I believe in solipsism. Is that crazy?

Phew! Finally. Be at least mine enemy!—thus indeed speaketh the true reverence. Tell me, ye men, who of you are capable of friendship? (I have enough self-confidence not to mind being called a cow. Feminists need more spine.) Did you figure out this is what I was doing? I can't tell.

A little too jumpy, though. It's certainly true that almost all MAL users could indeed use some humbling, some actual academic gymnastics, so they can see that such knowledge is too wonderful and high, something they cannot attain to. But what of the mode of such humbling? Answer not the fool according to his instrumentalized-reason social-media folly. Anyway, you don't need to impress me, as I'm already impressed—as you maybe should have realized, though again, the MAL average makes this difficult. I'll reciprocate the level so as not to be disrespectful, but I don't believe in being too quick to that particular variety of vaunted reference out in the open. It demeans knowledge. You should be more gnomic.

Transcendental arguments require transcendence, see; this practical, instrumental reason stuff only works if you're as naive and rigid as Kant. Yes, any truth has to work given the obviousness of what we see around us, but who knows which entities are needlesly multiplied? Kant knew we couldn't see to the foundation, so he tried to do what we physicists call an effective field theory, work out the mid-level objects necessary to allow for the observable dynamics but forfend speaking of what was at the bottom, integrating out the high-momentum degrees of freedom. Coherence theories of truth fail because they assume we can see enough of the foundation to know that one thing does indeed fit with another. Eugene Thacker's In the Dust of This Planet was mostly unrigorous mumbo-jumbo for the purpose of self-aggrandizement, but his notion of the world-without-us was worth the read (as was the fun horror literary criticism). In the cosmological/field-theoretic concept of AdS/CFT, all the information in our universe is able to be defined and encapsulated in what happens at its edge, or surface, which possesses one fewer spatial dimension. And the way this information is encoded on the edge is impossibly convoluted, exactly and conceptually like a space-filling curve. So yes, we humans must perceive the world in some prescribed fashion contained within a set of possible ontologies, but it's the measure of this space of ontologies that you're ignoring. I do believe in a universal (and in case it wasn't obvious, non-solipsistic) foundation, but what if it is a Barthian wholly-other, a sleeping Azathoth that will destroy our naive formulations when it awakes? Back when I was taking Lagrangian mechanics my sophomore year of undergrad, a faux-intelligent colleague who hero-worshiped Feynman, was similarly lauded by my peers, and wasn't as good at physics as I was, told me, when I objected to some stupid pablum our TA said, that, "If the universe weren't elegant, we'd all kill ourselves." I'll put more cards on the table than rhetoric would dictate and say that, as a Christian, I wonder what evil, stupid human notions of elegance amount to. (And by Christian I don't mean nice, fluffy, Western-civilizational superiority nonsense.) I expect the truth of the universe is an astonishing condemnation of all our sensibilities, just as I believe in total depravity. Thacker's world-without-us, something that exists absent human bias and construction, is salutary in its vision—its humility, which you claim to appeal to.

But you don't know me, so—you can be forgiven for calling me a nominalist. Though, admittedly, not knowing you, who knows how superficial you are. I dislike the American-Lutheran "best-construction" fetish, primarily because most people who appeal to best constructions lack the ontology to construct anything in the first place, but certainly I'll say I'm impressed at least that you're unafraid to disparage cosmology. As someone who has sat through enough astrophysics seminars to have dark matter coming out her ears, I applaud you for realizing cosmology's tentativeness (or at least claiming it, whether or not you know enough to do so). Most physicists are idiot Feynman acolytes who hate philosophy, and I can't stand them for it. (I also begrudge Feynman his brilliance, as he used it to disparage philosophy, and had zero idea what he was talking about.) But I am not one of these; the size of the voids we've observed in the universe is indeed evidence against the cosmological principle. I referred to cosmology rather than physics in general in my previous post precisely because its foundations are shaky. If anything smarted in what you said, it was the suggestion I was allied with the science-supremacists. All hail Thomas Kuhn. Errol Morris should have borne the ashtray, if his story was indeed true.

It should not surprise us that the false consciousness of our age encourages solipsism, especially among the uneducated. You have only to look at the two nominees of the dominant American political parties to understand this. And by the way: Maybe you find material security more important than the truth, but I'll give up my wallet for the truth any day. God is the prime mover of humor. And in case my point got lost, appeals to coherence require more ontological confidence than I think we've earned, entrenched in our historical milieu as we are. Anyway, you bother me because you have knowledge but not the wisdom to discern time and place. You make references like you know, but you don't write like you do. You write like you're doing a Ben Shapiro, not a Terry Eagleton.

So what's you're most-beautiful philosophical argument, that you weren't willing to state over on the other thread?

@auroraloose Every sentence of yours I read I find a new assumption that I disagree with, mainly informed by your metaphysical illiteracy and inability to parse the implications of my prior statements (all the while calling me transparent, no less). It seems that I'm being more opaque than first appreciated so I'll try again. That said, I am not interested in obscurantism - I have had no need to speak of anything explicitly esoteric with you or anyone else here so far, and so I feel no need to shield my words in obtuse and covetous manners. I value writing in a simple and direct fashion whenever possible, because at my core I am simple also, but chiefly due to the fact that I find no joy in the rabbit-hole of syllogistic logic and reductive formulas; these are but tools. I do enjoy polemics however, although it's hard to find the motivation when my present assignment is not to untie knots but merely poke holes. The true reverence to the divine which you speak of is something I employ constantly, and the fact that you think otherwise by me merely naming conduits of ideas (as opposed to their essential content) is very telling of your sophistic nature.

