The Search for Ultimate Truth and Other Afternoon Activities

Apologies for not responding, I didn’t see this until just now.

First, regarding your complaint that I use ‘eviscerating’ language: My desk unfortunately contains no tweezers, only sledgehammers. It’s personality flaw. But then, political rhetoric is not for the dainty.

Second: “I was arguing that one can meaningfully be an atheist. That atheism is not, as Ron suggests, a faith in disguise.”

Well, logically speaking, any application of skepticism is scientific. Put personal skepticism is a philosophy. Public argument that seeks propagation of a philosophy is a religion. You can’t argue for atheism without making atheism a religion. You can be an atheist, or more likely a polytheistic historicist, worshipping historical figures, which accomplishes the same thing without the political context. But if you argue for atheism in the political realm you are practicing a faith. The purpose of monotheism is to create an inexpensively administered code of laws. From that perspective, it was a horrid, but inexpensive innovation. The purpose of atheism must in turn replace theism with something more rational. And there is the rub.

In other words, the only purpose of argument is political. The only reason for political debate is to coerce others to confiscate their property for your, or your faction’s ends. Even if that coercion is to CREATE property (the ten commandments). Or to pool opportunity costs (especially among the poor – this is the force of most religions: the pooling of opportunity costs as a rebellion against the upper classes. ) The purpose of collective action is to accumulate and concentrate some form of capital, and to do so by coercing individuals into contributing to a collective rather than person end. All religion is political and all political action is to coerce property for the purpose of accumulating or concentrating capital. Otherwise the reason for debate would be politically null. So all political debate is for the purpose of constructing ‘shoulds’. And because of the differences in knowledge, the differences in incentive, the difference in age, class, race, culture, and whatever other set of properties that differentiate individuals, it is NECESSARY to concentrate capital for collective action. If only because people do not have enough individual knowledge, or individual perception (and numbers are a tool for extending our perception) to concentrate capital for collective action without such commonly held ‘themes’. Humans cannot, in real life, in real time, apply ‘science and formulae’. they instead, develop habits and rules of thumb, for general application in their daily lives.

Scientific debate (the quest for knowledge) is a search for “is”, not “should”. “Is” arguments are descriptive. “Should” arguments are arguments over property. (That may take a while to ponder. But debate is political. WIthout property involved, even communal property, or communal sentiment, there can be no reason for debate. -Hoppe)

Third: ” I think most theists are not making a mere logical claim but an empirical one. That is, that God or Gods have some identifiable impact on the world that we inhabit.”

But that’s the whole point. You’re using a confused language. (just as you’re using the unscientific term ‘meaningful’ above. Define ‘meaningful’ and you’ll have a harder time making your argument. ) But back to the point: If people ACT like gods talk to them, then by definition their resulting actions are such that their fantastic god talks to them. And therefore, because you are forced to act along side these people in real life, in politics, in the economy, then these gods DO have impact on the real world. We have to separate the social content from the physical content: weather is a mis-application of mythos. Conversely, “The fate of peoples” is an accurate application of mythos.

Of course these myths don’t determine the weather, the movement of the stars, or the raising of crops. But it’s entirely arguable whether these ‘gods’ determine the fate of political systems, people’s and economies. In fact, most of the great historians would argue that they are the most important of influences on them.

And when they argue for such silly things, they are doing this for political ends. And, as I’m trying to show you, you’re applying their mythical language, which does have political merit in terms of both process and outcome (see the natural law philosophers under catholicism) to a difference in metaphysical assumptions. In other words, you’re using the language and process of the material physical world which we must discover, because it has a definite structure we can comprehend, with the vastly more complex process of coordinating large numbers of humans and their attempt to place some sort of structure around it. In other words, they are speaking in utilitarian allegorical terms, and you are speaking in scientific terms. THey’re just different languages. One of science and one of politics. That does not mean it is ‘false’. It means it is allegorical.

