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eli-kittim · 3 years ago

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Science & God’s Existence

By Author Eli Kittim

Can We Reject Paul’s Vision Based On the Fact that No One Saw It?

Given that none of Paul’s companions saw or heard the content of his visionary experience (Acts 9), on the road to Damascus, some critics have argued that it must be rejected as unreliable and inauthentic. Let’s test that hypothesis. Thoughts are common to all human beings. Are they not? However, no one can “prove” that they have thoughts. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have any. Just because others can’t see or hear your thoughts doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Obviously, a vision, by definition, is called a “vision” precisely because it is neither seen nor observed by others. So, this preoccupation with “evidence” and “scientism” has gone too far. We demand proof for things that are real but cannot be proven. According to philosopher William Lane Craig, the irony is that science can’t even prove the existence of the external world, even though it presupposes it.

No one has ever seen an electron, or the substance we call “dark matter,” yet physicists presuppose them. Up until recently we could not see, under any circumstances, ultraviolet rays, X – rays, or gamma rays. Does that mean they didn’t exist before their detection? Of course not. Recently, with the advent of better instruments and technology we are able to detect what was once invisible to the human eye. Gamma rays were first observed in 1900. Ultraviolet rays were discovered in 1801. X-rays were discovered in 1895. So, PRIOR to the 19th century, no one could see these types of electromagnetic radiation with either the naked eye or by using microscopes, telescopes, or any other available instruments. Prior to the 19th century, these phenomena could not be established. Today, however, they are established as facts. What made the difference? Technology (new instruments)!

If you could go back in time to Ancient Greece and tell people that in the future they could sit at home and have face-to-face conversations with people who are actually thousands of miles away, would they have believed you? According to the empirical model of that day, this would have been utterly impossible! It would have been considered science fiction. My point is that what we cannot see today with the naked eye might be seen or detected tomorrow by means of newer, more sophisticated technologies!

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Can We Use The Scientific Model to Address Metaphysical Questions?

Using empirical methods of “observation” to determine what is true and what is false is a very *simplistic* way of understanding reality in all its complexity. For example, we don’t experience 10 dimensions of reality. We only experience a 3-dimensional world, with time functioning as a 4th dimension. Yet Quantum physics tells us there are, at least, 10 dimensions to reality: https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2014-12-universe-dimensions.amp

Prior to the discoveries of primitive microscopes, in the 17th century, you couldn’t see germs, bacteria, viruses, or microorganisms with the naked eye! For all intents and purposes, these microorganisms DID NOT EXIST! It would therefore be quite wrong to assume that, because a large number of people (i.e. a consensus) cannot see it, an unobservable phenomenon must be ipso facto nonexistent.

Similarly, prophetic experiences (e.g. visions) cannot be tested by any instruments of modern technology, nor investigated by the methods of science. Because prophetic experiences are of a different kind, the assumption that they do not have objective reality is a hermeneutical mistake that leads to a false conclusion. Physical phenomena are perceived by the senses, whereas metaphysical phenomena are not perceived by the senses but rather by pure consciousness. Therefore, if we use the same criteria for metaphysical perceptions that we use for physical ones (which are derived exclusively from the senses), that would be mixing apples and oranges. The hermeneutical mistake is to use empirical observation (that only tests physical phenomena) as “a standard�� for testing the truth value of metaphysical phenomena. In other words, the criteria used to measure physical phenomena are quite inappropriate and wholly inapplicable to their metaphysical counterparts.

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Are the “Facts” of Science the Only Truth, While All Else is Illusion?

Whoever said that scientific “facts” are *necessarily* true? On the contrary, according to Bertrand Russell and Immanuel Kant, only a priori statements are *necessarily* true (i.e. logical & mathematical propositions), which are not derived from the senses! The senses can be deceptive. That’s why every 100 years or so new “facts” are discovered that replace old ones. So what happened to the old facts? Well, they were not necessarily true in the epistemological sense. And this process keeps repeating seemingly ad infinitum. If that is the case, how then can we trust the empirical model, devote ourselves to its shrines of truth, and worship at its temples (universities)? Read the “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn, a classic book on the history of science and how scientific paradigms change over time.

