2009-01-19
Formal Argument
In the comments section I was accused of committing a logical fallacy. The one identified was an appeal to emotion, covered here and I quote the bit that explains why it is not applicable:
"appeal to consequences does not refer to arguments that address a premise's desirability (good or bad, or right or wrong) instead of its truth value. Therefore, an argument based on appeal to consequences is valid in ethics, and in fact such arguments are the cornerstones of many moral theories"
I have never attempted to argue "If you don't accept my claim that I am God, human rights abuses will continue to occur, and that is why my claim is correct". (Regardless of the fact that the first part of the argument is most likely correct). However, I don't think I've ever formally presented the argument. But let me have a stab at it.
1. In principle, it is wrong to wrong/bad to rape/chop people's tongues out and various other human rights abuses.
2. Protecting people from human rights abuses is good, even if this involves the use of force.
3. The ultimate good is to protect human rights.
4. God is usually assumed to be the ultimate good entity.
5. For a human to be considered close to God, or doing God's work, or God-like, he/she would do God-like things, ie ultimately good things, ie protecting human rights.
6. Stopping Saddam from doing those things to the Iraqi people is one of those good things even IF that was not the only, or even, primary, motive. (for some people it was the only motive - and it SHOULD have been A motive for ALL moral actors on the planet).
7. Humans thus have the ability to compete to see who comes closest to being God-like.
8. I chose to take part in that competition, regardless of the fact that I was an atheist, in fact, being an atheist was an integral part of that competition to eliminate the inaction/indifference caused by people saying "God will take care of that".
9. I devoted an enormous portion of my life to protecting people from human rights abuses, be they Americans jumping from the WTC or Iraqis being raped by their own government.
10. Not only did I make more effort than anyone else to protect human rights, the ultimate result of that was isolating/deriving a particular ideology that would convert human rights abusers into defenders of human rights, if adopted and internalized.
11. That ideology/philosophy (message 666) is the most important achievement in human history as for the first time it provides a pathway to obtaining world peace (ie after world freedom), rather than the current situation where wars, fights and human rights abuses seemingly pop up randomly and are unfathomable and unstoppable.
12. That human achievement was accompanied by a series of seemingly miraculous "coincidences", namely:
a) Message with discovery ended up being numbered 666. There is not even a 1 in 666 chance of this happening, as the thousands of messages that I wrote on the Iraqi blogs rarely ever even had an OPPORTUNITY to be 666, because message comments per post don't normally reach that number. It is an undisputable fact that 666 is widely known in our culture as representing evil (despite the fact that there's zero evidence of it being evil, any more than there is of 13 being unlucky).
b) Message was written on Sept 11, 2004, the anniversary of the most widely known act of evil by terrorists in human history.
c) (much weaker "coincidence") The blog post that the message chain was written in response to was posted on my birthday.
Specifically NOT included in this argument are unverifiable claims of revelations - they only play a part in easing (greatly) my personal acceptance of the argument - but as with all other unverifiable claims, they cannot play any part in a scientific line of enquiry.
13. The combination of the God-like actions with the miraculous "coincidences" point to something supernatural having just occurred.
14. There are other supporting "coincidences" surrounding the God-like person, such as the fact that he was born the same year that Jerusalem was reunited - something that many people believe (without hard evidence) to be of religious significance. Also other moral acts like trying to produce lots of public domain software to lower the cost to business to ultimately drive down prices.
15. It is wrong to write off something so improbable as the above as a long series of "coincidences" any more than it would be to write off the lottery numbers being the same every week 10 weeks in a row as "coincidence" (rather than the far more likely scenario that it's rigged).
That concludes the formal argument for the proposition "a supernatural event occurred around a God-like person".
I'm not expecting anyone to accept the argument, even though it is entirely logical and correct, because I am way too familiar with the extreme dogma that almost all humans possess.
The leap from "a supernatural event occurred around a God-like person" to "that person is God" is not provable. It is necessarily speculative because we don't have access to investigate how the universe was constructed. Such speculation gives rise to models that are conceptually useful, and different people will come to different views on the likelihood of those speculative models. My preferred model, and I stress, that it is just a model, is:
1. The universe has been constructed via a sophisticated computer, the closest movie that shows such a concept is "The Thirteenth Floor", although the aspect where the "player" gets replaced in the upper universe on death is not a very likely implementation.
