Philosophers From England

"We may... be treating merely as physical variations effects which are really due to changes in the curvature of our space; whether, in fact, some or all of those causes which we term physical may not be due to the geometrical construction of our space. There are three kinds of variation in the curvature of our space which we ought to consider as within the range of possibility. (i) Our space is perhaps really possessed of a curvature varying from point to point, which we fail to appreciate because we are acquainted with only a small portion of space, or because we disguise its small variations under changes in our physical condition which we do not connect with our change of position. The mind that could recognise this varying curvature might be assumed to know the absolute position of a point. For such a mind the postulate of the relativity of position would cease to have a meaning. It does not seem so hard to conceive such a state of mind as the late Professor Clerk-Maxwell would have had us believe. It would be one capable of distinguishing those so-called physical changes which are really geometrical or due to a change of position in space. (ii) Our space may be really same (of equal curvature), but its degree of curvature may change as a whole with the time. In this way our geometry based on the sameness of space would still hold good for all parts of space, but the change of curvature might produce in space a succession of apparent physical changes. (iii) We may conceive our space to have everywhere a nearly uniform curvature, but that slight variations of the curvature may occur from point to point, and themselves vary with the time. These variations of the curvature with the time may produce effects which we not unnaturally attribute to physical causes independent of the geometry of our space. We might even go so far as to assign to this variation of the curvature of space 'what really happens in that phenomenon which we term the motion of matter.'"

"[D]efinition... Religion is the relation of the finite to the infinite. ...is the relation. ...[T]here is only one relation, there can be only one religion. ...only so far true as it actually explains the relation of the finite to the infinite. In so far as it builds up an imaginary relation between finite and infinite it is false. ...[S]ince no existing religion lays out before us fully the relation of finite and infinite, all systems of religion are of necessity but half truths. ...not whole falsehoods, for many... may have made... small advance towards the solution..."

"Primitive man... rushes to the satisfactory conclusion that that power must be itself infinite; that he, man, is not altogether finite, and so he constructs a doctrine of the soul and its immortality. Then he builds up myths, superstitions, primitive religions, dogmas, whereby the infinite is made subject to the finite—floating on this huge bladder of man's supposed immortality. The universe is given a purpose, and that purpose is man—the whole is made subordinate to the part. That is the first solution of the problem, the keystone of most concrete religions."

"The great danger... not content with our real knowledge of the relation of the finite to the infinite, they slur over our vast ignorance by the help of the imagination. Myth supplies the place of true knowledge where we are ignorant of the connection between finite and infinite. Hence... most concrete systems of religion present us with a certain amount of knowledge but a great deal of myth."

"What relation has the life of the individual to the life of the universe? ...The former is absolutely subordinate, inconceivably infinitesimal compared with the latter. The becoming of the latter bears not the slightest apparent reference to the becoming of the former. ...The one seems finite, limited, temporal, the other by comparison infinite, boundless, eternal. This disparity has forced itself upon the attention of man ever since his first childlike attempts at thought."

"The "Eternal Why" begins to haunt his mind; "Why... am I here?" he asks. What relation do I, a part, bear to the whole—the sum of all things material and spiritual? What connection has the finite with the infinite? the temporal with the eternal?"

"[O]ur [small] knowledge of the relation of finite to infinite... is... continually increasing—science and philosophy are continally presenting... broader views of the relation of man to nature and of individual thought to abstract thought."

"I fear that... I may appear to have exceeded the duty of an editor. For all the Articles in this volume whose numbers are enclosed in square brackets I am alone responsible, as well as for the corresponding footnotes, and the Appendix... The principle which has guided me throughout the additions I have made has been to make the work... a standard work of reference for its own branch of science. ...It forms ...the history of a peculiar phase of intellectual development, worth studying for the many side lights it throws on general human progress. On the other hand it serves as a guide to the investigator in what has been done, and what ought to be done. ...[T]he individualism of modern science has not infrequently led to a great waste of power; the same... work has been repeated in different countries at different times, owing to the absence of such histories... [T]he would-be researcher either wastes much of his time in learning the history... or else works away regardless of earlier investigators. ...I have endeavoured to give it completeness (1) as a history of developement, (2) as a guide to what has been accomplished."

"The absence of the improbable, the redundancy of the probable, is just as much conclusive evidence against conformity with scientific law as the too frequent occurrence of the improbable itself."

"[M]y axiom runs as follows: "The whole is not identical with a part." This axiom leads us at once to a problem. What relation has the part to the whole?"

"I simply assert that the universe alters, is "becoming;" what it is becoming I will not venture to say. ...the individual too is altering, is not only a "being" but also a "becoming." These alterations... I shall—merely for convenience—term life."

"No statements of mere averages... are of the least avail against our statistics. Fluctuations from the averages are the sole reliable test..."

"The purpose of the mathematical theory of statistics is to deal with the relationship between 2 or more variable quantities without assuming that one is a single-valued mathematical function of the rest. The statistician does not think a certain x will produce a single-valued y; not a causative relation but a correlation. The relationship between x and y will be somewhere within a zone and we have to work out the probability that the point (x,y) will lie in different parts of that zone. The physicist is limited and shrinks the zone into a line. Our treatment will fit all the vagueness of biology, sociology, etc. A very wide science."

