The Principle of Sufficient Reason REVISED

The sense of ‘sufficiency’ in the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) is not arbitrary: a sufficient reason warrants that something is a fact. Sufficiency qualifies reasons as corresponding to facts; it is not the case that facts are qualified as corresponding to reasons. For example, if it is raining then the ground is wet: rain is a sufficient reason for the ground being wet, but wet ground does not imply that ‘it is raining’. There may be facts for which there are no reasons (why is there something rather than nothing?), but it cannot be the case that there is a sufficient reason and no corresponding fact. The interpretation that was historically assumed (that Fact implies Sufficient Reason) is therefore back to front. It should be understood that a reason is sufficient only if it implies a fact: R(x)→F(x). ‘It is raining’ is a sufficient reason for the ground being wet only if raining implies that the ground is wet.

People will help others out of empathy only up to a point, until the cost of helping matches the emotional cost of refusing to help. The empathy hustle (‘save the children’ charity approach) works by amplifying the emotional cost (the aim is to traumatise the audience as much as legally permissible) and then offer a way to emotional safety (request a donation to preserve their moral standing).

The function of healthcare is to restore health. When someone is healthy, any medical intervention is adverse to the healthy state. In case of contraception, it impairs healthy fertility. In case of vaccines it impairs the healthy function of the immune system. Both are inherently unhealthy by the medical standard of health.

Technology is an occult ritual. Its function is to transform mythology into phenomenology, and thus into reality. The rituals of Intel Corp, for example, are occulted by trade secrecy, their intricacy impenetrable to an uninitiated mind, conducted in high security temples called ‘factories’, where demonic entities called ‘robots’ are summoned to perform sacraments on the sacred object. Human access to the heart of the temple is restricted only to high priesthood; every other disciple must perform their rites of submission via a remote terminal. But the real power of the sacred object is imbued only by the ritual of its recognition by the profane. It is only at this final stage that the myth becomes reality, a means of possession of the minds of the profane.

The most insidious, false ideology is ‘altruism’. Until we acknowledge that everything we do is motivated by self-interest we are not yet moral beings, because we deny having an interest in the realisation of our wants, which is the substance of moral reasoning. Altruism implies that the question ‘why be moral’ is senseless.

Doctors know that when the available resources make it impossible to save everyone, they are required to choose who is to live and who is to die, based on their assessment of the net residual value of individual lives, and it is reasonable to assume that doctors would seek to save themselves ahead of any patient, precisely because they regard their capacity to make this kind of decisions as extremely valuable.

People get offended because of their own beliefs.

If over the last two years the roles of Israel and Palestine were reversed, then the situation would, without hesitation, be characterised as the Holocaust, and so it must be characterised as the Holocaust irrespective of roles. By applying the standard of the perpetrator, the state of Israel is committing the Holocaust.

Every Self has the sense of ‘I am’. This self-relation requires being a ‘something’ to relate to and from, but it is not conditional on the meaning of that something. The Self is essentially consciousness, but it is imperfect because of inconsistencies in the representations of its meaning content: the self-relation is corrupted if the ‘something’ is imperfectly reflected. What does consciousness want Consciousness wants perfection, which is the ultimate self-interest.

The challenge lies not in Who is self-relating but in the consistency of self-relating. It is rather ‘How’ you relate to yourself that matters. Traditional methods pursed self-nihilation, self-erasure to avoid inconsistent self-relating, which was analogous to killing yourself to avoid infections, thus contradicting the ultimate purpose, not fulfilling it. They are all false.

There are no shortcuts, no gurus, no salvation by proxy; you must do all the hard work yourself.

The sense of ‘experience’ is that it relates to something beyond our subjective state of mind or point of view, that we experience something other than ourselves, something ‘real’, and that this realness is the same for every subject, therefore objective. As such, experience is already an interpretation, of something that happens to us subjectively, according to a common standard of realness or truth. Experience is truth-apt only to the extent that its meaning is falsifiable. Since we have no first person awareness of the subjective states of others, validation of our experiences is a purely conceptual challenge, a logical test of the integrity of the world as we know it that includes other beings of the same kind and in which the conceptual content is sustained only via meaningful communication with others. Objectivity of what our subjective experience is about is thus inextricably dependent on the subjectivity of others.