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Cosmology, Modern Astronomy, & Philosophy Seem to Point to the Existence of God

If you studied cosmology and modern astronomy, you would be astounded by the amazing beauty, order, structure, and precision of the various movements of the planets and stars. The Big Bang Theory is the current cosmological model which asserts that the universe had a beginning. Astoundingly, the very first line of the Bible (the opening sentence, i.e. Gen. 1.1) makes the exact same assertion. The fine tuning argument demonstrates how the slightest change to any of the fundamental physical constants would have changed the course of history so that the evolution of the universe would not have proceeded in the way that it did, and life itself would not have existed. What is more, the cosmological argument demonstrates the existence of a “first cause,” which can be inferred via the concept of causation. This is not unlike Leibniz’ “principle of sufficient reason” nor unlike Parmenides’ “nothing comes from nothing” (Gk. οὐδὲν ἐξ οὐδενός; Lat. ex nihilo nihil fit)! All these arguments demonstrate that there must be a cosmic intelligence (i.e. a necessary being) that designed and sustained the universe.

We live in an incredibly complex and mysterious universe that we sometimes take for granted. Let me explain. The Earth is constantly traveling at 67,000 miles per hour and doesn’t collide with anything. Think about how fast that is. The speed of an average bullet is approximately 1,700 mph. And the Earth’s speed is 67,000 mph! That’s mind-boggling! Moreover, the Earth rotates roughly 1,000 miles per hour, yet you don’t fall off the grid, nor do you feel this gyration because of gravity. And I’m not even discussing the ontological implications of the enormous information-processing capacity of the human brain, its ability to invent concepts, its tremendous intelligence in the fields of philosophy, mathematics, and the sciences, and its modern technological innovations.

It is therefore disingenuous to reduce this incredibly complex and extraordinarily deep existence to simplistic formulas and pseudoscientific oversimplifications. As I said earlier, science cannot even “prove” the existence of the external world, much less the presence of a transcendent one. The logical positivist Ludwig Wittgenstein said that metaphysical questions are unanswerable by science. Yet atheist critics are incessantly comparing Paul’s and Jesus’ “experiences” to the scientific model, and even classifying them as deliberate literary falsehoods made to pass as facts because they don’t meet scholarly and academic parameters. The present paper has tried to show that this is a bogus argument! It does not simply question the “epistemological adequacy” of atheistic philosophies, but rather the methodological (and therefore epistemic) legitimacy of the atheist program per se.

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megrimlocke · 5 years ago

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How We Are All Going to Die Laughing

The other day, I was looking at a post made by one of my favorite internet comic artists. The guy used to be something I’d read in the army newspapers, next to the adds for cheap TVs at the post exchange, but these days it’s mostly a facebook feed I occasionally read. The artist and writer behind “PVT Murphy” (though these days Murphy’s a sergeant, I’m aging after all it seems) was annoyed at Facebook showing him a shopping page offering what amounted to white nationalist (US neonazi, if you prefer) paraphernalia.

Now, I pointed out that this was what the robot had concluded he wanted to see, and honestly none of us should be surprised by this. Military members lean right, and in the age of Trump this means that radicalization is around every corner- though for the record it always has been. In some insidious ways with a cancer of racists and bigots among our ranks, sure, I know because being gay I was targeted by a few myself, but also in more subtle ways.

I once watched a man scream at some Iraqis who were emptying a waste bin nearby, screaming that they didn’t get him, because he’d been the target of an IED attack two hours prior. Those men had no way in hell of having anything to do with it, but the guy that hit us got away free and the trash guys looked like someone he could defiantly vent his feelings of helplessness and victimhood upon in a vain effort to reclaim his power. I’m not condoning it, I’m just saying that sometimes the path to prejudice isn’t paved with propaganda and privilege.

I have every faith in the artist who draws PVT Murphy himself, but if you attract the attention of a lot of white supremacists, then probably the robot is going to conclude that you might want to look at some of the things that all the people who like your posts are looking at. Hence the shop page that offered a wall pinup of a templar knight preparing to smite the saracen to defend (white) Christendom with a few crass remarks about Islam written on it.

Now I explained, in truncated terms, how the robot made this call. The artist wasn’t excited about this explanation, and in fairness no one is excited about the black mirror showing them something ugly, it’s almost like an automated attack. But the machine was really just trying to be helpful. It wasn’t programmed to be sensitive to racial issues, and certainly the people who took out the add didn’t take that into their considerations. It identified a pattern and arranged the delivery of data that conformed with its instructions based upon the data input.

