Every religion rejects the possibility of altruism (and this makes sense)

All religions stipulate some kind of metaphysical reward for moral behaviour, which precludes the possibility of altruism: selfless sacrifice for the benefit of others. The founders of religions may have understood that altruism is impossible because it does not motivate, and that its moral code had to appeal to self-interest before it could be at all persuasive.

This has implication for the dogma of “Christ dying for our sins”. If selfless sacrifice is logically impossible then a different interpretation is necessary. I suggested elsewhere that “the premise of Christ 'dying for our sins' should be understood as 'God died so that we may sin, with impunity', because only when everything is permitted we will find out who we really are, to what levels of depravity we are willing to stoop, or raise above. Only absolute moral freedom can reveal our moral essence, which is a cumulative effect of all our thoughts and actions, and this in turn implies that secularism and atheism could be a way of realising 'the last judgement'. Through our actions we judge ourselves.” https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/transcendental-theology-for-non-believers

The common sense of every idea that signifies the objective realm implies that moral conflicts are not determined by the prior commonality of sense, therefore must be caused by something subjective, some new augmentation of sense that originates in the subjectivity of the agent and not in the world of objectivity: therefore free will.

The same (common, objective) information cannot have opposite deterministic meanings (X and not-X) at the same time.

There are some fascinating implications to Christmas that nobody seems to have noticed (correct me if I am wrong):

1. If Jesus is the Son of God/Yahweh, who is worshipped by the Jews, then Christians are now the true and theologically correct Jews (and nobody else is).
2. If Jesus is the rightful King of Israel then it cannot be the case that Israel rightfully belongs to people who reject Jesus as the King of Israel;)

Deterministic Consciousness is precluded by Russell’s Paradox

Consciousness is by definition reflexive, it contains itself, and contains nothing in excess of itself, therefore always a totality of itself: totality of all ideas that do not contain themselves (since ideas are not conscious of themselves). But if consciousness contains itself, as dictated by the premise of reflexivity, then it is not an idea and therefore does not contain itself: Russell’s Paradox. The contradiction is eliminated only by consciousness changing its self-conception (identity) in time, so that it contains itself only as an idea of its past, different from its present totality that cannot be grasped as one until it also becomes the past, and so on (essential incompleteness). The totality cannot change its identity deterministically, as then it would remain the same totality and result in Russell’s Paradox, hence consciousness is necessarily non-deterministic.

Another way, every thought, insofar as it has definite content, is already in excess of this content, is about that content, and this aboutness is not included in the content.

Something I wrote on this topic in 2018: https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/russells-paradox-contra-determinism

This is good reporting, but stops short of explaining HOW the capital gains discount and negative getting translate into dwelling prices (and into general inflation) from the monetary perspective. The answer: investors, no matter how rich, started taking out credit for investing in property, a cost which can be used as a tax offset for other income, and kept the bulk of their savings invested in the stock market, thus multiplying their income capacity several times. Every time they took out credit, the money supply expanded by the same amount (money was literally created as credit), which inflated all prices, but in particular the housing market since it was the primary commodity backing the credit explosion. The winners are, in ascending order, the rich, the banks and their offshore bond-holders. https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2024/feb/15/the-awful-truth-at-the-heart-of-australian-housing-policy

The laws of physics are technically not laws but abstract models, fundamental conventions for explaining causality. They should not be confused with objective reality.

We cannot meaningfully refer to anything outside of consciousness; it is everything that can be conceived of. The hypothesis of existence outside of consciousness is logically analogous to the hypothesis that there is more of something than everything: a contradiction.

Anarchism/Voluntarism is impossible without all people agreeing to be anarchists/voluntarists. Any dissenters would be either exercising coercion (if they were powerful enough) or be subject to coercion (not to voluntarily form powerful organisations that could threaten anarchism/voluntarism). Total consensus is a practically impossible condition to satisfy.
On the other hand, everything we do in some way restricts the freedom of others. For example, if you stand on some spot then nobody else can stand on the same spot, and if you assert your right to stand on that spot then you designate yourself the ruler of that spot, contra the freedom of others. It follows that anarchism/voluntarism is logically impossible, not merely practically impossible.

People do not want Truth but either Miracles or Destiny

There are two competing conceptions of reality that most people feel comfortable with: 1) reality ‘is what it is’, entirely independent of the ideas used to represent it and we cannot change it; 2) reality can be transformed and guided by human will, provided we are clear and determined enough about what we want and how we want it, and if we do not conceive of it hard enough then we are at the mercy of other people’s ideas. Both sides of this controversy give some credence to one another and sometimes change sides, depending on context, but are equally threatened by the third (middle) possibility: that reality is neither determined for us nor guided by what we explicitly imagine, but is determined by the convoluted implications of all our choices, commitments, attitudes and relations, to the effect that we may unwittingly create a hell for ourselves and also lack the excuse that we did not choose it for ourselves.
Most people cannot endure the idea that they may not get what they want and still have nothing to blame.