The fact that “vaccine-exemptions” were recognised is of itself a proof that nobody could consent to mandatory vaccination, in the same sense that saying “yes” to a rapist to save your job is not “consent” to sex. Exemption implies compulsion, which in turn precludes consent to what one is already compelled to submit to.

Fact Check: Partly False. Interest rate cuts make it cheaper to create money under the guise of bank credit. It is not true that any of the existing money is borrowed when bank credit is given. Credit is money creation, whereby the banks extract value (equal to the ‘loan’ principal) from everyone’s wallet by creating new units of currency, and charge interest on it. The principal is never repaid to the original wallets and the interest is embezzled by the banks. TLDR: Rates cuts increase the rate of monetary embezzlement by the banks while the little people are bedazzled by the nominal increase in the value of their homes.

The majority of people agree that those who refuse to style their moral judgement according to the authoritarian prejudices of the majority must be subjugated. Democracy is a form of group tyranny; it never had legitimacy beyond the renunciation of moral status that voting entails. Trump and Putin (in fact all democratic governments) accept this renunciation as their mandate to subjugate, albeit most rulers are less transparent about it than Trump and Putin.

It is conceivable that democracy is only nominally about the majority rule but is essentially a moral test: those who are willing to impose their preferences on others by the arbitrary standard of being in the majority are implicitly denying that preferences can be objectively right or wrong in their own right, thus negating the rationality of their choices and the authority of their own preferences. It then follows that this collective self-negation has representative priority over the negated preferences. If this is right then the abusive, humiliating, deceitful and exploitative governments are not a failure of democracy but express its proper function, provided it is applied only to those who vote.

A minority can never defend itself against the will of the majority by means of representative democracy, but by declaring itself as not represented and rejecting the premise of representation, it invalidates democracy, and thus becomes powerful as a disrupter of the premise of democratic authority.

Democracy could work only in a tightly knit, highly interactive group of peers who agree on principles, which could include at most one hundred individuals. On the national scale it is a bad joke, an aberration.

We transcend democracy once we realise that Power (the “brick wall at the back of the theatre” F. Zappa) is the primary reality. All we have to do then is deal with reality: the brick wall at the back of the theatre. This is transcendent of all the illusions: freedom, democracy, equality under law… all just part of the show. Once you think about it, it is not that bad; dealing with the actual Power is not as difficult as overcoming the illusion of freedom, and this interaction is subject to rules we can grasp; seemingly absurd things start to make sense.

Consider ‘a tree’ that you perceive as real. What you see, smell and touch is precisely what you think you experience: it matches exactly the concept of a tree that you have, and that is how you identify ‘a tree’ as the object of your experience. The only means of revision of the conception of what you experienced is additional experience, subject to systemic consistency of all experience, including the testimony and the conceptual criteria of identification maintained by others. Your initial ‘experience’ is therefore inherently unreal, subject to being systemically validated by others. You never experience ‘reality’ but only the temporal continuity of your conceptual world-model and then infer whether it was ‘real’ on the basis of cohesion with the world-models of others.

You need the input of others to deduce what is real, and therefore there is nothing real ‘in itself’. The real consists in the conceptual integrity of the meaning held in common.

I can accomodate the distinction between ‘no-thing’ and ‘not zero’. When I say ‘nothing’, as in ‘no thing’, I mean no object-identity that could be consistently posited at the empirical level, but there has to be some meta-level (above empirical) essence that animates the whole system. At the meta-level we find the laws of sense, and of course the self-evident, immanent sense of ‘I am’, which is reflexive consciousness as far as we can reduce it. Consciousness is not a thing (not an object) but also not zero, it has meaning, a structure, which is above the world and also permeates the world, like Logos: the metaphysical framework in which all empirical content becomes possible. In a sense, only Logos is real, absolutely, whereas the empirical is not strictly real, but only a system of quasi-linguistic, infinitely contingent relations that depend on the real to signify anything at all.

The immanence of ‘I am’ is conditional on the meaning content of identity and on external relations, which are governed by sense. There is no ‘I am’ without ‘sense’. Moreover, the laws of sense dictate (necessitate) that ‘I am’ is essentially a multiplicity, each ‘I’ sustained by reflexive relations with other ‘I’s’, and dis-integrates otherwise. For these reasons I take ‘I am’ and the laws of sense as belonging on the same level, both being part of the same immanence.