Now, some right wing dude decided to join in this discussion to point out that the robot didn’t know what it was talking about, included the terms “lib” and “snowflake” in his post, and suggested that if the robot had any idea who he was it wouldn’t keep showing him liberal content- after all he always used the laugh react on it. I pointed out this part as well, but I’d like to go into a deeper analysis for this discourse.

The right, and perhaps a lot of people using the reacts on facebook, has decided that you can use the laugh react to express a dismissive chuckle to the words of others. I think this has several sweeping, problematic implications.

First, the people using the internet are using it to each other, and are either unaware of the robots they share the internet with or ignorant regarding how they function. The robots do not interpret Laugh as a dismissive gesture. The data they gather from this is that you were paying attention to something and decided to put a reaction on it. The Laugh react is not a downvote on reddit, the robot, innocent little helperbot it was made to be, assumes you are amused by the thing you clicked on, and so endeavors to further tickle your funny bone. In short, it’s your good-natured wholesome friend who doesn’t understand the difference between you laughing with liberals and laughing at us. It thinks we’re all friends.

This leads to the second problem. If you are a conservative and you do not care to be bothered with leftist posts, then using the laugh react doesn’t help you at all. It further engages you with the content that annoys you. The stuff that caused you to try and put on your dismissive “ha ha tawdry communist drivel” mid-atlantic aristocrat voice is going to keep appearing. If you’re the sort given to conspiracy theories (and you are my bro, you still hate Hillary for the pizza thing), you might draw the conclusion that you are being targeted by leftist internet operatives, spamming your feed with leftist propaganda.

The truth is you’re spamming yourself with leftist content because your socially clueless helpful robot pal is gonna go out and find more things for you to laugh at. You’re not special or important enough for leftist internet operatives to target your facebook feed with propaganda attacks, and you have damned yourself to an experience on facebook in which you are bombarded with annoying or even blood-boiling content. All of this guidance, by the way, is equally applicable to left leaning users of the laugh react as a dismissive gesture.

What this does is contribute to people’s paranoia. It makes them believe that an enemy that doesn’t exist is trying to get into their heads. It fills their electronic lives with incendiary content that makes them angry and it encourages them further to continue to have generally unproductive electric arguments with people that they disagree with, leaving them exhausted by a brain full of cortisol.

Personally, I think the Left’s electric sin is more to do with our frankly superior witticisms (sorry Right, you invented and stuck to Nobama, you’re just not witty) and the craving so many of us seem to have for delivering that sick burn one-liner so cutting and succinct that it stops the conservative dead in his rhetorical tracks seems to consume online political discourse on the left almost as aggressively as call-out culture does when arguing among our own.

In the effort to sell us more things by pandering to our professed passions, the capitalist internet has created an electric rage engine that wraps you into one heated argument after another among people who are not listening to one another and who are learning to disengage from hard discussions. This last part is so dangerous to our democracy.

To be clear, I’m not lamenting the death of compromise specifically. There can be no compromise on the income gap, healthcre, free elections, or the rights of people who are darker in skin than I. But the electric rage engine makes it difficult to even have conversations about these things in the real world, and if you’re not talking to the people you disagree with face to face in the here and now, your chances of finding compromise are precisely zero percent, nevermind actually changing their views.

Have you noticed yourself having conversations with people that could just be copy pasted almost word for word off the tumblr where they “informed” themselves about this topic? I’ll bet that you have. Or else, more dangerously, you have begun to avoid having such conversations at all with people. Have you ever been in a discussion turned friendly debate with your friend and realized after a few moments that the debate isn’t suddenly so friendly? I’m willing to bet it’s been a while, so much so that you might even be shocked if it happens.

People like to go on about how fraught the holidays can be because of how politically charged family dinners can be, but I can’t remember such an experience within the past ten years. No throw down arguments, no discussions about the merits of one tax policy or another- we can’t even seem to discuss weighty matters with people who are blood kin anymore unless we already know they agree with our own views- and thanks to the electric rage engine, we can know, in precis, what their views are and what we think about them as a result long before we ever think about what to put in our covered dish. The opportunity for someone stepping into a landmine social or foreign policy issue at family and social gatherings has been eliminated, and with it the ability of the dinner table to serve as a place for families to reach consensus by resolving their arguments. We don’t talk politics with people who disagree with us in the real world anymore, we all just avoid it and spit our venom on the internet, achieving nothing but our mounting unhappiness and dislike for one another.

