"Wise men are instructed by reason; men of less understanding, by experience; the most ignorant, by necessity; the beasts, by nature."
- Marcus Tullius Cicero

"I am persuaded that every time a man smiles - but much more so when he laughs - it adds something to this fragment of life."- Laurence Sterne.

"If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life." -- Albert Camus

"We are the children of chaos and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe." -- Peter Atkins, chemist

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell

"In the end there were no simple answers. No heroes or villains; only silence." -- Never Cry Wolf


Truth is a pathless land, however, not all who wander are lost.

"Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed." -- Blaise Pascal

"When I stand alone with the earth and sky a feeling of something in me going off in every direction into the unknown of infinity means more to me than any organized religion gives me." -- Georgia O'Keefe

When found, I am usually in a state of contemplation or bewilderment or just plain-ole' dumbfoundedness.
Due to the uninteresting and generally tedious nature of my biography and interests, I've decided to use this space for a brief summary of my positions.

epistemology:

Theory arises from and is grounded in praxis; theories are to be evaluated by their utility (pragmatism). There is no absolute, infallible, quasireligious Truth, but we can nonetheless talk about truth (falibilism). Our models are the result of conscious human labour (constructivism), not something found in nature or deduced from observation. The most useful models are those commonly recognised as scientific (primacy of science).

metaphysics:

A serious commitment to human praxis rules out gods (atheism) or any other hobgoblin purportedly outside material nature (materialism). Nonetheless, material nature has myriad aspects and no regime of description exhausts our knowledge of it (antireductionism). Nature is best conceptualised by the categories of materialist dialectic (dialectical materialism).

ethics:

Ethical statements refer to nothing (metaethical nihilism); there is nothing that can be used to justify moral norms a society imparts to its members and nothing that can be used to disprove them. At most we should think through the contradictions that these entail (dialectics) and always be radical.

ontology:

If no 'parts' then no 'wholes' (compositional nihilism). We may only say that basal building blocks without proper parts exist (e.g. leptons, quarks), and that these elementary building blocks never unify to become non-individual. We may, however, concede that it is innocuous to refer to such 'composed objects' in most demotic or colloqiual contexts.

Atheism: (a) theism is false & (b) nontheism (e.g. deism, pandeism, pantheism, or acosmism) is undecidable. Merely subjective conceptions are not what's at issue; rather those god-concepts which while subjectively grasped are also ascribed objective (i.e. non-subjective) predicates (e.g. "creator", "law-giver", etc). The point is that where ascriptions allege non-subjective effects, or consequences, these ascriptions can be logically examined & empirically tested, and if found incoherent and/or falsified then they do not obtain; it necessarily follows, therefore, that any "god-concept" to which these ascribed predicates (e.g. "creator", "law-giver", etc) -- that do not obtain -- are sine qua non does not have a referent (i.e. is imaginary). Reality -- indifferent, chaotic, catastrophic, protean -- is consistent with the absence of any 'intelligent design', divine guidance & miraculous interventions. The countless inconsistencies, on the other hand, between "revealed truths" and all that's rigorously known about reality (via sciences, histories, etc) cannot be accounted for without begging quite a few questions (e.g. "miracles"). Thus, "agnosticism" is not a coherent option.

nota bene:

- Socratics-Ptolemaics seek a 'general theory of ideality', or mind-dependent reality (sufficient reason).
- Presocratics-Copernicans seek a 'general theory of reality', or reality-dependent mind (insufficient reason).
- Absurdists seek a 'general theory of stupidity', or normative maladaptive malpractices (negativesum conflicts).


aporia:

I seek a general theory of stupidity which calls attention to the universally unstated philosophical fallacy of presuming the "insufficiency of the real" (e.g. magical thinking, transcendent facts, etc).

praxis:

[absurdism [materialism [social ecology]]]

i. absurdism
- reality -- that which cannot be transcended or transcend itself -- transcends reason; thus, there isn't any reason for reality; and denial of the real via (e.g.) "metaphysics" "theology" "ideology" is absurd (i.e. self-deceptive, tragicomic) ...

ii. materialism (scientific)
- [hyper-chaos [cosmology [ecology [neurology [meta-cognition]]]]

iii. social ecology (economic democracy)
- 'agency affecting and affected by the problems of the commons'

Response to TAG:

If god created logic, morality & science, then they -- like all 'creations' -- are, at most, contingent and consist neither in 'necessity' nor 'objectivity' because god, if 'omnipotent' & independent of its 'creations', could have made them otherwise and always can change them. Either (omni-creator) god without any (created) necessity-objectivity or (uncreated) necessity-objectivity without any (omni-creator) god; the latter is consistent with reason & the human condition whereas the former is not

Take me. I am undone. Tears of gratitude. Solemn acknowledgement of death and impermanance.
Of joy for the gift of experience and the pain that makes it real. Love, love, I cry out to you, I have tasted victory, thank you.