2. Almost all history is fabricated as part of that simulation.
3. The universe creator, who we will DEFINE as "God", has most likely JOINED the universe (something that is technically easy to do once everything is silicon-based) and is in fact the most God-like person we see on earth.
4. The purpose of the universe is to create a challenge for God-on-earth to see how much wrong he can right during his time inside the universe.
I have no interest in debating the latter speculation, since not only can I not prove it, I don't even claim that it is true. I only claim that it is the best model I know of (and challenge people to find a superior alternative). I'm happy to refine the model based on "likely implementation based on how we would do it ourselves". I am happy to debate the initial premise and the various assumptions in it. I certainly understand why a rapist would not accept the logic when he baulks at an assumption that rape is a human rights abuse rather than a perk. But apart from the rejection by sociopaths of these things being human rights abuses, no-one has been able to find a flaw in the resulting logic. It's extremely unlikely they ever will either, because I have other (non-scientifically verifiable revelations) reason to believe the argument is sound. So any counterargument is sure to have a flaw in it, even if it takes some time to flesh out the formal error of logic.
Now let the monotonous wall-to-wall dogma and ever-repeating logical fallacies begin. Foddy, you have pole position as usual.
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"appeal to consequences does not refer to arguments that address a premise's desirability (good or bad, or right or wrong) instead of its truth value. Therefore, an argument based on appeal to consequences is valid in ethics, and in fact such arguments are the cornerstones of many moral theories"
I have never attempted to argue "If you don't accept my claim that I am God, human rights abuses will continue to occur, and that is why my claim is correct". (Regardless of the fact that the first part of the argument is most likely correct). However, I don't think I've ever formally presented the argument. But let me have a stab at it.
1. In principle, it is wrong to wrong/bad to rape/chop people's tongues out and various other human rights abuses.
2. Protecting people from human rights abuses is good, even if this involves the use of force.
3. The ultimate good is to protect human rights.
4. God is usually assumed to be the ultimate good entity.
5. For a human to be considered close to God, or doing God's work, or God-like, he/she would do God-like things, ie ultimately good things, ie protecting human rights.
6. Stopping Saddam from doing those things to the Iraqi people is one of those good things even IF that was not the only, or even, primary, motive. (for some people it was the only motive - and it SHOULD have been A motive for ALL moral actors on the planet).
7. Humans thus have the ability to compete to see who comes closest to being God-like.
8. I chose to take part in that competition, regardless of the fact that I was an atheist, in fact, being an atheist was an integral part of that competition to eliminate the inaction/indifference caused by people saying "God will take care of that".
9. I devoted an enormous portion of my life to protecting people from human rights abuses, be they Americans jumping from the WTC or Iraqis being raped by their own government.
10. Not only did I make more effort than anyone else to protect human rights, the ultimate result of that was isolating/deriving a particular ideology that would convert human rights abusers into defenders of human rights, if adopted and internalized.
11. That ideology/philosophy (message 666) is the most important achievement in human history as for the first time it provides a pathway to obtaining world peace (ie after world freedom), rather than the current situation where wars, fights and human rights abuses seemingly pop up randomly and are unfathomable and unstoppable.
12. That human achievement was accompanied by a series of seemingly miraculous "coincidences", namely:
a) Message with discovery ended up being numbered 666. There is not even a 1 in 666 chance of this happening, as the thousands of messages that I wrote on the Iraqi blogs rarely ever even had an OPPORTUNITY to be 666, because message comments per post don't normally reach that number. It is an undisputable fact that 666 is widely known in our culture as representing evil (despite the fact that there's zero evidence of it being evil, any more than there is of 13 being unlucky).
b) Message was written on Sept 11, 2004, the anniversary of the most widely known act of evil by terrorists in human history.
c) (much weaker "coincidence") The blog post that the message chain was written in response to was posted on my birthday.
Specifically NOT included in this argument are unverifiable claims of revelations - they only play a part in easing (greatly) my personal acceptance of the argument - but as with all other unverifiable claims, they cannot play any part in a scientific line of enquiry.
13. The combination of the God-like actions with the miraculous "coincidences" point to something supernatural having just occurred.