I have a young colleague at work, maybe 25, who demonstrated the ability to just promptly end a discussion last week. Now it was a nonsense discussion and in fairness the participants had gotten into trolling him for kicks, saying a blue shirt was green on purpose or some other nonsense, I don’t remember the particulars. But what I do remember vividly was the ease and efficiency with which he was able to simply end the discussion, how disengagement came so very naturally to him. I despise the phrase “agree to disagree” because it means that the argument hasn’t been resolved, but it is at least a sign that there was actual thought going on between participants. No such gesture here. My colleague put down the conversation and simply went back to his work with all the ease with which you might put down your phone when you decided you were done arguing with someone, and the ability to do this in realspace chilled me to the bone.

Moreover, there is a certain epistemological nihilism that has arisen among us, suggesting that no one can truly know anything because the sources of information, with whatever omissions or biases they may possess, are a matter of consumerist choice rather than objective fact. We can’t agree on what is real anymore because if you dislike someone’s account of events, you can simply get someone else to present a more palatable story and declare the other people liars.

If you don’t like what you read on NBC, you can simply tune to Fox to hear it told in a way that you choose to consume, often playing to your appetite for validation rather than your need for actionable information. We like feeling right, and the consumerist information economy has identified that as a means to get our attention long enough to upload some ads along with our news video of choice.

If the very identity of a person can be expressed by a computer algorithm and 4 or 5 hundred clicks across news articles, think pieces, and shopping pages, how easy will it be for the people who do understand how the machines work to begin influencing who we are?

In closing, I think every single one of us is developing a progressively more toxic relationship with the internet, particularly when it comes to political discourse, and I think that if we aren’t especially careful our ability to simply shut down and switch off, while healthy on the web, is going to begin invading our lives in the waking world in insidious ways that will hurt our ability to function as a cohesive society. I think that the marketing robots and the very act of making a profile and posting to it things that are important to you are dangerous influences on our sense of identity, and that by wrapping our sense of identity in the ideas and products that we consume in such a contrived, calculated fashion that we are restricting our ability to be flexible in our thinking, making us less able to get along with one another.

I’ve been on a soft departure from Facebook for a good while now, making it my loose rule to stick to messenger and instagram because I like indulging my vanity but for the most part I want to be interacting with people directly and not selling myself for likes when I use these things. Real attention from real people is much much better.

In 2020, I invite you to join me in kicking facebook or your own social media vice altogether and bringing our political lives and our debates back into the real world so that we can practice and re-acquire the skills of persuasion and discussion; not as a cynic call to begin trying to convert every conservative we can find, but for the sake of a political discourse that serves as less of a battleground with immovable ideological fortresses and more of a crucible in which the useless can be burned away and useful consensus and meaningful, mind changing-discussions can be had once again. We cannot afford to keep unsubscribing from one another if our democracy is to survive. (<- leftist witticism addiction in demonstration)

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diarrheaworldstarhiphop · 6 years ago

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I’m five minutes in and already this seems like something beamed in from an alternate universe. Did this crowd just cheer “doctoral degrees” and then, specifically, “psychoanalysis”?

This big arena debate world where people cheer academic qualifications like wrestling belts is obviously Peterson’s world. And it’s really off-putting. He sits in his chair looking expectant and deep in thought, occasionally letting slip a brief acknowledgment of the surreality of the situation. Zizek, on the other hand, looks bewildered. When his introduction is concluded, he simply shrugs and does a brief facepalm.

Peterson, by contrast, barely flinches. He’s obviously used to this… And that’s the weirdest thing of all.

I’m not really sure what I’m in for here as I sit down to watch this. I’ve heard interesting things about this debate from those who have already watched it — apparently it’s not a complete waste of time — and so I have been tempted to give it a go for myself…

But I’m already aware of the kind of discussion I’m hoping for — and unlikely to get — and this anticipation is probably going to inform my viewing for better or worse…

So, first things first, I feel like I should declare my biases.

I like Zizek (generally speaking). He’s the sort of cantankerous sniffling voice I’m happy to have in the public sphere. I have a soft spot for him, in a way, because, perhaps like many other people my age, he was the first contemporary “Public Intellectual” that I paid any attention to; the first living philosopher I remember hearing and reading about.

However, that’s not to say I know his work all that well. The only book of his I’ve read with any seriousness is his first: The Sublime Object of Ideology — which is still a good read — but the majority of the rest of his written work is unknown to me. (Those films of his are, at the very least, entertaining.) I have, however, read a lot of his earlier articles and writings on communism, but I’ll come back to those shortly.

