Mystifying what the meaning of the word ‘IS’, is, is the means of making you disappear from your life

Mystifying what the meaning of the word ‘IS’, is, is the means of making you disappear from your life

As David Hume demonstrated by his inability to identify a ‘self’ when he looked into his own mind, mystifying what the meaning of the word ‘IS’, is, is the means of making you disappear from your own life. Those engaged in that mystification, ‘gnowingly’ or not, are in opposition to the understanding that we can know reality as it is, which is the idea promoted by the nominalists, rationalists, skeptics/empiricists, and idealists, whose ideas about ‘ideas’ take varying approaches to having you believe that thinking not only doesn’t make reality clearer to us, but misleads and separates us from it, trapping us within our minds in a ‘copy world, which distances our understanding from what is actually real and true.

What may come as a shock to fans of sci-fi like the Matrix, is that the real technology trap has nothing to do with machines & computers, it’s Ideas and their systematic misuse which are the means of trapping you within an ideology, which excludes you from your own life and ability to live it well.

A prime example of such an ideological technology trap, is the bizarre twist that modernity has taken in misconstruing Aristotle’s signet ring & wax analogy, and aided by our ignorance of the Three Acts of the Mind, the idea of being born with a ‘blank slate’, Tabula Rasa, has come to be viewed as having less to do with how our senses give us access to reality and store that in memory, than with alleging that our minds only have access to those impressions that the ‘signet ring’ of reality has ‘somehow’ impressed into that wax they equate our minds with, and that it somehow does so without our involvement. What that means is that we are unable to have contact with reality ourselves, as by this theory we can only have a muddled awareness of the impressions that’ve somehow been left behind in the wax, and which we can only ‘feel’ from the interior of the wax, and whose impressions we follow around like bread crumbs in an attempt to figure out what has happened ‘out there’, even though the theory means that we can’t have any ‘real’ effect upon our senses determined lives anyway.

However bizarre that might seem, that is what the ‘copy theory’ of ideas has come to mean, and it is modernity’s claim that our own experiences, ideas, and memories, ‘aksually’ separate us from reality, and equally bizarre is the fact that a number of well respected and admirable people have helped in establishing it.

John Locke for instance, in the act of batting away the rationalism of Descartes, nevertheless advanced a materialistic theory of ideas in his thoughts on education and morals, the error of which has been intensified with every iteration of thinkers who’ve added to it, particularly in the development (and misuse of) ‘Empirical Thinking‘, which is:

relying on experience or observation alone often without due regard for system and theory

Thomas Reid identified the root error that Locke had made,

“…[536] First, Because, when he purposely defines the word idea, in the introduction to the Essay, he says it is whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks, or whatever the mind can be employed about in thinking. Here there is no room left for objects of the mind that are not ideas….”

David Hume took that erroneous idea and ran with it, advancing what had been a mere error, into ever increasing falsehoods, as his positions helped in intensifying the effects of the copy theory several times over, and transformed an old fashioned skeptical attitude towards presumptions of what we think we know, into the claim that all we think we know about what occurs in our lives, is nothing more than chance associations of events we have and can have no real comprehension of. With that came the incredibly consequential claim, that Causality is not observing the effects that follow from the nature of that reality which caused them, but is instead nothing more than the unwarranted projection of our expectations onto the world of experience, because of what has only chanced to occur in sequence before, which our minds fabricate as having a causal connections, in order to give us a sense of control or power, which, in Hume’s mind, is all a figment of our imaginations.

According to Hume, the only things we can have the confidence to trust and talk about, is empirical evidence taken directly from experience (‘taken’ how?). But he continues (almost as if he has no regard for causality) if we then reason from those same experiences, we cannot understand there to be any ‘real’ causal connection between them, other than their being ‘contiguous in time’. According to Hume, our believing that we can understand how one experience follows from another – causality – is nothing more than ‘a priori’ ideas which we deceive ourselves with.

And what are these ‘a priori’ ideas which Hume derides? Webster’s defines ‘a priori‘ as:

“relating to or derived by reasoning from self-evident propositions”

, and gives the example that:

“So, for example, “Every apple is a fruit” is an a priori statement, since it shows simple logical reasoning and isn’t a statement of fact about a specific case; “apples are sweet” is a posteriori, as it expresses something the speaker knows from experience.”