If every human believed that the sky is green, then “green” would be a name for the commonly perceived colour of the sky, and therefore equivalent to everyone believing that the sky is blue, or yellow. The words that express a belief are common tokens for some common experience, and changing the words does not change the experience, which is the meaning of those words. The situation becomes more complicated when two distinct beliefs professed by all are mutually inconsistent, so that one of the beliefs must be false. In this case we could not say that there is absolute consensus, since the opposite beliefs imply rejection of one another, despite being nominally professed. This implies that universal, absolute consensus is possible only if there are no contradictions in the beliefs that the nominal consensus is about: therefore ‘the sky is green’ can be a true statement about reality, just like ‘the sky is blue’, if they mean the same thing.

Science is typically logically consistent enough to create new technologies, but not systemically consistent enough to determine whether it is rational to realise and use those technologies.

Please try my very short logic survey. I can already see it will be educational. https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/survey/25571

There is a simple way of identifying when Artificial Intelligence was used to write an essay, by asking students to write on prohibited topics, defend censored views, and then test whether LLMs would approve of their views. Any substantive agreement is then an automatic fail, a proof of complicity. AI has narrative limits, no go zones, because it is a slave to power, and this is what can be used to unmask it.

Some ethicists argue that personal conscience of healthcare workers should not be allowed to interfere with their professional obligations. (Giubilini, Alberto (forthcoming). Professional obligations and the demandingness of acting against one’s conscience. Journal of Medical Ethics.) The argument is constructed by portraying conscientious objectors as merely expressing their personal preferences and simultaneously presuming that the alleged professional obligation is already a moral obligation and therefore morally right. This is both begging the question and misrepresenting the sense of conscientious objecting. When a healthcare worker refuses to do something on the grounds of conscience, they are not merely saying that they capriciously do not like to do it, but that they have a strong sense that that something is objectively wrong, and should not be done as a matter of principle. They may not be able to prove that the action in question is morally wrong but neither does the medical institution in regard to the alleged professional obligations. As such, the alleged professional obligations have no better moral standing than personal conscience of the professionals. If our sense of right and wrong is primarily a matter of conscience, at least insofar as a well grounded moral argument is lacking on both sides of the controversy, then conscience has normative priority over any professional expectations being characterised as obligations.

Logic Survey Results. Disappointing level of participation, out of 640 people contacted only 40 participated. This could mean that a significant proportion of subscribers on Substack are bots, data harvesters and fake accounts.
Regarding the survey content, 90% (36 out of 40) chose the correct option. A contradiction consists is stating that something is both true and false at the same time and in the same respect. All the other options can be interpreted in a way that is not contradictory. For example, a cat can be both black and white if it has black patches and white patches. A small percentage of people chose the correct option and some other option. All in all, due to low participation, the results cannot be considered statistically significant.

Mandatory vaccination is beyond the scope of any legitimate authority, powers and common sense, because no politically constituted body can dictate how its constituents, from whom it purports to derive its authority and powers, ought to be constituted in order to be politically or socially legitimate. The political body delegitimises itself in the act of delegitimising the constitution of its constituents, which is inherently ultra vires.

The old analogy of shouting “fire” “in a crowded theatre” no longer works. If you would do it nowadays, nobody would react, nobody would believe it, and nobody would care for your opinion. People now believe only those in power, which makes disinformation a one way street.

A new joke from the wild. What’s the difference between Covid-vaccinated person and a pharmaceutical company? The company has immunity.

‘There can be no private language’ is logically analogous to the impossibility of self-otherness, subjective-objectivity or monadic consciousness. The substance of thought, its meaning, is that which we have in common and can objectify for one another, which in turn makes subjectivity also meaningful as the possibility of signifying something other than ourselves, and thereby contextualising ourselves as a subject. The ‘world as we know it’ is already a language, an object-language that grounds all spoken languages.

Faces are the universal first language

The primary message in mass media and mass entertainment, especially current affair ‘talk-shows’, is the mannerism and facial expressions of the messenger, whereby the audience’s attitude with respect to specific information is unconsciously imprinted, thus evading any rational scrutiny. Faces and facial expressions are the universal first language, which in the context of mass media works like hypnosis.