14. There are other supporting "coincidences" surrounding the God-like person, such as the fact that he was born the same year that Jerusalem was reunited - something that many people believe (without hard evidence) to be of religious significance. Also other moral acts like trying to produce lots of public domain software to lower the cost to business to ultimately drive down prices.
15. It is wrong to write off something so improbable as the above as a long series of "coincidences" any more than it would be to write off the lottery numbers being the same every week 10 weeks in a row as "coincidence" (rather than the far more likely scenario that it's rigged).
That concludes the formal argument for the proposition "a supernatural event occurred around a God-like person".
I'm not expecting anyone to accept the argument, even though it is entirely logical and correct, because I am way too familiar with the extreme dogma that almost all humans possess.
The leap from "a supernatural event occurred around a God-like person" to "that person is God" is not provable. It is necessarily speculative because we don't have access to investigate how the universe was constructed. Such speculation gives rise to models that are conceptually useful, and different people will come to different views on the likelihood of those speculative models. My preferred model, and I stress, that it is just a model, is:
1. The universe has been constructed via a sophisticated computer, the closest movie that shows such a concept is "The Thirteenth Floor", although the aspect where the "player" gets replaced in the upper universe on death is not a very likely implementation.
2. Almost all history is fabricated as part of that simulation.
3. The universe creator, who we will DEFINE as "God", has most likely JOINED the universe (something that is technically easy to do once everything is silicon-based) and is in fact the most God-like person we see on earth.
4. The purpose of the universe is to create a challenge for God-on-earth to see how much wrong he can right during his time inside the universe.
I have no interest in debating the latter speculation, since not only can I not prove it, I don't even claim that it is true. I only claim that it is the best model I know of (and challenge people to find a superior alternative). I'm happy to refine the model based on "likely implementation based on how we would do it ourselves". I am happy to debate the initial premise and the various assumptions in it. I certainly understand why a rapist would not accept the logic when he baulks at an assumption that rape is a human rights abuse rather than a perk. But apart from the rejection by sociopaths of these things being human rights abuses, no-one has been able to find a flaw in the resulting logic. It's extremely unlikely they ever will either, because I have other (non-scientifically verifiable revelations) reason to believe the argument is sound. So any counterargument is sure to have a flaw in it, even if it takes some time to flesh out the formal error of logic.
Now let the monotonous wall-to-wall dogma and ever-repeating logical fallacies begin. Foddy, you have pole position as usual.
2009-01-04
Truth
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer.
Let's hope that it doesn't take the 1800 years it took Aristarchus's work to move into the 3rd stage, for my work to arrive there. World freedom, human rights, peace and prosperity will suffer until people get around to dropping their extremely dogmatic unsubstantiated viewpoints and start teaching the truth of message 666 to every child in Gaza.
Until then, bombs away.
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Let's hope that it doesn't take the 1800 years it took Aristarchus's work to move into the 3rd stage, for my work to arrive there. World freedom, human rights, peace and prosperity will suffer until people get around to dropping their extremely dogmatic unsubstantiated viewpoints and start teaching the truth of message 666 to every child in Gaza.
Until then, bombs away.
2009-01-03
Ideological War
A lot of times I don't know how to explain myself, because some things are just "obvious" to me, and I don't know what assumptions are built-in that I haven't elaborated and justified until I stumble across it in a debate.
This time I was in a debate with a Taiwanese guy and he was claiming that I was just sitting at my computer instead of taking "real action". I asked him what "real action" was to liberate Iran, protect America or whatever, given that this was an IDEOLOGICAL WAR. Of course he couldn't answer. No-one ever can. They just like to throw mud. But it did occur to me that I had never actually elaborated that before.
The thing about 9/11 is that the perpetrators were just individuals, not a state. This forced America to deal with an ideology (similar to communism or Nazism) rather than just one rogue country that got it into its head that it wanted to fight. US troops were already IN Saudi Arabia, as guests! It wasn't really possible to order the US military to invade Saudi Arabia without at least first having the decency to LEAVE! Actually, one of the reasons for the attack was that Saudi opinion was divided as to whether US troops should be in the "holy" land or not!