The fact that these ideas assume that neither ‘apple’ nor ‘fruit’ are considered to have resulted from ‘logical reasoning’ connected to experience, is something you should take a moment to consider the meaning of, and what such a statement tells you about the thinking that thinks that is ‘true’. The IEP, which entirely buys into Hume and modernity’s usage of the terms, tells us:

“…A given proposition is knowable a priori if it can be known independent of any experience other than the experience of learning the language in which the proposition is expressed, whereas a proposition that is knowable a posteriori is known on the basis of experience….”

, meaning that ‘a priori’ ideas are the waxen impressions that we’ve formed within the interior of our minds, and we have done so without any real connection to reality. Note: What they are saying and the exceedingly dangerous path they are inviting you to travel down (which is what Reid & Beattie warned against), and beware: it takes only a few steps to abandon the path and ground of Common Sense, and become sucked into the Idealist’s Matrix.

According to Hume, the ‘reality’ is that because we’ve formed these ideas within our minds, separate from reality, then:

“… If we reason a priori, anything may appear able to produce anything. The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits….”

Thomas Reid on Hume:

He argues that our concepts are just the contrived word games of definitions that we fabricate to socially construct (anachronistic, but accurate) a narrative:

“…to convince us of this proposition, that where there is no property, there can be no injustice, it is only necessary to define the terms, and explain injustice to be a violation of property. This proposition is, indeed, nothing but a more imperfect definition….”

, and so Hume claims that conceptual terms such as property, justice, violation, are totally unlike reliable empirical facts and math, which, in his mind (and it’s worth noting that in his mind, he chose to target the foundations of Justice), requires reasoning directly from experience in order to very reliably discover,

“…That the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the squares of the other two sides….”

, and,

“…That the cube root of 64 is equal to the half of 10, is a false proposition, and can never be distinctly conceived. But that Caesar, or the angel Gabriel, or any being never existed, may be a false proposition, but still is perfectly conceivable, and implies no contradiction….”

Well. What can common sense tell us about this today?

Quite a lot, actually, as Thomas Reid & Beattie’s arguments are every bit as applicable and effective today, as they were when they first made them, and it should be emphasized that it was their arguments and understanding that carried the day over Hume’s, and so deeply informed the understanding of our Founders’ era.

The only thing keeping their common sense from being understood by us today, is the attention that modernity has diverted away from their arguments. It’s worth noting that Hume would’ve been relegated to an odd philosophical footnote in history, if not for the pernicious rise of German Idealism which Hume woke from its ‘dogmatic slumber’ (via Kant), and the aid that was given to that by ‘Classical Liberals’ such as J.S. Mill.

I strongly recommend reading what Thomas Reid had to say, especially as what he says is exceedingly clear, and said with a lively humor, which exposes the folly of Hume’s assertions, and makes plain the obvious truth that reality is directly known and knowable to us.

That being said, there are still a few additional points I’d like to add in regards to the key issue that Hume & those following him, rest their cases upon, which is ‘a priori’, and his putting ‘empirical thinking’ up on a pedestal to portray it and themselves as being ‘strictly logical’, proclaiming deductive logic to be the gold standard while turning his nose up at abstractions and inferences, either ignores or evades that fact that all deduction is derived from, and requires, prior inference!

If someone says inductive logic is inference, is not dependable, they’re confessing that they don’t really know what they ‘no!‘. All deductive concepts, resulted from what previously had been inferred from something else, which was found to be sound enough to take as self-evident – all deduction implies those instances which that concept was inferred from.

Hume can only declare the primacy of his ‘empirical thinking’ by evading the fact that logic operates by means of general abstractions, being compared to less abstract particulars, and that neither logic nor science could operate at all, if we ‘dispensed with’ inferences, abstractions, and systems that adhere to them.

All of that equally escapes his attention when he says:

“…That the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the squares of the other two sides….”

, and,

“…That the cube root of 64 is equal to the half of 10, is a false proposition, and can never be distinctly conceived….”