I thought it was clear as day that I am indeed discussing matters of transcendence, and certainly am not interested in projecting the limitations of my own cognition and presupposing foundationalism in a Kantian fashion. I am the last person you need to tell that the study of sensible phenomena is not where the line begins or ends. I am unsure by what you mean with the term "needless". Needless by what criteria? Those of the metaphysical vacuum you're leaving unaccounted for? What are your priors that you're assuming everyone is on board with? I am yet to come across a part of reality that doesn't fulfil the principle of sufficient reason in one way or another, and I'm mostly convinced you haven't either unless your studies in purposefully limiting the scope of your inquiry have made you privy to some fundamental secret. Let us relish in our shared transcendental assumption that this (or frankly any) conversation is of any significance; you do have Schopenhauer in your signature, after all. I can only hope that with all those "good books" you've been reading have yet internalised the fact within you that epistemology is a self-referential outcome, not a first principle.

The measure of the possible space of ontologies is exactly what I'm describing, and I'm letting everyone here know that this can be further mapped and approximated by contemplating first principles (which indeed depend on coherence, by which I don't exclusively mean syllogistic correspondences) - not by failing to comprehend the fact that something's parts and its essential "wholeness" have an intimate and mystical relationship which binds even the highest god (that we can contemplate of and have any real contact with whilst in this state). It has yet to be proven to me that by breaking things apart we fundamentally understand what they actually are. But what I can hope to prove is that each component of our reality needs to contain all universal laws "within" it in an ontological fractal recursion - this is fundamental to every object, if you do not accept that then you need to redefine for me what the formalised "laws" of reality fundamentally are (if not the teleological symbol of the divine) and "where" they exist (if not in the shadow of the divine itself). Any difference we can perceive is dependant upon some system of syntax, a law of relation within the medium, so therefore your counterpoint (as it was expressed above) is nonsensical and I think you are in no position to call others ontologically inept. The idea that manifested reality has unaccountable blips in it seems to be more influenced by your depressing, and effectively gnostic, theology than any appeals to rationality, which itself is a gift from god that allows us to get closer to him - even if it does have a limit and we must eventually go beyond dialectic. Argue against parsimony all you wish however, just be sure to preface much more strongly in the future that it is ultimately more a dogmatic and emotional claim than anything else. The aforementioned notion of an underlying unity stretches beyond being itself, so obviously appeals to cosmology or physics are worthless in these considerations; there is nothing praiseworthy in recognising that unless you're itching to make a category error again. A world without us is nihilistic masturbation to me, nothing more; a perversely impious thought. Just convert to Judaism already or something like most self-respecting protestants already have in all but name, or take the full leap and become atheist if you are this detached from god and his limbs. There is an order to divine effusion, thinking otherwise leaves the door open for some part of his creation as being arbitrary. To be clear: I am also affirming the ineffable, but I also believe we can attune ourselves with its presence as many people more intelligent and spiritually adept than either of us have done and will continue to do so. The fact that this is a possibility makes me doubt your diatribe and want to categorise it as nominalist, even if I understand you clearly are not. If god has the potential to terrify you, it is because you are distant from him, not because he is distant from us.

If you share my (tentative) fondness for Khun, and I'm not misreading sarcasm (simple, remember?), then I fail to see a good reason for your dislike of reality. The reality of course being that you don't have much of a choice but to choose from a range of potential hypotheses on the base of adequate criteria, which are informed by the hypothesis itself. The best criteria I have found myself are coherence, empirical consistency, and parsimony, in that order. Failure to do so puts you at a serious metaphysical and scientific disadvantage in terms of your ability to describe reality, as you'll have no clue as to where to look next; your intuition, a Ouija board, whatever, you need it to make any guesses at all. Affirming one system over any other is simultaneously and affirmation and a rejection, and what basis would you choose on if not coherency first and foremost? Again, coherency is more than just logic or vague transcendental notions, I am describing pure metaphysics here and not simply that which aligns with our purely noetic notions. Even considering which questions in of themselves are worth asking is simply an ethical question of how to best allocate our resources, in of itself dependant on first principles - and as such, a more complete system is necessarily better than a less complete system. You can keep building your autistic model train set, but what lies underneath it?

All of that simply put, ontological coherence is not an abstraction, it is something we can affirm through states of mind (or more correctly, states of being) which we can induce by manipulating our perception and reality accordingly. Time and place is but a threshold to be passed if you are really looking towards truth, I find this so obvious that I'm unsure what you could mean by the opposing statement; being subjugated with popular modern spirits bars you from communion with higher spirits. In the meantime, I'll meditate on whether I'd be more hurt by being compared to Shapiro or Eagleton. On the upside, someone who reads pomo saying I lack "wisdom" did give me a good laugh; if someone of your ilk gave me any more praise I'd be compelled to take a sobering cold shower and ask my parents where it all went wrong.

Material security and the truth must converge at some point, that's a bet I'm willing to hedge and as a religious person I'd imagine you're sympathetic to that (although most Christians I've met seem to have trouble with this). The idea of these being in opposition is foreign and frankly offensive to me, to the degree that it is

Also: Unless prompted by necessity I prefer not to touch on genuinely esoteric matters any more than I have done already in my initial reply to OP, and no, merely asking politely after I have already declined will not work.

@TibetanJazz666 And I thought math guy's response was great.