So now the war needed to be fought worldwide. Every country in the world, even the US (think Wright) has people who subscribe to this ideology that the US deserved to be attacked. And if you want to protect yourself from this enemy you need to:
1. Isolate the exact ideology that is causing people to want to hurt America.
2. Convert the convertable from that ideology to an ideology that wants to either protect America, or be neutral.
3. Kill or capture or neuter the unconvertable.
With respect to 1, real action is in fact, RESEARCH. You don't just run aimlessly around Afghanistan shooting guys holding weapons. Sure, that's needed too (in a large part to assist with the research), but these Taliban morons with pea-shooters are just a symptom. And the Afghan National Army who are hunting them down are a symptom of part of the solution! But the entire mess needed to be reconciled. What was causing these Afghan Muslims to form violently diametrically opposed ideologies? The real action - research - was indeed done to explain these forces, and the answer was finally produced in message 666. This shows why one group of Muslims are on one side, allied with the US, while the other is on the other side.
With respect to 2, real action is in fact trying to convert the enemy! This requires laying out a logical argument to people and trying to convince them to stop hating America by seeing a different perspective. This campaign is not yet up to the military stage in places like Egypt and Pakistan etc etc. But it can be done via contacting these people over the internet, with the idea being to convert them, then asking them to assist in converting others, including their own family, so that we can end up with 95% of Egypt abhorring the 9/11 attacks and instead assisting with hunting down the religious bigots in their own country and making it socially unacceptable. Most people are too cowardly to go outside of what "popular opinion" is.
With respect to 3, real action is in fact the military aiming a gun at a Taliban and squeezing the trigger. However, that's a minority of the military, and it doesn't operate alone. There are support personnel, there are pilots, there are mechanics and there are people who pay for all this. Basically the entire country (minus leeches) are involved in the war effort - even the unwitting anti-war who are incensed that their tax dollars are being used for this purpose. And real action also includes stopping those tax-payers from being incensed and support the military campaign. All the components of the military are volunteers, and there are replacements available for all of them. Having 21 million Australians line up for the very narrow job spec of shooting bullets at the Taliban is a non-starter. Explaining this to morons is also part of the real action. And above all that, those people who shoot bullets won't even be ALLOWED to do that (even though they are perfectly happy to) if the general public doesn't support that. So once again, the real action (and in fact, this is where the battle was lost when the Australian people elected a treacherous PM who pulled the troops out of Iraq) is to get the public behind these wars.
In a nutshell, the battleground for an ideological war is not Helmand, Afghanistan. It is the mainstream media, newspapers, radio, and the internet. All around the world. There are already lots of people engaged in this war. Fox News is one of the fighters. But getting people to actually watch Fox News and ignore the ridicule from the nasty left-wing is also part of that battle.
So, the war continues on all these levels. I have already done everything "real" I can think of. If everyone was doing what I was doing, we'd have 10,000 Australian troops in Iraq today because the government needed to respond to the pressure. The reason we don't have Australians killing insurgents in Iraq is not because our military is incompetent. It is far from that. Some consider our soldiers to be the world's best (personally I would go with America now that they are the most combat-experienced). Certainly before the war I would go with Australia or Israel.
Note that we're up against a tough opponent. Their heads are locked solid with concrete. It's a bit like trying to argue with a communist rabitting on about how capitalists exploit the poor and that if we could just implement what's in this book, we'll have a wonderful world. And you try to point them to the Soviet Union's crimes and they tell you that's all American propaganda. No communist atrocity is unable to be spun. It actually took the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Russians themselves saying "communism sucks" before the commie scum in our own countries decided to change tactics and just bring capitalism down to the same disastrous result of communism by insisting that fine, let's try capitalism, but it's important that we do it without breathing. Well, we need to run industry without producing carbon dioxide, anyway. Let's see you try that, huh! Let's see whether capitalism really works under realistic constraints like not producing carbon dioxide! And that's part of yet another ideological war, although it's already covered by message 666 (war against DOGMA, in this case the communist dogma).
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This time I was in a debate with a Taiwanese guy and he was claiming that I was just sitting at my computer instead of taking "real action". I asked him what "real action" was to liberate Iran, protect America or whatever, given that this was an IDEOLOGICAL WAR. Of course he couldn't answer. No-one ever can. They just like to throw mud. But it did occur to me that I had never actually elaborated that before.
