This ends the notebook completed in November 2020.
the Constitution as a document vs. the Constitution as a legal entity
A tyrant is a mob of one, one with a mob's power to damage.
populism as an artifact of means of communication (e.g., mobile internet)
The earliest known historical pharaoh of Egypt is Iry-Hor, whose existence was only independently confirmed in 2012. He reigned during the early 32nd century BC and was entombed in the Umm El Qa'ab.
Financial systems often arise out of religions, and change over time when religions change.
All politics is an interweaving of physical force and shed religion.
The seed of the market is found in the oversight of the gods.
inference as mediate experience
Sin eats away at the aptitude for receiving grace.
What capitalism does very well is incentivize cooperation with strangers.
What people call intelligence is often either easy of memory or ease of imagination.
Bostrom's argument is like a trilemma:
(1) extinction before ability to simulate
(2) disinterest after ability
(3) living in simulation highly probable
It's not a real trilemma; all these are tendentiously expressed (e.g., they are deliberately framed on assumption that the relevant ability is a real ability, despite the fact that we have no idea what would have to be done to simulate everything we think and experience). But it also assumes that we have reason to think there is another civilization besides our own (poss. simulated) one -- i.e., it's really an argument that there exists a particular kind of technological civilization other than ourselves. But it does so purely on hypothesis: Suppose this civ. exists at some point, then what is the prob. that we are not really its past and that it would simulate us. It then tries to draw a probability of our actually being a simulation of this purely hypothetical civilization. It is a variant of an ontological argument: you could rewrite it with God (e.g., cp. Whitehead's objective immortality) instead of a tech. civ.
origination of power, translation of power, and division of power as sources of authority (the same can be done for wisdom and goodness)
realist and anti-realist accounts of karma
Planning for problems, including natural disasters, etc., is essential to the maintenance of freedom, since problems are what provide cover for restrictions of freedom.
Openmindedness is always the result of a process.
consent vs. consent appropriate to human dignity
Desires are often only completed as desire in their expression. As one often doesn't fully specify one's view until expressing it, so one often doesn't fully specify one's want until expressing it.
the Church as evangelistic sign to the world vs. as sacramental sign to the faithful
All scientific discovery depends on patronage; the only questions are whether this patronage is personal or institutional, whether it is concentrated or diffuse.
Communities form not around ideas of communities but around actual shared goods.
conclusive inference as Diamond-reduction; reorganizing inference as Diamond-neutral; problematizing inference as Diamond-expansion
noetic effects of sin (Canons of Dordt): blindness, terrible darkness, futility, and distortion of judgment in the mind
"The Testimony of the Holy Spirit is simply the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart of the sinner, by which he removes the blindness of sin, so that the erstwhile bland man, who had no eyes for the sublime character of the Word of God, now clearly sees and appreciates the marks of its divine nature, and receives immediate certainty respecting the divine origins of Scripture." Berkhof
the sublime in the humble as the central aesthetic concept of Christianity
memorial, spiritual presence, physical presence accounts of testimony of Spirit
Most forms of utilitarianism require an ever-expanding central management of what originally would have found its own equilibrium, the takeover of ecology by calculation.
Studying questions by looking at possible answers is like studying premises by looking at possible conclusions.
Every set of premises can be interpreted as a question ('What is true if/given such-and-such is true?'), with the conclusions as the answers.
14th Amendment: four ways American citizenship has priority over state laws (origin, privileges and immunities, due process with respect to life liberty and property, equal protection); but note that due process and equal protection are not confined to citizens
The corruption in any government tends to be proportionate to the incentive people have to look the other way.
the analogical angels,
like an anagram,
combine and ever combine in holy choir
1 Thess 1:6-7 transitive imitation
Mt22:15 sets a pattern that will continually recur: trying to entangle the bearer of the gospel with his own words
icons as a way of giving to God what is God's, in symbolic form
To call a man a coward is to say he falls short of a dignity that should be his.
Test results matter less than results persevering under testing.