It’s an interesting exercise to disassemble religious language into economic language. And to treat it as poetic, mythic and allegorical rather than scientific. Allegorical language is often not ‘wrong’ per se. It produces the right effect. (The chinese character narrative in artificial intelligence.) But as a use of language in the analytical sense, it is not causally accurate – truth being causality. Democratic secular humanism is a religion that is competing with traditional agrarian monotheism, worldwide. (and losing, at least numerically.) The fact that it is a religion of the wealthy (emphasizing monetary costs and centralized control) versus monotheism which is a religion of the poor (emphasizing opportunity costs and decentralized control) is left unspoken, despite the fact that these underlying structures are RATIONAL forms of power competition, even if the language of both theists, and Democratic Secular Humanists are both either incomplete, misleading, deceptive or false – as any political argument MUST be, given the diversity of ears and brains in any population.

But I think that the error goes both directions. Scientists often make common political, rhetorical, positivist, and ‘scientism’ errors on a daily basis. And I’m trying to explain to you that you’ve fallen into the trap of expecting someone to embrace your language and discuss on your terms despite the fact that we are fairly certain that the entire model we’ve borrowed from the calculus of relative motion and tried to apply to political economy as been a complete and utter FAILURE.

And that is very important. It may be the most important problem of our age. We now populate this planet in vast numbers. We run an empire, and multiple monetary systems on a calculus of gaussian probability we derived from the natural sciences that is ENTIRELY FALSE IN APPLICATION.

To which you reply:
“I take a Bayesian view that says that we have evidence which allows us to predict future evidence. That’s it.”

I know, but you cannot, and I repeat, positively cannot, demonstrate either logically or scientifically, that the precept that you hold applies in the real world except *in retrospect* where knowledge gained allows you to define categories in the past. You cannot demonstrate the use of bayesian or other DSGE/DSEM models for prediction. In fact, you will find, that it decidedly DOES NOT. Or rather, you cannot demonstrate that any sufficiently profitable opportunity derived from your model can be realized, other than those of information asymmetry in time. And you cannot do so because of the plasticity of factors of production, the acquisitive and status-driven nature of human wants, the radical nature of innovation, and the Mandelbrotian nature of human learning and forgetting curves, all specifically prohibit such prediction and force all gaussian predictions to be false: People school like fish around opportunities, and their memories hold little but the amplitude and frequency of categorical stimulus. This is the source of ‘animal spirits’. Thats what the stock market data says. Nothing else. (Mandelbrot)

We have advanced economic science by capturing data on monetary transactions. This has led us to apply the one calculus that we know of, which was taken from the physical sciences, to this transactional data. The problem we face is in not capturing enough data, and not inventing a mathematics based upon what is gleaned from that data. (This is how we will solve Hume’s problem. Finally. Kant and Popper to the contrary.)

As an economist, studying human decisions made in real time, and made with fragmentary information, and in competition with other decision makers, we are faced with the problem of explaining how people make decisions that they MUST make in real time, in order to reduce their costs, by seizing opportunities. And they make these decisions by the application of myths, habits, conventions rules of thumb. They almost NEVER apply any quantitative reasoning. And we can demonstrate, overwhelmingly, almost without exception, that quantitative analysis yields WORSE prediction than the application of myths, which DO incorporate assumptions of asymmetry.

And you further your argument with:
“We are not whittling away down to some fundamental truth nor are we evolving along a path to greater and greater truths. We are refining probabilistic estimates.”

And that’s the problem right there. They are not quantitative and probabilistic. They are utilitarian and qualitative. You are TRACKING non-marginal changes in existing categories of causality. You are not REFINING definitions of marginal changes in causality. (Let that error of historicism sink in a bit.) We simply assign absurdly convenient quantitative descriptions to categories of utilitarian and qualitative human activity because we have not yet solved the underlying problem of human, social science. “We do not yet have a mathematics that lacks the device of an equals sign.” The right side of the equation is not fixed to the left.

The only rational argument is that “this is the best we have”. But it does not mean that it is correct, right, or even logically sound. And it is certainly not scientific because it is not predictive, which is the criteria for scientific categorization. So , either one is searching for fundamental truths, or one is attempting to be pragmatic, or one is simply DOCUMENTING A FALLACY. And as such, pragmatism in that context is exercised under a demonstrably false set of principles.