The thing about 9/11 is that the perpetrators were just individuals, not a state. This forced America to deal with an ideology (similar to communism or Nazism) rather than just one rogue country that got it into its head that it wanted to fight. US troops were already IN Saudi Arabia, as guests! It wasn't really possible to order the US military to invade Saudi Arabia without at least first having the decency to LEAVE! Actually, one of the reasons for the attack was that Saudi opinion was divided as to whether US troops should be in the "holy" land or not!
So now the war needed to be fought worldwide. Every country in the world, even the US (think Wright) has people who subscribe to this ideology that the US deserved to be attacked. And if you want to protect yourself from this enemy you need to:
1. Isolate the exact ideology that is causing people to want to hurt America.
2. Convert the convertable from that ideology to an ideology that wants to either protect America, or be neutral.
3. Kill or capture or neuter the unconvertable.
With respect to 1, real action is in fact, RESEARCH. You don't just run aimlessly around Afghanistan shooting guys holding weapons. Sure, that's needed too (in a large part to assist with the research), but these Taliban morons with pea-shooters are just a symptom. And the Afghan National Army who are hunting them down are a symptom of part of the solution! But the entire mess needed to be reconciled. What was causing these Afghan Muslims to form violently diametrically opposed ideologies? The real action - research - was indeed done to explain these forces, and the answer was finally produced in message 666. This shows why one group of Muslims are on one side, allied with the US, while the other is on the other side.
With respect to 2, real action is in fact trying to convert the enemy! This requires laying out a logical argument to people and trying to convince them to stop hating America by seeing a different perspective. This campaign is not yet up to the military stage in places like Egypt and Pakistan etc etc. But it can be done via contacting these people over the internet, with the idea being to convert them, then asking them to assist in converting others, including their own family, so that we can end up with 95% of Egypt abhorring the 9/11 attacks and instead assisting with hunting down the religious bigots in their own country and making it socially unacceptable. Most people are too cowardly to go outside of what "popular opinion" is.
With respect to 3, real action is in fact the military aiming a gun at a Taliban and squeezing the trigger. However, that's a minority of the military, and it doesn't operate alone. There are support personnel, there are pilots, there are mechanics and there are people who pay for all this. Basically the entire country (minus leeches) are involved in the war effort - even the unwitting anti-war who are incensed that their tax dollars are being used for this purpose. And real action also includes stopping those tax-payers from being incensed and support the military campaign. All the components of the military are volunteers, and there are replacements available for all of them. Having 21 million Australians line up for the very narrow job spec of shooting bullets at the Taliban is a non-starter. Explaining this to morons is also part of the real action. And above all that, those people who shoot bullets won't even be ALLOWED to do that (even though they are perfectly happy to) if the general public doesn't support that. So once again, the real action (and in fact, this is where the battle was lost when the Australian people elected a treacherous PM who pulled the troops out of Iraq) is to get the public behind these wars.
In a nutshell, the battleground for an ideological war is not Helmand, Afghanistan. It is the mainstream media, newspapers, radio, and the internet. All around the world. There are already lots of people engaged in this war. Fox News is one of the fighters. But getting people to actually watch Fox News and ignore the ridicule from the nasty left-wing is also part of that battle.
So, the war continues on all these levels. I have already done everything "real" I can think of. If everyone was doing what I was doing, we'd have 10,000 Australian troops in Iraq today because the government needed to respond to the pressure. The reason we don't have Australians killing insurgents in Iraq is not because our military is incompetent. It is far from that. Some consider our soldiers to be the world's best (personally I would go with America now that they are the most combat-experienced). Certainly before the war I would go with Australia or Israel.
Note that we're up against a tough opponent. Their heads are locked solid with concrete. It's a bit like trying to argue with a communist rabitting on about how capitalists exploit the poor and that if we could just implement what's in this book, we'll have a wonderful world. And you try to point them to the Soviet Union's crimes and they tell you that's all American propaganda. No communist atrocity is unable to be spun. It actually took the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Russians themselves saying "communism sucks" before the commie scum in our own countries decided to change tactics and just bring capitalism down to the same disastrous result of communism by insisting that fine, let's try capitalism, but it's important that we do it without breathing. Well, we need to run industry without producing carbon dioxide, anyway. Let's see you try that, huh! Let's see whether capitalism really works under realistic constraints like not producing carbon dioxide! And that's part of yet another ideological war, although it's already covered by message 666 (war against DOGMA, in this case the communist dogma).