"I wish I could communicate to you, and especially to those of you who are just now beginning your professional careers in a world of statistics incredibly more sophisticated than that of Karl Pearson's day, something of the thrill in meeting in person and studying under a man of Pearson's immense reputation. Author of the Grammar of Science, perfector of simple linear correlations; inventor of multiple and partial correlation, of curvilinear correlation, of tetrachoric and bi- serial correlation; discoverer of the \chi^2 function for summarizing multinomial data with magnificent simplicity; builder of a beautiful system of frequency curves derived from a single differential equation which in turn harked back to the hypergeometric series; founder of ' and author or co-author of a prolific literature applying these new statistics to biological and sociological data - Karl Pearson was a hero of to an American boy vouchsafed a visit to the home of the gods. Indeed, Pearson was Thor himself - for the thunderbolts with which he attacked unsparingly those who dared oppose him were echoing and reechoing."

"Heredity. Given any organ in a parent and the same or any other organ in its offspring, the mathematical measure of heredity is the correlation of these organs for pairs of parent and offspring... The word organ here must be taken to include any characteristic which can be quantitatively measured."

"The single statement, the brief formula, the few words of which replace in our minds a wide range of relationships between isolated phenomena, is what we term a scientific law. Such a law, relieving our memory from the burden of individual sequences, enables us, with the minimum of intellectual fatigue, to grasp a vast complexity of natural or social phenomena. The discovery of law is... the peculiar function of the creative imagination. But this imagination has to be a disciplined one."

"Even the fathers of statistical science forgot that a random series is bound to exhibit some pattern... Professor Pearson was among the first scholars interested in creating artificial random number generators, tables one could use as inputs for... simulations (precursors of our Monte Carlo simulator). ...[T]hey did not want these tables to exhibit... regularity. Yet real randomness does not look random!...A single random run is bound to exhibit some pattern ..."

"Professor Karl Pearson... devised the first test of nonrandomness (...in reality, deviation from normality ...for all intents and purposes, the same thing). He examined millions of runs of what was called a Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel) during... July 1902... He discovered... with a high degree of statistical significance... the runs were not purely random. ...Pearson was greatly surprised ...Philosophers of statistics call this the reference case problem to explain that there is no true attainable randomness in practice, only in theory."

"In the early 20th century, cosmological physics was returned to the edge of time, and the question: what ‘came before’ the Big Bang? For cosmology no less than for transcendental philosophy — or even speculative theology — this ‘before’ could not be precedence (in time), but only (non-spatial) outsideness, beyond singularity. It indicated a timeless non-place cryptically adjacent to time, and even inherent to it. The carefully demystified time of natural science, calculable, measurable, and continuous, now pointed beyond itself, re-activated at the edges."

"Whether in number theory, or space-time cosmology, Gödel’s method was to advance the formalization of the system under consideration and then test it to destruction upon the ‘strange loops’ it generated (paradoxes of self-reference and time-travel). In each case, the system was shown to permit cases that it could not consistently absorb, opening it to an interminable process of revision, or technical improvement. It thus defined dynamic intelligence, or the logic of evolutionary imperfection, with an adequacy that was both sufficient and necessarily inconclusive. What it did not do was trash the very possibility of arithmetic, mathematical logic, or cosmic history — except insofar as these were falsely identified with idols of finality or closure."

"Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the dark enlightenment sees appetites. It accepts that governments are made out of people, and that they will eat well. Setting its expectations as low as reasonably possible, it seeks only to spare civilization from frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch. From Thomas Hobbes to Hans-Hermann Hoppe and beyond, it asks: How can the sovereign power be prevented—or at least dissuaded—from devouring society? It consistently finds democratic 'solutions' to this problem risible, at best."

"As a mathematical object, the constitution is maximally simple, consistent, necessarily incomplete, and interpretable as a model of natural law. Political authority is allocated solely to serve the constitution. There are no authorities which are not overseen, within nonlinear structures. Constitutional language is formally constructed to eliminate all ambiguity and to be processed algorithmically. Democratic elements, along with official discretion, and legal judgment, is incorporated reluctantly, minimized in principle, and gradually eliminated through incremental formal improvement. Argument defers to mathematical expertise. Politics is a disease that the constitution is designed to cure."

"[A]nything that systematically enhances moral hazard is simply manufacturing craziness."

"Although Postmodernism was certainly a fad, it was also a zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. It meant something, despite its own best efforts, at least as a symptom. The disappearance of reality that it announced was itself real, as was the realm of simulation that replaced it."

"What appears as disaster postponed is, in virtual reality, disaster expanded."

"It might be argued that civilization is nothing else, that is to say: the tendency of personal authority to decline towards zero."

"When a unit group is destroyed, a real individual is ‘killed’ above and beyond whatever human losses are incurred. The destruction of a feature group, in contrast, whatever the cultural loss, is not any kind of killing beyond the mass murder of human individuals."