Granting that I am deliberately cheeky (though here that was partly out of pleasure someone could actually understand it, though maybe you hate Nietzsche just as much as you hate the postmodernists), I again think you're being too jumpy. And are you sure you want to talk about religions thus? Attacking Protestantism is par for the course, but to refer to Judaism as an inferior place to which you consign people who you find too nihilist is way further than I'd ever go on a public forum. I am glad you're actually serious about what you said over in the other thread—it's not easy to tell online when someone isn't just rattling off references, and your first response to me here did indeed look like that as well—but where you're going I don't know that I myself want to talk about what I think out in the open. 'Cause this is theology you're asking me to do. (Though, to be fair, I was gesturing towards theology from the get-go.) Like,



I might steal that one; rarely do I see someone share such sentiments with me, though maybe for doctrinal reasons I'd rather phrase it differently. And people objected to the OP's argument that the suckiness of humanity and the world made him think something's wrong with reality. Again, poor guy. I will say a little about math guy's complaint:



(Included the knowledge-of-God stuff too since it's relevant to your response.) The poor guy was already lost in the wrath and punishment of internet nonsense and stupidity; Christ did indeed shift radically between saying he was bringing peace and saying he was bringing a sword, but for the lost and beaten he came with mercy first. How can you not immediately feel sad when someone literally pulls up MAL and actually asks for opinions on pop philosophy? This is what prompted my initial critical post; we have enough superficial mass pilings-on—wait a minute:



I was just going to go with being immeasurably pleased at your response, but I didn't notice this one earlier. Alas.

Speaking of "wisdom" and "coherence"! And I'm the one accused of nihilism, despite my obvious dedication to humor. I've been harsh online before, but this truly is gross. Reconcile your truly beautiful with saying that. This is really my initial point, attacking this rolling-in-the-mud that sullies whatever knowledge we do possess. Thus lacking balance really does—and should—make me, and anyone reading this, wonder whether you actually know the philosophy you're talking about.

Well, we are all sinners. Eagleton, by the way, is a Marxist of the "postmodernism is a bourgeois skepticism in the way of the revolution" school. And he can write, by the way. You ought to respect him solely for his skill and literary erudition, even if you don't like his politics. (Which I don't agree with myself.) I kind of want to say you're a Roman Catholic for how pissed you are (yes, I'm a Lutheran), your dislike for masturbation, and shot at Judaism; if so, it may be that we share opinions on that truly beautiful philosophical argument.

Depending on your response to this I might say more later. Certainly you do know your stuff, and know things I don't; and certainly my response to you was of the casting down ontological strongholds variety without explicitly saying I do very much believe in a—rational and coherent!—stronghold myself. There is good reason for doing that. It did seem to me on my initial reading that I agree with most of what you're saying, but I'll have to process it further to fully respect it. To be simple: When I think of that which is needful or needless, I think of Luther's fire exaggeration that the Trinity is absurd. If that's what sits at the center of all things, then maybe "needless" explanations of what's right in front of us aren't so needless. But yes, now I do call to wisdom to testify against you.

EDIT: Added the "shot at Judaism" bit. Knew there was something else fishy there I forgot to mention.

I am baffled that CTMU is being considered a useful reference point in any regard, though maybe it is my bias towards any personal philosophy cosplaying as a scientific theory. Other than that, I have nothing I can really think of. Langan is the prime example of how IQ can be rendered ineffectual or less effective by virtue of personal failings that makes us only human.

@PeripheralVision You are baffled because you have not studied the most relevant matters. Yes, you indeed are ignorant when you prefer to indulge in the nonsense you have listed on your profile than serious works of metaphysics and theology, why is this confounding? I wouldn’t exactly expect you to perform surgery either. Until you can come up with a better (i.e. more coherent, unless you can argue against coherency) system that accounts for all of reality, and not just scientific observation, then you should take a vow of silence on this matter. Langan doesn't have all the answers, far from it, but he's clearly much wiser than you and your cringe-worthy observations about "personal failings". How would you characterise your presumptuous and irreverent behaviour? Is this a failing or not? Utterly pointless interjection. The ability to form an opinion is not equal to the right of having one; if not life itself, then academia should have taught you that by now.

@TibetanJazz666

CTMU just is not accepted within the greater scientific community and among actual physicists. We barely discuss it if at all (Better physicists and scientists than myself have criticized it) if ever. In fact, I don’t think I ever seen it discussed with any seriousness! Perhaps you can argue its strength as philosophical piece of work, but it is filled with unfalsifiable assertions from a man who states that one can mathematically prove god (Though perhaps I misunderstood what he meant by “God”). That is where my bias against it stems from. Langan pushes it as scientific theory despite being unwilling to actively work within research and with peers in the field, and has hardly made any worthwhile contributions in this regard.

Smart is as smart does. What has he accomplished in the field of physics? It is rubbish in that respect. When its defenders fall on “you do not understand it” as the primary defense rather than citing any empirical results, any observations, that would suggest it to be far truer than our working theories, then it shows little they understand the words that they are parroting.

CTMU would have never been considered in any regard if it was not for Langan’s IQ, but that just makes it a novelty. Anyone can take known truths and observations and gesture about this and that, but a rigorously tested theory it does not make. If you want to consider it as philosophy fine i suppose, but don’t regard it as scientifically “validated”.