Berkeley's account of units makes sense if you assume no intrinsic ends -- then you need an extrinsic end to unify.
finality - transcendental totality - quantitative totality
No sense can be made of verification without natural classification.
Unearned good has priority of a sort over earned good, as mercy has priority over justice; but some unearned good has the purpose of making earned good possible.
God as uniquelly unique (Vallicella)
-- Vallicella holds that this implies that God transcends the distinction between kind and instance, and thus must be simple.
marks of createdness: change, composition, finitude, being in a genus, contingency, deficiency
Albert's account of the image in the mirror: it is an accidental form in the mirror that acts on the vision, but the form has spiritual (representative, not presentative) being in the mirror; it therefore has quantity only intentionally.
The complications of casuistry arise because reasons matter for morality, and reasons are rich and varied.
divine primacy in being, in life, and in thought (cp. Liber de causis)
The good of the whole cosmos is the best part of each of us.
God is the necessity that is the possibility of all.
Whewell's Five Ideas as ways we work for the common good
common good as including humanity itself: benevolence
common good as including mutuality of good: justice
common good as pertaining to intellect: truthfulness
common good as reflected in and as end of self: purity
common good as the end of society: order
Eternal law is that law which is most rational, most concerned with what is most properly common good, from the one who most properly has care for what is common, and most promulgated.
Every society is eventually poisoned by an exaggeration of itself.
Aquinas suggests the likeness between God and creatures is like the likeness between act and potency or between substance and accident (De Pot 3.4 ad 9).
Better is always relative to a whole.
States and governments do not, as a general rule, go around justifying their rule, and this is as true of liberal states as any others.
probability in casuistry as advisability
redundancy for preservation, for confirmation, for simplification
The world is but a whisper
in a canyon deep and wide,
bottomless with echoes up a steep and craggy side.
Paranoias come in pairs.
Human movement is a movement in both spacetime and possibility, taking explicit account of both.
original presence of Christ -> sacramental presentation -> indirect personal (ecclesial) presentation ->final presence
original presence of Christ -> memorial representation -> invocational compresentation -> final presence
Human beings are civil-society animals; human life is civil-society life.
The world is revealed to us as a world of services. These services involve serviceables, whose serviceability can be considered both broadly and narrowly (more specific ends). Physics concerns bodies and the like in a very broad degree of serviceability.
inherent, causal, and systemic signs
inherent, causal, and system-fitting evidence
An entire language is justified by one excellent poem.
'Violence' requires deviation from an appropriate mean; it is not 'violence' forcibly to restrain a murderer.
the self-organization of evidence in a cognitive medium
All struggle between factions becomes the ground for struggle within factions.
"A piece of apparatus for performing a physical or chemical experiment is also a reasoning machine, with this difference, that it does not depend on the laws of the human mind, but on the objective reason embodies in the laws of nature." Peirce
order-to vs order-in-light-of
The family is the first bulwark against totalitarianism.
"Bonds ought not to be imposed when there is no manifest law to impose them." Benedict XIV
PSR as a postulate of aporetic method
Those who do not come before Christ's court of mercy will come before his court of justice.
"Perhaps the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare and abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth a few words. We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because, for a time, they are not remembered; and he may therefore be justly numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to recur habitually to the mind." Samuel Johnson, Rambler 175
Every inquiry is structured by its starting points, its object, and its motivating impulse.
Most employment is in practice semiproductive social interaction involving an implicit negotiation as to the threshold of productivity acceptable for the pay. But the 'most' is important; across many enterprises, the lion's share of result is due to people doing more work than the lesser amount they could get away with, for no real and commensurate reward from the employer, but only the motivation of interest, of benevolence, or of honor.
Lived experience is not the inner light; it's just the living that we strive to articulate.
Evidence is the relation between appearance and reality.
Tuor's faithful acceptance of the word of Ulmo contrasts with Turin's willful attempt to master fate, and is the reason why Tuor plays the man of hope to Turin's man of despair.
We experience ideas deriving from impressions, i.e., impressions introducing new ideas.
We can only recognize ideas as copies rather than as just new impressions of the same kind by recognizing them as effects in needs of causes.