I wish I could ask him:

“Tell me David, where in experience do you find this ’64′ of which you speak?”

, because the fact is that neither Sixty, nor six, nor four, are found anywhere in nature. ’64′ exists only in the mind of man, and does so only in one that has successfully abstracted from quantities of anything, to arrive at the concept of number, and from which he’s then able to apply those numerical concepts to everything that can be quantified (and to discern those qualities that aren’t quantifiable).

How could anyone ‘do math’ uncontaminated by ‘a priori’ concepts? And if it’s so central to ‘empirical thinking’, how & why does counting, mathematics, not to mention geometry, have to be so studiously learned? How does knowing that ’2 + 2 = 4′ become Common Sense?! And how to do any of that without the use of either syllogistic reasoning, or any of the other conceptual abstractions involved in either defining or calculating a hypothenuse, or to know and prove their calculations to be correct?

Without those abstractions, neither Hume nor anyone else could acquire the ability to count from 0 (!) to 64, nor to sum up the internal angles of a triangle, without first respecting and applying the exceedingly abstract concepts and systems of numbering, counting, and addition.

What Hume and modernity framed as a consequence of his ideas, turns a blind eye to is the understanding that ‘causality’ isn’t something we simply string together from a sequence of events, Causality is the consequence of identity in action, and interaction with other identities within a given context – materially and immaterially – and that Logic would not and could not exist without it, and without which no ‘empirical’ observations or calculations could be made at all.

To be a sceptic, to be an empirical thinker (as Hume intends it), to be a person that can sincerely proclaim that

“…The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits…“

, is to be as far from being a realist as can be imagined. It’s not at all surprising to note that the words that he conveniently makes use of, words like “sciences”, “enquiries”, “men”, “contradiction”, “existence”, “intelligible”, “true”, “confused”, not to mention “existed” and “identity”, and so on, are metaphysical conceptions which legitimate Science, not to mention Mathematics, depend upon and could neither exist nor be performed without!

To say even so much as ’64′, is to make every bit as much use of ‘a priori’ concepts, as what Hume meant to slight with ‘Caesar’ or ‘or any being never existed‘, and doing so is evidence of a dis-integrated mind, which is the sadly un-surprising result of a mind that is bereft of the unifying benefits of metaphysics. The conceptual blindness that is a consequence of ignoring, evading, denying, some (and always more) of what is real and true, truly dis-integrates you from the world, and from your own self, as it wipes out the very thing that makes Common Sense possible – our ability to apprehend, to make a judgment, and to reason from that reality.

The lack of connection that such a person’s ideas have to what is real and true, leaves them as the prey of, and into themselves becoming, fabulists, conceptual embezzlers, and intellectual amnesiacs, as it involves their thinking in a level of distance from reality that’s hardly even up to the level of being called dishonest, because there is so little reality left in their comprehension to be dishonest about. For Hume to have equated the validity of concepts that have been inferred ‘a priori’, with words arranged to speak of falling pebbles extinguishing the sun, was a demonstration of his having already fallen into a fantasy world of Ideas, where effects are so easily disassociated from their causes, that he’d left himself trapped within an idea of a world without identity, within a mind so stripped of meaning, value, or purpose, that he was unable even to identify that as being ‘bad’.

As Josef Pieper noted in his amazing, and amazingly brief essay, ‘Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power‘:

“…Can a lie be taken as communication. It means specifically to withhold the other’s share and portion of reality, to prevent his participation in reality. And so: corruption of the relationship to reality, and corruption of communication – these evidently are the two possible forms in which the corruption of the word manifests itself…”

The elephant in the room that Hume is evading, is that his claim that ‘non-empirical’ words imply “… no contradiction…”, that is only the case for the person who has failed to integrate their own thinking, which is less a comment upon reality and our ability to know it, than a confession of having given so little meaningful thought to the nature of identity, experience, and causality, that he failed to ensure that the concepts he ‘understands’, are connected to, and derived from, what is real and true.