@TibetanJazz666 My original comment was expressing incredulity at seeing CTMU being taken seriously in any form, from my context as a researcher who has a bachelors in physics (Though I am ChemE by trade). Langan had made no secret that he intended for CTMU to be understood as more than a religious spiritual or philosophical belief, but as scientific theory. He views himself as Hubbard viewed Dianetics in relation to psychology, as an alternative to academia which they both see as corrupt or misled. Not that there is no lack of truth in those sentiments, but…yes, Langan does intend for it to be science in the academic (Or anti-academic stance) sense. Anyone who is somewhat knowledgeable with Langan should be aware of that. In that sense, it is as much a crackpot theory as dianetics is.

So I was surprised to see it mentioned positively and outside that context. Merely a comment. Outside of that, I am not too interested in contesting it “validity” as a work of philosophy because I am not well-versed in or interested in ontological discussions.

To which…no? Analogous conclusions don’t really “matter” here, as I have said before.



Check to see if any recently well-received physics papers ever cited or mention CTMU. You will not find any because it is not mainstream physics. They do not need to namedrop Langan? That is ludicrous argument and you should know it. Citation matters, first of all. Secondly, just because I believe that the sky is blue does not justify my underlying rationale, and that is the issue with Langan. His theory incorporates claims and hypotheses that are not falsifiable. Modeling your philosophical work after real science does not make one a scientist. Being right for the wrong reasons still means you are wrong.

Why, this is the first time I have seen anyone defend the validity of such niche pseudoscience by saying “they did not need to cite CTMU”.

@auroraloose "Jumpy"? I guess you'll have to dust off your walking stick then, because your theology bleeds through each response you make and I'd rather get to the matter of things and not mince words by mirroring your feminine mode of response (they are called first principles for a reason). I don’t dislike Nietzsche or postmodern writers; I dislike people who have any substantial amount of their philosophical education from modern (in the proper historical sense) sources alone, as they typically have little respect for the fact that all these questions have been raised and given better answers many centuries prior. Apologies in advance for my lack of conciseness, I just don't take your characterisation of my actions lightly.

I have zero reservations about pointing out the insufficiencies I see in theologies and traditions. Going "far" for you seems to be putting mean words next to things which typically don't have mean words next to them, as if personal sensibilities matter in here of all places. Granted, I do respect Judaism to the degree that it is a genuine expression of the Semitic experience of the divine, it's just that out of all proper traditions it's the one which raises the most eyebrows once I research it to any degree of depth and converse with its practitioners; me speaking of it in a disparaging tone was more in reference to whatever you were giving me in your previous reply than anything Judaism itself is. I say protestants are de facto Judaic in their misreading of the incarnation's implications and their implied representation of our relationship with god as some sort of contract that they can find loopholes in and thereby eventually audit his presence out of reality altogether - but these are generalisations of both groups and I wouldn't take them to heart if I were you; I see no need in disrespecting nuance and this is a minor point in a much larger conversation. Just don't go full Ockham on me and imply that any part of creation is arbitrary simply because you fail to appreciate how it fits into the nature of logos, and I won't feel inclined to call you atheistic again. I will add at this point that I am not Christian, so quoting scripture at me will probably have the opposite of its intended effect as by now I've learned better than to debate the source of dogma with the dogmatic.

Anyways, to address the substance of your post: OP is the furthest thing from lost and beaten. The only way you could characterise him as such is by conceding that the one doing the misleading and beating is himself - this is visible in his initial reply as to why he arrived at this conclusion. Perhaps one becomes addicted to a substance through their inability to account for their bodily nature, but becoming addicted to lies is an outcome of egotism. What cure is there other than the cold hard ground of reality? If not my job to administer it, it will be nature's. Had he not been drunk on the ooze spilling from the digitally irradiated folds of his brain, he would have had the inclination to seek clarity proactively and not be merely swept away by his passions to the miniscule degree that they satisfy his atrophied intellectual curiosity. Prompt sobering, a violent waking startle, and the ripping of the blanket of inertness are all in order. If one cannot bear even that little then any knowledge (which rises above what is merely relative to their context in this passing reality) is lost on them and will in fact cause them even greater distress than I. You speak of divinity and it's potentially incomprehensible terror yet you think we're all going to get a candy along the way, as if going to a dentist. Pardon the metaphor, but you only get a candy if you brush and show him you have no cavities.

Knowledge is not just information as you keep pointing out - what would sully it is if you let the implications of the teaching merely rot in your mind and not be actualised in each passing second. By acting upon what I have learned, I justify its presence and my own. Logos is not just a state of being, for us it is also a state of becoming; to bring reality into accord and let it prove itself that it indeed is a part of god. I accept the karmic repercussions for the sake of those worse than me - in doing so I am showing them more kindness than you could ever possibly comprehend. Again: all that is needed is to describe reality. Like the reality that OP has been given many chances but is lazy and/or distracted because whatever has calcified itself around his soul prevents him from knowing better; his fate is part of his essence, and thus he has responsibility over it. Another part of this reality is that your wishy-washy appeals to compassion inspire idleness. All you are doing is appeasing OP's flabbiness, letting him be toyed with longer than necessary until one day the doors will get shut in his face. This is what is gross to me, true cruelty is to simply let things be until nature wags its dispassionate finger more than you can. OP has not proven he deserves logic and guidance yet, only humbling. The wise man's ambrosia is the fool's molten lead.

All the authors that I have relied on for my metaphysical position share this perspective, as one is an outcome of the other. You saying you doubt my knowledge because of my consistency further begets your sophism and lack of meaningful study. A mosquito does nothing morally wrong by passing disease to entities which have a better capacity for appreciating god than it does, yet I will still not hesitate in killing it as the law which compels me to do so is equal to the one that granted it the gift of existence. Kindness is not a virtue in of itself, it is an outcome of the cultivation of virtue, and one only deserves to benefit from its presence once they show they are above the level of an animal. Otherwise, they can run away with the gazelles and bemoan the presence of lions - but lead them to water all you like, just do not forget that men never concede their heart to anyone but themselves and their superior.