There are three relations between ideas and impressions in Hume: succession, derivation, and representation.
The idea of substance is derived from each impression considered as action, and from impressions together considered as wholes; substances are a kind of acting as a whole.
Every sense conveys kinds of unity.
Hume's criticism of substance just makes imagination the only known substance, by giving all the functions and actions of substances to the imagination.
Hume takes the representative relation of ideas to impressions to be wholly resolvable into resemblance. (A strength of Peirce is his recognition that this is inadequate.)
The particular length of a line is distinguishable from the line because we can in fact still consider that length without the line; measurement of length depends on this, and in particular on the fact that two different things may have the same length in common.
The reference of an idea to an object is not reducible to extrinsic denomination.
It is impossible to form the idea of a mountain not bigger than me; it doe snot follow from this that I can't form the idea itself unless the idea is bigger than me.
Hume's alternative to abstract ideas effectively just replaces them with customs that do exactly the same thing. (The analogy to the decimals and to the use of terms merely underline this.) You could go around Hume and replace 'custom' with 'abstraction', and it would all work.
Whatever is infinitely divisible is susceptible without limit to constructions dividing it into finite parts.
Deep neural nets work the way they do because they happen to parallel some of the logical structure of classification through their layered connection-strengthening.
Presidential candidates visit states (1) to drum up voters for themselves (2) to shore up legislative races (3) to fundraise.
Identity politics is what people do when they don't have much of a culture.
Landy on Shepherd
(1) Beginning, or coming into existence, is an action.
(2) An action is a quality of an object.
(3) If an object can come into existence uncaused, its beginning can only be a quality of that very object itself.
(4) If an object can come into existence uncaused, its beginning is a quality of an object not yet in existence.
(5) An object not yet in existence cannot have its qualitied determined.
(6) Thus a nonexistent object must both have qualities and not have qualities.
(7) Therefore no object cannot come into existence uncaused.
We can imagine an imagination coming into existence with no other cause than our imagining it; and this leads to the illusion that we can imagine an imaginable coming into existence without a cause.
'Everything capable of infinite division has infinite parts' is a claim that Diamond implies True.
''Tis certain we have an idea of substance distinct from that of a collection; for otherwise, why do we talk and reason concerning it?'
Anger, fear, etc. contribute to our sense of being in space.
SBN 37: 'fiction' is making an idea represent objects or impressions other than those from which it is derived
Geometrical equality is derived from the circle.
Note SBN 51's discussion of the supposition of a deity, which anticipates the Humean response to occasionalism.
logic with a finite archive (e.g., linear logic)
logic with an infinite archive (e.g., classical logic)
logic with multiple archives (modal logic)
logic with an infinite library of archives
We take the external world into us in sensation, in food, in drink, in sex and kiss, and in breath.
To reflect on something and to reflect on it as existent are clearly different.
T. 1.2.6 on the idea of external existence; T 1.4.2 on the belief in it.
the illusion that philosophical reasoning can be done without an archive
zombie as horror trope = pandemic + animate corpse + cannibalism
-- different approaches to zombies emphasize different elements
vampire as horror trope = spiritual desecration + animate corpse + blood-drinking
(1) Find real-person problems.
(2) Find charitable solutions, even if imperfect.
(3) Repeat.
Nothing so perfectly depicts human dignity as the calendar of saints.
the zoomorphism of human expressions
The imperfection of analogical inference is itself valuable; one learns from the failures.
The brain
is a hurricane,
swift with wind,
thick with rain.
Hamlet is a play about interpretation. (cp. MacIntyre)
Descartes gives epistemology a properly narrative character; he was not widely followed in this particular aspect.
rectification of names as the repairing of tradition
Our ideas of objects are all ideas of them as able to have effects.
The most simple phenomenon which can be accounted for from the qualities of an object as it appears to us is their appearing to us.
We often reason justly without understanding perfectly the idea concerning which we reason.
It is quite clear that *in sensible experience* many causes and effects are not contiguous; rejecting action at a distance requires abstract reasoning.