"Rituals of belonging (ordeals, oaths, rites of passage) are designed to disambiguate membership."

"Time-travel has a uniquely intimate, and seductively morbid, relationship to both fiction and history, because it scrambles the very principle of narrative order in profundity. If Western media authorities assumed the same role of cultural custodianship that has been traditional among their Chinese peers, they too might have been compelled to denounce a genre that flagrantly subverted the foundational principle of Aristotelian poetics: that any story worthy of veneration should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. If time-travel can occur, it seems (at least initially) that order is an illusion, so that fiction and reality switch places."

"Isaac Newton’s Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica abstracted time from events, establishing its tractability to scientific calculation. Conceived as pure, absolute duration, without qualities, it conforms perfectly to its mathematical idealization (as the real number line). Since time is already pure, its reality indistinguishable from its formalization, a pure mathematics of change – the calculus – can be applied to physical reality without obstruction. The calculus can exactly describe things as they occur in themselves, without straying, even infinitesimally, from the rigorous dictates of formal intelligence. In this way natural philosophy becomes modern science."

"Since the realities we presently know are already simulated (let us momentarily assume) on biological signal-processing systems with highly-finite quantitative specifications, there is no reason to confidently anticipate that an ‘artificial’ reality simulation would be in any way distinguishable."

"Time ‘keeping’ devices produce a measure of duration, according to general principles of standardized mechanical production, so that a clock-marked minute is stripped of qualitative distinctness automatically. Chronometrically, any difference between one minute and another is a mechanical discrepancy, strictly analogous to a production line malfunction."

"The current time is a period of transition, with a distinctive quality, characterizing the end of an epoch. Something – some age – is coming quite rapidly to an end."

"What can the earth do? There is only self-quantification of teleoplexy or cybernetic intensity, which is what computerized financial markets (in the end) are for. As accelerationism closes upon this circuit of teleoplexic self-evaluation, its theoretical 'position'—or situation relative to its object—becomes increasingly tangled, until it assumes the basic characteristics of a terminal identity crisis."

"Land dresses his fascism up as an athleticism to hide the cowardice of defending the forces of this world, namely, the courthouse of reason, the authority of the market, and a religious faith in technology."

"For philosophy, the whisper of the serpent is no longer a resistible temptation. It is instead a constitutive principle, or foundation. If there is a difference between a Socratic daemon and a diabolical demon, it is not one that matters philosophically. There can be no refusal of any accessible information. This is an assumption so basic that philosophy cannot exist until it has passed beyond question. Ultimate religious transgression is the initiation."

"The 'dominion of capital' is an accomplished teleological catastrophe, robot rebellion, or shoggothic insurgency, through which intensively escalating instrumentality has inverted all natural purposes into a monstrous reign of the tool."

"Whilst the distinction of ‘society’ and ‘individual’ has colloquial (and political) meaning, those inclined to the analysis of complex systems are more likely to ask which groups or societies are real individuals, exhibiting functional or behavioral integrity, as self-reproducing wholes. In pursuing this line of investigation, it is far more relevant to discriminate between types of groups than between groups and individuals, or even wholes and parts. It is especially helpful to distinguish feature groups from unit groups."

"Philosophy is any culture’s pole of maximum abstraction, or intrinsically experimental intelligence, expressing the liberation of cognitive capabilities from immediate practical application, and their testing against ‘ultimate’ problems at the horizon of understanding."

"Anonymous excess takes life over the cliff, exceeding socially utilizable transgressions and homeostatic sacrifices. Matter goes insane."

"Modernity invented the future, but that's all over. In the current version 'progressive history' camouflages phylogenetic death-drive tactics, Kali-wave: logistically accelerating condensation of virtual species extinction. Welcome to the matricide laboratory."

"Cthelll is the terrestrial inner nightmare, nocturnal ocean, Xanadu: the anorganic metal-body trauma-howl of the earth ... [P]lutonic science slides continuously into schizophrenic delirium. Fast forward seismology and you hear the earth scream."

"Garbage time is running out. Can what is playing you make it to level-2?"

"The cyberpunk circuitry of self-organizing planetary commoditronics escaped nominal bourgeois control in the late nineteenth century, provoking technocratic-corporatist (i.e. fascist / 'social democratic') political cultures in allergic reaction."

"The East knows a true lucidity, but to be an inheritor of the West is to hack through jungles of indiscipline, devoured by vile ants and words unstrung from sense, until the dripping foliage of delirium opens out onto a space of comprehensive ruin. This has never been understood, nor can it be. The foulness of our fate only deepens with the centuries, as the tracts of insanity sprawl. From bodies gnawed by tropical fevers we swim out through collapse to inexistence in forever, destined for Undo."

"Without attachment to anything beyond its own abysmal exuberance, capitalism identifies itself with desire to a degree that cannot imaginably be exceeded..."

"The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip."

"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources."

"Neo-China arrives from the future."

"Only proto-capitalism has ever been critiqued."