So no, we are not all sinners - at least not to equal degrees. You perhaps are a sinner, but that is the point at which you should stop speaking lest you project any more than you already have. I respect nobody on the basis of their linguistic pretzels, if anything couching falsities in such luxuries is impious and heavy cause for derision. I will admit that I've never read a full book of his though, I am busy enough with writings that I've had more sensible indication actually matter to fulfilling my obligation to the divine. I should add, I am not angry even if I seem aggressive, I just don't see why I should afford you or anyone else anything but the respect of directness and honesty. My opinions seem strong because I have fallen down many holes to arrive at them, and scarcely do others feel inclined to hit the ground that hard also (and there is nothing wrong with that, to each their own). I've worked hard to have confidence in my words and know that I should only engage when my knowledge may be of use to others, until someone takes me down a peg when I least expect it I will not stop being this way.

I'd argue that the trinity is the one of the few relatively coherent parts of Christianity and is a decent example of the super-rationality I was referencing earlier. Our current perception of god being circular as a default has more explanatory power, in my opinion, than not. Brushing multiplicity aside as merely god's whim is not rational, but I will stop before I speculate on what would compel a person to adopt such an aberrant perspective unless I become more abrasive than I expect you to tolerate. I do agree however that there indeed something is beyond that, beyond this. On that point, I should lay my cards down also and say that I am a perennialist and believe theology is an outcome of race (with conversion being a misnomer; I cannot choose how divinity shows itself to me). The path to god obviously stretches beyond those things, but it is a filter we must all pass whilst in this state. Divinity has no obligation to tell you all of its names, nor indeed all the places it has graced.

@PeripheralVision You could have just answered "no" instead of making a fool of yourself. Here's a quote from the abstract:



If this seems like a claim which is more falsifiable metaphysically than it is scientifically, that's because it is. Not that I'm denying it ever happened, but please show me a quote where Langan affirms he was working to any meaningful degree towards conclusions which chiefly apply to the classical sciences and not the domain you admit you're ignorant on? He does not use arguments which only have meaning within classical science, he scarcely talks about it other than to explain how it affirms metaphysical positions, and ultimately all his conclusions are ontological. You seem to see the word "science" and are unable of placing yourself outside of the little box by focusing on more than just labels as if you were a machine with no intuition (or reading comprehension). The CTMU is a "scientific theory" by virtue of the fact that it interprets reality, that is all - and if you read the damn thing for even a couple of sentences you'd be privy to this fact.

Do you cite Aristotle in each paper you work on? You are using principles he outlined to arrive at any conclusion whatsoever, after all. This is the sort of references which I am making, ones that actually concern concepts and ideas; not your sad reductive corner. Schopenhauer never claimed to be a scientist by using optics to prove his arguments, yet he is still correct on how he synthesises them.

Firstly, this the beginning of his titled abstract.



and the ending of his abstract



Or this



"Addressing physical evolution...most evident deficits and paradoxes associated with conventional discrete and continuum models of reality..." Sure seems like it is trying to be a scientific theory to me.



This is the same man who by the way believed God can be mathematically proven, which makes no fucking sense either. (Likely, he does not understand why Betrand Russel failed in life to "prove" that logic can be axiomatically explained as a result of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which showed that two incompatible assumptions can lead to mutually exclusive but still coherent and non-contradictory systems.



But...yes, I do not understand why it be illogical to not approach CTMU as a non-scientific work of physics, one that tries to explain Langan's hypothesis regarding the nature of the universe, when it clearly makes these sorts of claims and describes itself as a scientific model, as a theory of everything. If Langan was intelligent, he would not misuse or redefine words and phrases that clearly have an established meeting in these types of communities. Calling your philosophical work a "scientific model" makes no fucking sense outside of being technobabble.

Which by the way, I have not heard of have the jargon like "conspansive duality" used. Like, as a scientist, we do use jargon that is known to us, but it has a legitimate purpose in abridging things, not obscuring the meaning of the work itself. I will also respond to this dumb defense.



No, I do not cite things that can easily be found in an undergraduate or graduate level textbook. Langan is not in any textbook I have seen. That is just a common rule of thumb. As researchers how often we are cited is a measure of our prominence. You have to cite work that was done by another PI, another group. That is their work, and they deserve credit. Plagiarism is an incredibly serious crime in academia. You cannot steal work, and you cannot leave it uncredited. Promotions to tenure can live or die by how often your papers are cited. This is at the heart of publish and perish.

Which...Aristotle is dead by the way, and Langan is still kicking. So...what is the holdup with Langan getting any recognition? I doubt you even are in academia or even have a degree in any relevant fields. Seriously, bring CTMU up with an actual physicists and see if they heard of Langan in any meaningful capacity.

Have you read The Glass Bead Game? You remind me of Tegularius, someone whose horse of the passions is dragging along the horse of reason. Yes, I've read Phaedrus. I believe in self-deprecation, see; thus I describe myself as someone who has "only" read postmodernists, though I do indeed possess the properly-ordered philosophical education that begins with the Greeks. Your petty disposition rightly makes me wonder what you really have read; hopefully it is not just what Christopher Langan suggests as introduction to his CTMU. Eastern-philosophical unity usually implies serenity; I cannot help but notice that, in our dialogue, my movement is ever towards the placid and serene (and jolly), while you seem more and more like you want to stab me for discovering the square root of two. I note also that you're a young'un—one who can't spell "minuscule" and confuses "it's" for "its"—if your MAL profile birthday is to be believed. As someone who believes in unity, you cannot discount your linguistic inferiority as irrelevant. Well, I was similarly angry when I was 23, though not 24; by then I was far more at peace than you seem to be, not to mention a far better writer.