It's notable that Hume himself recognizes that ordering cause and effect by temporal priority is controversial.
Correlative ideas are distinct but not separable.
An object that exists absolutely without any cause is not its own cause; but this is not the same as to speak of an object that begins to exist without any cause.
Given how Hume defines causation, it seems that in the supposed case of the thing that begins to exist with no cause, you could in fact argue that 'nothing' could be counted as a cause: it is prior, we are speaking of nothing in the vicinity of what comes to be, and ex hypothesi there is a necessary connection. If you absolute exclude this as a cause, it can only be with a different notion of a cause; if you keep the notion of cause in this sense, the nothing in such a scenario is obviously a relative nothing, not pure nothingness, and relative nothing seems necessary to make sense of beginning.
Free choices guarantee unequal outcomes.
"The paradigmatic example of the possible is the actual." MacIntyre
The sense of beauty facilitates our identification of, and memory for, patterns.
the sense of health as essential to the practice of medicine
campaign, litigation, transition: the three parts of the American election
All our sensible impressions arise from the object, are produced by the creative power of the mind, and are derived from the author of our being, all at once.
Communication works not merely by presenting patterns but by excluding them.
Hegel on phrenology & the nature of lived experience
Lot was saved from Sodom not because he was saintly but because, being enmeshed in a corrupt society, one with which he was complicit, he sincerely tried to the decent thing.
oral history as central to a society's treatment of the elderly
strategy as coordinate of partial plans
natures as the intrinsic providentia of things
Llull & combinatorial transcendentals
Neh 8 and the role of the domestic church in renewal
means to an end with respect to an interpretant
Campaigning by its nature is biased toward the urban because it's easier to campaign in areas in which you can reach a lot of people easily.
the Electoral College as a jury system
The Christian is in the Church and only in and through the Church does he understand himself as Christian.
the theological anarchism of the modern academy
We think in but also beyond signs.
To rely on one another, we must rely on many other things.
Philosophy is unavoidable, for the cogito is in itself philosophical.
Everyone believes beyond their experience.
election as authority ritual
The expressiveness of natural scene is of fundamental importance to cinema.
The human body is an organized, self-ordering, expressive, interpretable agency; thus the Church as the Body of Christ is also an organized, self-ordering, expressive, interpretable agency.
What physics studies is constraint on potential, but this constraint is not absolute. Physical constraints limit what can be a bridge in given circumstances, but they do not guarantee the bridge itself, nor this particular version rather than that. So too with the human body and its physical movements.
Formation of a clear idea of something requires reasoning and proof.
The existence of most objects we know implies the existence of other objects. The existence of books implies the existence of readers; the existence of lungs implies the existence of something breathable; the existence of a watch implies the existence of time-tellers; the existence of a green leaf implies the existence of light; etc. etc. It is difficult to make sense of anything that exists without getting immediately into what other things its existence would imply.
The same reasoning that leads Hume to conclude that belief is a manner of conceiving should have led him to conclude that immediate inference is a manner of conceiving.
the synthetic a priori as implying the rejection of the distinction-separability rule
Popular elections need to be sanitized because they are inherently messy; this is done by official counts and certifications.
The free press is the whole people as a publishing people.
The primary difficulty for challenge-arguments is that the woods are always empty for bad hunters. Challenge is concerned with know-how, and thus its quality and answerability are related to considerations of skill.
Given that everything has some analogy to everything else, the future necessarily has some resemblance to the past.
From frequent experience we gain a better understanding of possible relations among possibilities.
Probabilities are not predictions.
Half of destiny is hope.
Expectation and preparation should not be confused.
That voting proceed in a manner established by law is essential to rule of law.
Types of experience linking natural sublime and religious
(1) I view the natural sublime and it resembles what would be made by God.
(2) I view the natural sublime and it arouses in me feelings as of being before God.
(3) I view the natural sublime and, introspecting because of it, I find God in myself.
(4) I view the natural sublime and infer God as its cause.
(5) I view the natural sublime and imagine it as from God.
-- all of these seem both possible and reasonable.
music as virtual terrain (Charles Nussbaum)