Whether that came as a consequence of his having slipped and fallen into Descartes’ notion of an artificial doubt (Descartes’ rationalism is distraction, his artificial doubt is the key) as being a ‘something’ of the mind, or just a lazy and self-flattering cynicism, the consequence of failing to be concerned with the danger inherent in accepting contradictions, is abandoning the basis of common sense. Such a foundation as that is wholly incapable of supporting or adhering to reality, or a system of ethics that reflects it, or of utilizing logic as anything other than a tool for word games, which leaves their own words having, and able to have, no meaning, even to himself and serves only to support schemes for peddling pure sophistry of the kind that Aristotle debunked 2,000 years earlier.

Hume sadly demonstrates the truth of that in his own statements. When reading his thoughts and those who think like him, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that in Hume’s ideal of empirical thinking (not the good kind) – you don’t really think, you don’t choose (free will, in his opinion, being only a sensory illusion). In Hume’s idea of Empiricism, there was, ‘empirically speaking’, no ‘You’ in you:

“When I introspect, I see no ‘me’ within”

, and that a person was:

“… nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity…”

, and that without those perceptions, there is no ‘you’:

“…When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist…”

Hume was a phantom in his own mind, unaware of the fact that the ‘Self’ he sought was that which was doing the seeking. He took the position that a human being is nothing more than “… a bundle or collection of different perceptions…”, and from that position he admonishes us that all a ‘realist’ can do, is to recite those isolated ‘facts’ that he’s observed to happen sequentially, and that we should refrain from fabricating any additional ‘ideas’ – especially moral ones – upon them:

“…It is only experience, which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another34. Such is the foundation of moral reasoning, which forms the greater part of human knowledge, and is the source of all human action and behaviour….”

, and so advises us to dismiss them as mere fictions:

“…If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

, which leaves man bereft of an understanding of reality, of causality, of logic, of ethics, and of science as well.

In Hume’s two-dimensional world of ‘facts’, we’re incapable of coming into ‘the fullness of understanding’, and can neither comprehend nor justify a difference between a criminal shooting a person to rob them, and a policeman shooting a criminal to prevent him from murdering his intended victim – both deaths are but empirical ‘facts’, and as their causes are illusory, so must be the pretense that there should be consequences for those actions.

To put the matter more provocatively, by Hume’s way of thinking, today’s woketivists epitomize his ideal of ‘empirical thinking’, since, as per David Hume, they’ve seized upon all abstractions and ‘a priori’ concepts that enable us to identity and understand what a woman ‘really is’. Having seen to it that all such abstractions have all been “committed to the flames“, ‘their truth’ is now unmitigated by ‘abstractions’ of understanding and delusions of causation, it is the simplest and most ‘logical’ of things for them to insist that mutilating a person’s genitalia and breasts to alter the shallowest of outward appearances of experience, does in ‘fact’ empirically make a ‘man’ into a ‘woman’, and a ‘woman’ into a ‘man’, and how could any empirical thinker deny that?!

The people whose minds have been taken by modern thinking don’t believe that they’re pretending when they say that a man can be a woman. The ‘Woke Virus’ has so stripped their minds of the ability to engage in common sense realism, that they actually believe that surgically altering appearances, or even donning costumes, can and does transform a man into a woman and a woman into a man. Their seemingly over-the-top reactions to anyone who denies that ‘fact’ to them, is their frantic and hysterical response to an understanding that legitimately threatens to obliterate their entire worldview and concept of ‘self’, and so they treat your disbelief as an all-out assault upon what remains of their soul.

That is the endpoint of the supposed ‘reasonableness’ of Hume’s empirical skepticism, and his attacks upon Causality, and it has enabled such perilous cracks to be inserted into the foundations of the house of The West, as to have even stripped it of its roof (the Arts & Humanities), which has left the western world unable to find shelter from the anti-western storms of modernity.