You are to be lauded for your harshness; this is something not encouraged these days. But you clearly do not know me, or those like me. I can confidently say I am far more unique and interesting than you, and harsher than you, who are indeed RationalWiki-brained, if not as dumb as Ben Shapiro. My greater mercy mirrors my superior hellfire. That your instinct is to judge the OP, and mine is to mercy, indicates your lack of perspective. In this I follow my master and fellow humorist, Christ.


If you have the knowledge your prior posts seem to display, you know there is far more I could say; your traps are far too simple, which is why I mention neither feminism nor bishop Berkeley. Have you read A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge? You see, I held something like your opinions and disposition back when I was 15, when I decided to read Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein. But it is when I read Luther (when I was 23, I think), and realized he had dealt far better with the theological questions I was struggling with than the stupid Calvinist moderns whose answers I had previously been confined to, that I was able to transition from your sour mood to my happy one. (Yes, I share your opinion that philosophers have discussed our contemporary issues far more intelligently in their antiquity.) Anybody reading here can see that I'm far closer than you to being at peace with myself and the universe, while you clearly have something unfortunate stuck up there. Hence my transition to Nokotan, and why there is no church of Pythagoras today. So yes, you are right that I am theological in everything, though that has far less to do with jumpiness than being dedicated to connecting the highest and lowest aspects of reality constantly, as your nonsense "ontological fractal recursion" intimates. (Math guy ought to attack you, not me.) I have no problem with deep references without explanation, as long as the discourse warrants no explanation; but this is MAL, remember. I have similarly harsh opinions, but I display them only when doing so is wise. And we live in a time that has forgotten that man is a featherless biped; I am not so capitalist that I fantasize selling Greek philosophy as you seem to. Your foolishness does make me hope you exaggerate how much you've read, but though you accuse me of blitheness, I am not unrealistic. We do not know if the rich young ruler never sold what he had and gave it to the poor, but we are to take the lesson as admonition not to respond as he did.

Perhaps it is a weakness and inferiority on my part that, despite my opinion, I still think I can learn from you. But I say now that, while it was rather up in the air whether I'd respond to your previous post, this time the probability I respond to your next post is measure zero. You have utterly lost, this being a forum where almost nobody is as intelligent as either of us but everyone can see that you've got some ridiculous garbage stuck way too far up your ass. Your prior posts should be evidence that you can take such criticism in stride, but I don't think you know what an unpolarized beam passing through a Stern-Gerlach apparatus even is.

EDIT: But I forget: As a student of Adorno, I am conceptually bound to absolute opposition to JAZZ.

Firstly, this the beginning of his titled abstract.



and the ending of his abstract



Or this



"Addressing physical evolution...most evident deficits and paradoxes associated with conventional discrete and continuum models of reality..." Sure seems like it is trying to be a scientific theory to me.



This is the same man who by the way believed God can be mathematically proven, which makes no fucking sense either. (Likely, he does not understand why Betrand Russel failed in life to "prove" that logic can be axiomatically explained as a result of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which showed that two incompatible assumptions can lead to mutually exclusive but still coherent and non-contradictory systems.



But...yes, I do not understand why it be illogical to not approach CTMU as a non-scientific work of physics, one that tries to explain Langan's hypothesis regarding the nature of the universe, when it clearly makes these sorts of claims and describes itself as a scientific model, as a theory of everything. If Langan was intelligent, he would not misuse or redefine words and phrases that clearly have an established meeting in these types of communities. Calling your philosophical work a "scientific model" makes no fucking sense outside of being technobabble.

Which by the way, I have not heard of have the jargon like "conspansive duality" used. Like, as a scientist, we do use jargon that is known to us, but it has a legitimate purpose in abridging things, not obscuring the meaning of the work itself. I will also respond to this dumb defense.



No, I do not cite things that can easily be found in an undergraduate or graduate level textbook. Langan is not in any textbook I have seen. That is just a common rule of thumb. As researchers how often we are cited is a measure of our prominence. You have to cite work that was done by another PI, another group. That is their work, and they deserve credit. Plagiarism is an incredibly serious crime in academia. You cannot steal work, and you cannot leave it uncredited. Promotions to tenure can live or die by how often your papers are cited. This is at the heart of publish and perish.

Which...Aristotle is dead by the way, and Langan is still kicking. So...what is the holdup with Langan getting any recognition? I doubt you even are in academia or even have a degree in any relevant fields. Seriously, bring CTMU up with an actual physicists and see if they heard of Langan in any meaningful capacity.

This is my favourite thread of the year.


Metaphors are meant to illuminate a reasoning, and not make it obscure by resorting to scientific notions that your interlocutor will be completely unable to understand. Measure theory cannot tell you anything about the value of a given ontology or axiomatic system, so it did not belong to the discussion. Otherwise, I agree that the space-filling curve is a good enough metaphor for something convoluted, even if in practice, those objects are fairly simple. I would like to add however that we should not overestimate the importance of standard perception and physical intuition; it does not take special efforts to work with infinite-dimensional spaces, and even to develop an intuition about them (or more modestly, about 4-dimensional manifolds like Thurston). By the way, do you have any good reference on AdS/CFT for the mathematics-oriented reader?

