is how do you know you've bet on the right god?
@nihongomaamaa @mattsheffield I feel this way about how New Atheists approach empiricism. It all hinges upon our ability to be completely objective—which I’m skeptical about. So many things about how we perceive the world hinge on language which, by its nature, is a game. -
@nihongomaamaa @mattsheffield I feel this way about how New Atheists approach empiricism. It all hinges upon our ability to be completely objective—which I’m skeptical about. So many things about how we perceive the world hinge on language which, by its nature, is a game.
@atomicpoet @nihongomaamaa That perspective you highlight, which is indeed the New Atheist viewpoint, is anti-scientific.
All the best philosophers of science share the idea that there is no objectivity, only ideas which are presently unfalsified.
We can only know through negation.
Nothing about the external world can ever be "true." It can only be false, possibly false, and not known to be false.
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@atomicpoet @nihongomaamaa That perspective you highlight, which is indeed the New Atheist viewpoint, is anti-scientific.
All the best philosophers of science share the idea that there is no objectivity, only ideas which are presently unfalsified.
We can only know through negation.
Nothing about the external world can ever be "true." It can only be false, possibly false, and not known to be false.
@mattsheffield @atomicpoet @nihongomaamaa
There is a not insignificant segment of the New Atheists who have to believe that there are no such thing as qualia, because otherwise a great many of their assertions would collapse.
From there it's not exactly a long drive to get to the notion that one person's lived experience must be intrinsically comprehensible to another, and from there it's a skip and a jump to some of the very worst examples of human behaviour, starting with victim-blaming and jumping all the way to straight-laced eugenics.
And all in service to a god named objectivity.
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@mattsheffield @atomicpoet @nihongomaamaa
There is a not insignificant segment of the New Atheists who have to believe that there are no such thing as qualia, because otherwise a great many of their assertions would collapse.
From there it's not exactly a long drive to get to the notion that one person's lived experience must be intrinsically comprehensible to another, and from there it's a skip and a jump to some of the very worst examples of human behaviour, starting with victim-blaming and jumping all the way to straight-laced eugenics.
And all in service to a god named objectivity.
@theogrin @mattsheffield @nihongomaamaa The irony of dismissing metaphysics as mysticism is that you make a priori assumptions about being and therefore knowledge and experience. -
@mattsheffield @atomicpoet @nihongomaamaa
There is a not insignificant segment of the New Atheists who have to believe that there are no such thing as qualia, because otherwise a great many of their assertions would collapse.
From there it's not exactly a long drive to get to the notion that one person's lived experience must be intrinsically comprehensible to another, and from there it's a skip and a jump to some of the very worst examples of human behaviour, starting with victim-blaming and jumping all the way to straight-laced eugenics.
And all in service to a god named objectivity.
@theogrin @atomicpoet @nihongomaamaa This all goes back to Immanuel Kant and how his ontology is contradicted by his epistemology.
Most of science listened to David Hume that objectivity was impossible. Too much of liberalism listened to Kant that it was.
New Atheism and right-wing libertarianism are both undead sciences that have made common cause with the older undead science of traditionalist religion.
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@theogrin @atomicpoet @nihongomaamaa This all goes back to Immanuel Kant and how his ontology is contradicted by his epistemology.
Most of science listened to David Hume that objectivity was impossible. Too much of liberalism listened to Kant that it was.
New Atheism and right-wing libertarianism are both undead sciences that have made common cause with the older undead science of traditionalist religion.
@mattsheffield @theogrin @nihongomaamaa It’s a lesson every generation must contend with.
100 years ago, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead tried to write Principia Mathematica, an attempt to reduce all of mathematics to pure logic.
However, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Russell’s former student, would later upend its entire foundation. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Wittgenstein argued that language and logic could only depict the world, not ground it—that the limits of logic were the limits of meaning itself.
So basically, all that work put into Principia Mathematica was futile—and this was a three-volume work.
We still have folks like Bertrand Russell walking around but none of them have learned his lesson.