That erosion of the West that Hume’s empirical skepticism made to seem clever and ‘sciency’, was quickly advanced upon by Immanuel Kant, who transformed Hume’s radical skepticism into the full blown idealism that has made the Western World so structurally unsound over the course of the last two centuries. Kant, who claimed that Hume had woken him from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’, was less interested in refuting Hume, than in doubling down on his claims and extended them with his own assertion that aksually our sensory media don’t give us impressions of reality, instead they create our reality,

“…It has hitherto been assumed that our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to ascertain anything about these objects a priori, by means of conceptions, and thus to extend the range of our knowledge, have been rendered abortive by this assumption. Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in metaphysics, if we assume that the objects must conform to our cognition…”
Critique of Pure Reason, translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1901), 41.

, which we’re only then able to experience by being systemically encased within our own subjective copies of it.

According to Kant, the experience of thinking prevents us from having any real experience of ‘the thing itself’ of reality.

It’s that Kantian system that forms the basis of our modern practice of ‘epistemology’, and it’s that process of ‘thinking’ that has progressively insinuated itself into every aspect of our lives – philosophy, religion, art, history, education, law, and ‘economics’ – which has been progressively transforming what had been the solid foundational rock that the House of The West was built upon, into only so much sand.

The radically worse nature of Kant’s theory of morality, which is based upon explicitly non-contextual nature of his ‘categorical imperative’ (which naturally begins not with reality, but from your preferences severed from it), is such that actually claims that it would be immoral to lie to the murderer at your door who’s come to kill your daughter, by telling him she’s not at home. Kant was called out on that implication of his ‘Categorical Imperative’, and Kant held to it:

“…if you have by a lie hindered a man who is even now planning a murder, you are legally responsible for all the consequences. But if you have strictly adhered to the truth, public justice can find no fault with you, be the unforeseen consequence what it may… “

, emphasizing that, even to a would-be murderer, you ‘should’ be

“To be truthful (honest) in all declarations is therefore a sacred unconditional command of reason, and not to be limited by any expediency”

That’s what Kant’s ideal of ‘morality’ looks like in practice, and indeed once you dispense with reality, causality, and a respect for what we can understand to be real and true, your own thoughts become a threat to your life and happiness.

In sum, where in traditional philosophy our minds and our knowledge are the benefits of being human, to the modern idealist, our lives, minds, knowledge, and abilities, are the curse of being human which they want to rid our world of – and that is who the proverbial ‘They’ are.

It’s important to be aware of what they want you to buy into, and to give some active thought to noticing and identifying the evidence of it in what’s happening around you, because there are those amongst us who are actively attempting to interfere with and even prevent you from being aware of that. It is important to realize that when given an idea, the mind will fill in the blanks with your expectations, unless you pay attention to how reasonable those assumption are or are not. It’s important to be aware of all of this because your lack of clarity enables them to peddle banalities such as ‘your truth is not my truth‘, and considerably more involved versions of that (such as monetary theory, ‘price inflation’, and income distribution curves), to reshape ‘your reality’ as they see fit.

Which they can only get away with doing, so long as you’re unaware that you can and should know what is real and true.

The good news of course is that Reality hasn’t gone anywhere, and neither has your ability to experience and perceive and verify it, the only thing that’s been altered is where our attention is habitually directed to, and how & why it has been misdirected, and to break that spell we only need to open our eyes up to the sleight of mind being performed upon us, and be willing to engage with it. As Aristotle said at the opening of his Metaphysics, ‘All men by nature desire to know’, and to that end our senses provide us with the ability to perceive reality, and it is our mind, memory, judgement, gives us the ability to reason our way to understanding far more about the nature of what we’re perceiving, than perception alone ever could.

The nature of human nature is that the three acts of the mind occur naturally, and they do so without separating us from, or encasing us within, a lesser matrix knockoff of the world we live within. Believing otherwise is a philosophical spell which skepticism and idealism teach us to cast upon ourselves. Stop doing that. Stop reinforcing that.

…from Stephen Coughlin’s Unconstrained Analytics

By caring about what is real and true, by consciously observing the causal relationships within the world around and within us, a logical hierarchy naturally emerges in our approach to, and understanding of, what is real and true and of our place within it – that is how our minds work (this one post gives an overview of their relation). And as we gain a more solid footing, and a clearer perspective from which to best identify not only what something is, but in what context it exists, and where it does and does not take precedence over other considerations, we find ourselves displaying the mark of prudent thinking.

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