The only issue is that measure theory is not qualitative, unless you delve into rectifiability theory where the density properties of your set has direct implications on its geometry. Therefore, it is not a useful notion in this discussion.

It comes from a discussion of poet, writer, theologian, dramatist, ambassador, crêpe connoisseur, and spicy food enthusiast Paul Claudel with one of his friends. He had the bad habit to tell to some people that they would be damned (probably after they had blasphemed against the Spirit). Pointing out obvious flaws of reasoning is not particularly harsh, and it is certainly not sinful—sin is not a vague idea but stems from a physico-moral sensation; I never needed sacred texts to understand what was eminently wrong with bearing false witness or considering your body as a mere commodity. Non enim possumus aliquid adversus veritatem, sed pro veritate. To me, Truth (yes, with a capital letter) matters more than charity and I loathe the pseudo-Christian morals that has become ubiquitous on the internet, "In a world where you can be anything, be kind." What Jesus Christ kind to the merchants of the temple? Have you ever read flamboyant Christian (Catholic) writers like Bloy or Bernanos? Their attitude to Christianity is as justifiable as many others, and it is surely not "gross." I find it far more tolerable than most of the nonsense associated to the generally repulsive (and selfish beyond reason) concept of love ("When I hear the word 'love,' I want to puke." James Joyce).

I personally do not care if people are solipsists, but I could not help but pointing out how absurd it was to believe in solipsism because scientists have not managed to explain all natural phenomena yet.


Thank you.


What is more merciful than wasting your time to explain his mistakes to a nonentity? The "poor guy" thought that he had come up with a revolutionary idea and hopefully realised that he was wrong to the point that he was probably ashamed of himself and deleted his account. The people who replied in this thread did not do him a disservice.


+ε for using the KJV.


In fact, although mathematicians publish on "fractal theory," the notion of fractal is not rigorously defined. I actually liked his metaphor about the self-similarity of the laws of physics (if it were his intention). But I have not replied to him for the simple reason that generally, I only quote people who might actually benefit from what I have to say and will not simply reply by an egotist nonsense. I had also lost track of this discussion, and I do not have to be equitable in my rare replies here (despite what my post count may indicate...). If someone believes that the best (French-speaking) prose writer of his time (Jean-Jacques) is "retarded," he does not deserve any attention and this terrible judgement alone eternally disqualifies him in similar intellectual topics. By the way, I feel similarly about the people (especially the native speakers) who confuse "it's" with "its"...


This opinion alone makes you an enemy of life and therefore of humanity. I feel sorry for the lost souls who do not understand that Epistrophy will always matter more than epistemology (and I say that as a mathematician, not just as a "math guy"). By the way, in case you were wondering, the Riemann Hypothesis is true and the Hodge Conjecture is False (for Trivial Reasons). No need to thank me for the $2,000,000.

Remark. I apologise for the many edits if you started to reply at once. I had sent the reply by mistake and kept editing my message for over 10 minutes.

Your attitude looks exemplary at first order, but you still called Rousseau "retarded" and yet spoke about people needing to be humbled in this thread, which is rather ironic. If you had spent more time reading living prose instead of dusty ratiocination of sophists, you would have already realised by now that style is largely preserved in prose (translating poetry is another issue), and that its value can be easily assessed. You do not have to learn Hebrew and Ancient Greek to appreciate the value of the Bible (as a literary text), nor learn Russian to know that Dostoevsky and Shakespeare stand shoulder to shoulder as writers.

I let you a chance to explain yourself by calling you in another thread a "literature-hating philosopher" (a probably too flattering epithet) and referred to your comment on Rousseau to make myself clearer. But you did not seem interested to explain your judgement in more detail or had any objections on this description. You could have said that his philosophy has limitations and refrained from this kind of reductive, insulting comment—especially if you only knew him by his least interesting side. He was more a writer than a philosopher, and if like Swedenborg, he was part of the optimist faction of great moralists (amongst which Nietzsche and Schopenhauer take the 2nd and 3rd place), it does not undermine in any way the significance of his work. Whether moralists have a positive or negative prejudice on the nature of men, their aphorisms are equally valuable for a maxim has only a limited field of application even if the quantifiers are almost never indicated; when you read "men" in a sentence, the moralist may simply be talking about a specific group of men or a single man—this is a stylistic device, and Chamfort (who is the unchallenged king of witticisms) explains that in his very first aphorism. Otherwise, Rousseau had a major influence on Goethe, Chateaubriand, and therefore on the entire romantic movement. He also pioneered the autobiographic genre and his prose was a work of art. He was without a doubt one of the most exceptional men of his time, and deserved more than a lapidary comment from you. Considering that Goethe's literary talent is one of the main reasons why Germans turned to philosophy, knowing that would not be able to match his genius, one can claim that Rousseau was indirectly essential to the development of modern German philosophy. Not bad for an intellectually-challenged man.