Then it follows that your quantitative experimentation is exercised against the will of people using demonstrably true allegorical langage, and the consequence is that you’re using the violence of government, law, and the state, to steal from them either materially, or in the form of opportunity, for the purpose of testing your fancies. (Isn’t that just corruption?)

At the moment when you rely upon pseudo-scientific arguments for the purpose of implementing policy, and when policy is no longer based upon ‘allegorically utilitarian but semantically false” decision criteria, and is instead, based upon “semantically false and allegorically null pseudo-science”, you are of necessity, committing a fraud. You may consider it a fraud of pragmatism. But that is just saying that you’re using the violence of the state for your ends rather than someone else’s ends.

As such, a) atheism, when debated becomes a material religion. b) scientism is a religion because it is incomplete, and c) scientism claims a completeness in political realm that it does not possess, and cannot demonstrate is better in application than traditional allegorical wisdom. d) scientism fails the test of scientific criteria because it is not predictive in practice within the social sciences.

As such: “Scientism, and it’s corollary, positivism, are simply an act of faith. It is an act of faith which persists in the presence of overwhelming evidence of it’s failure, and despite the logical necessity of its inapplicability to social actions by virtue of quantitative asymmetry: the fact that what is on the left of the equals sign is known, and what is on the right is not known – because the scale of probability on the left is known, and the scale of probability on the right is unknown, and the categorical representation of the left side is plastic and open to re-categorization of causality and scale upon experience gained from the right side.”

This lesson can be learned from Goedel, Mandelbrot and others. Or in social science from Hayek, Mises, Parsons and Popper. The tools we use today will be considered in the future as no better than phlogiston theory.

Atheism is a faith because its purpose is political, and because in the absence of traditional knowledge it must rely upon science, and science is insufficient because of asymmetry of probability in the social sciences. This is the problem with democratic secular humanism. It is a religion based upon false premises.

We may have no alternative than to rely upon religions with false premises. But if we must, we should rely upon the religion that produces superior outcomes.
Not rely upon a pretense of knowledge. Especially not when that pretense of knowledge is demonstrably false in practice, and in logic.

***The answer in politics is not to be found in probabilism. It is to be found in the use of credit to test the willingness of men to make choices with their property. Not the deception of probabilism so that the state may appropriate it.*** Only small homogenous groups are charitable in capital formation. All other groups compete. Government is formed to resolve differences in conflicts between groups by forcible redistribution. As the diversity of groups increases, the competence of the state to resolve differences declines to the point where only the market can compute those differences. Any advanced society requires a vast division of knowledge and labor. There are benefits to currency scale. Therefore the state is no longer capable of resolving differences, yet there are advantages to currency scale. Therefore lawmakers and laws become incompetent for the resolution of differences. THerefore credit and lending are the necessary purpose of the state, not the resolution of differences between groups. (Our state has become addicted to group differences.)

That one statement of probability and credit is the answer to all of the above quandaries. We build our future. It is not probabilistic.

Property has plastic utility in time. All costs are opportunity costs. Knowledge is forever asymmetric.

The answer is “Loans not Laws.” And that change in political structure will yield the data that will allow us to answer Hume’s Problem. And it will put a knife in democratic secular humanism, and ludic probabilism.

There is perhaps, too much here for the average mortal mind’s short term memory to coordinate into a whole – and were it easier to convey, I’m quite sure such an argument would be unnecessary. Such is the problem of our limitations.

But in summary, you are treating the concept ‘athiesm’ unscientifically, because you are falsely attributing to it limited causality and consequence – too narrowly considering it’s scope and function – a convenient trick of the rhetorician, or a logical error of the honest man. I have tried, probably with futility, to put the concept in context. But that context should demonstrate that it is, in fact, a component of democratic secular humanism, and a faith that has as it’s ambition, political ends, and is based upon false premises, and as such may be marginally better than some other faith. But it is a faith none the less.

Curt