Pastry-baking? I do not cook "useless" food. My sympathies are only guided by artistic (or scientific—in the broad sense of Wissenschaft) value. If you think that literature is superficial like pastry-baking contrary to philosophy that would be your daily bread, I can only express my sympathies for such a juvenile attitude that makes you discard what you do not understand (I also used to regard literature as something inferior to philosophy when I was in high school). Great writers do not only "tell a story" or try to do something "pretty" (like illuminations—enluminures in French), they recreate the world entirely through a special lens, a philosophy that touches to ineffable, to indicible (the conclusion of Wittgenstein's final "aphorism" can and should be reversed—which shows his major limitations as a writer by the way), to sublime (not only in a Kantian sense) and has the value of living things, contrary to philosophy that rarely gets into this territory (Plato and Nietzsche are obvious counter-examples). Literature is as essential as philosophy—if not more. Jung's pathetic attempt to reduce Ulysses to the work of a schizophrenic only shows his limitations as a literature critic, and also that Joyce went far deeper in the human psyche. My love for the truth is so great that I can claim that with probability 1, I have spent considerably more time pursuing the truth than you have spent reading about philosophy...

You are not entitled to my time, and what makes you think that I spend significant amounts of time on frivolous things? I surely do not want to hear this kind of comment from someone who reads manga (a time better spent on literature) and has watched more than twice as much anime as I (and if you are curious, I mostly watch anime while cooking—it is disgusting to read with unclean hands, eating, or exercising; and I have successfully passed JLPT N1 this year, so it was not a waste of time)... Please have some self-awareness when you attempt this kind of jab, lest you should be ridiculed. I called you that with respect to your comment on Rousseau, and was I wrong? It implies in particular that you think yourself a better person than Rousseau although you only have a partial knowledge of his work... This is a prime example of hubris. Gossip needs to take place in your back, and I knew that you would read my post, but I had to explain to @auroraloose why in case of disagreements with you, I would not have spent any time addressing my dissent—maybe I was wrong for this hasty judgement, but your patronising, entitled, sarcastic reply has failed to convince me that I had erred. Actually, I have read your last posts and I do not have any major disagreements with what you have said.

I apologise for referring to you as a native speaker, I was misled by your location, and I am not petty enough to discard your entire reasoning out of a few grammatical mistakes and typos. Last but not least, you were right not to read the excerpt of the Bible in Aurora's reply for what preceded it was blasphemous—Christ has no fellows and only followers.

This is my favourite thread of the year.


Metaphors are meant to illuminate a reasoning, and not make it obscure by resorting to scientific notions that your interlocutor will be completely unable to understand. Measure theory cannot tell you anything about the value of a given ontology or axiomatic system, so it did not belong to the discussion. Otherwise, I agree that the space-filling curve is a good enough metaphor for something convoluted, even if in practice, those objects are fairly simple. I would like to add however that we should not overestimate the importance of standard perception and physical intuition; it does not take special efforts to work with infinite-dimensional spaces, and even to develop an intuition about them (or more modestly, about 4-dimensional manifolds like Thurston). By the way, do you have any good reference on AdS/CFT for the mathematics-oriented reader?

The only issue is that measure theory is not qualitative, unless you delve into rectifiability theory where the density properties of your set has direct implications on its geometry. Therefore, it is not a useful notion in this discussion.

It comes from a discussion of poet, writer, theologian, dramatist, ambassador, crêpe connoisseur, and spicy food enthusiast Paul Claudel with one of his friends. He had the bad habit to tell to some people that they would be damned (probably after they had blasphemed against the Spirit). Pointing out obvious flaws of reasoning is not particularly harsh, and it is certainly not sinful—sin is not a vague idea but stems from a physico-moral sensation; I never needed sacred texts to understand what was eminently wrong with bearing false witness or considering your body as a mere commodity. Non enim possumus aliquid adversus veritatem, sed pro veritate. To me, Truth (yes, with a capital letter) matters more than charity and I loathe the pseudo-Christian morals that has become ubiquitous on the internet, "In a world where you can be anything, be kind." What Jesus Christ kind to the merchants of the temple? Have you ever read flamboyant Christian (Catholic) writers like Bloy or Bernanos? Their attitude to Christianity is as justifiable as many others, and it is surely not "gross." I find it far more tolerable than most of the nonsense associated to the generally repulsive (and selfish beyond reason) concept of love ("When I hear the word 'love,' I want to puke." James Joyce).

I personally do not care if people are solipsists, but I could not help but pointing out how absurd it was to believe in solipsism because scientists have not managed to explain all natural phenomena yet.


Thank you.


What is more merciful than wasting your time to explain his mistakes to a nonentity? The "poor guy" thought that he had come up with a revolutionary idea and hopefully realised that he was wrong to the point that he was probably ashamed of himself and deleted his account. The people who replied in this thread did not do him a disservice.


+ε for using the KJV.


In fact, although mathematicians publish on "fractal theory," the notion of fractal is not rigorously defined. I actually liked his metaphor about the self-similarity of the laws of physics (if it were his intention). But I have not replied to him for the simple reason that generally, I only quote people who might actually benefit from what I have to say and will not simply reply by an egotist nonsense. I had also lost track of this discussion, and I do not have to be equitable in my rare replies here (despite what my post count may indicate...). If someone believes that the best (French-speaking) prose writer of his time (Jean-Jacques) is "retarded," he does not deserve any attention and this terrible judgement alone eternally disqualifies him in similar intellectual topics. By the way, I feel similarly about the people (especially the native speakers) who confuse "it's" with "its"...


This opinion alone makes you an enemy of life and therefore of humanity. I feel sorry for the lost souls who do not understand that Epistrophy will always matter more than epistemology (and I say that as a mathematician, not just as a "math guy"). By the way, in case you were wondering, the Riemann Hypothesis is true and the Hodge Conjecture is False (for Trivial Reasons). No need to thank me for the $2,000,000.

Remark. I apologise for the many edits if you started to reply at once. I had sent the reply by mistake and kept editing my message for over 10 minutes.