My understanding of Peterson’s general project is even more limited. I haven’t read his book. All I’ve seen are a few lectures and some click-bait “Peterson destroys…” YouTube appearances. That being said, I’ve found very little to admire or relate to in what I have heard him say. (I’ve previously critiqued one of his UK television appearances here.) But he’s nonetheless on my radar as a cultural figure and I have found his discussions around masculinity to be interesting, if only because of what he leaves out.

I want to briefly talk about Peterson’s views on masculinity because they seem integral to his overall position and you can see much of the same logic that is applied to this topic leaking out into his other opinions. For instance, on at least one occasion, he’s compared the modern “femininsation” of men to the Nietzschean death of God. It’s an apt comparison in some respects — although I’d take it more positively than he seems to do. His argument seems to be that men have lost their purpose, their drive, their grounding, like peasants without God, or a state without its sense of nationhood — the latter being a particularly important similarity, I think, when considering his popularity amongst hypermasculine nationalists. Point being: men are lost without their own inflated (and gendered) senses of self. Peterson is here to give it back to you. It’s not a bad project in and of itself, but he’s pretty terrible at it. His success despite this perhaps says more about the depths of the crisis that we’re willing to accept him as a savior.

What Peterson decries as taking the place of traditional gendered duties and positions within society is what he regularly defines as “contemporary nihilism”. This nihilism is, of course, a huge freedom to many others who have felt traumatically constricted by societal expectations and in contemporary philosophy more generally we have seen the emergence of a new nihilism which explores the outsider epistemologies of occultism with as much rigour as scientific rationalism — you could say it was precisely this crossover that gave the world Reza Negarestani — and so Peterson’s nihilism is, in itself, a very limited concept.

Ray Brassier’s old nihilism, for instance, is a nihilism that grounds itself on the “meaninglessness” of rational truth, which is to say, nihilism is an attempt to decloak oneself of the stories and “realisms” which we allow to structure (but also inevitably limit) our realities. Truth and meaning are not the same thing and so a life of facts and rationality is far closer to nihilism than the popular conception of the term allows. By contrast, despite warning of its dangers when it applies to something he doesn’t believe in, Peterson seems to champion the adoption of ideologies in order to give your life meaning. It is in this sense that he’s often positioned by some as fascist (or at least fascist-adjacent).

Masculinity, for Peterson, appears to be just such an ideology in being held up as an Idea that gives gendered subjects purpose and a sense of duty. But what is odd about this is how much Peterson otherwise critiques ideology. Because, for Peterson, it seems ideologies are only ever collective. Individualism, in particular, is not an ideology…

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… And that’s ridiculous. As Zizek writes himself:

[I]deology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’ — ‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence — that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals ‘do not know what they are doing’. ‘Ideological’ is not the false consciousness of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by a false consciousness.

He defines ideology as Marx does (at least implicitly): “they do not know it, but they are doing it“. Such is Peterson’s argument — don’t pay attention to any of that stuff which supposedly defines (or fails to define) your existence, just get on with it; tidy your room. (His insistence on personal cleanliness is, I’ve always felt, near identical to an army induction into self-presentation, and if that isn’t the ultimate immersion in ideology then I don’t know what is.)

Today, despite Peterson’s attempts to rehabilitate it, we see that the particular ideology of patriarchal individualism has been in crisis and so the left embraces the ideological crisis of masculinity, understood as a by-product of a broader crisis of patriarchal capitalism, in order to encourage the emergence of a new consciousness; the emergence of something altogether different. This is not to try and destroy men as such — well, okay, that depends who you ask… — but rather the ideology of Masculinity. In response to this general vibe, Peterson’s blinkered response to this is to try and save patriarchal capitalism by focussing on the individual and selling them an anti-feminist magical voluntarism.

What Peterson doesn’t get is that the argument is not that this crisis of manhood is a result of capitalism’s “failure”, per se — which is presumably why Peterson wants to defend its honour — but rather that this crisis is a direct result of capitalism’s own internal development and indifference.

(It would also be interesting to see what other takes people have on this, actually: “the feminisation of men” — a marxist feminazi psyop or a by-product of free market automation reducing the need for big strong physical labourers? You’d think Peterson, for all his citing of anthropological evidence, would be more on board with the latter, but he’s not… Responses on a postcard!)

The relevance of modern masculinity, and its crisis, to this particular debate is that masculinity is, more often than not, framed as an ideology in being not just a gender but a gender identity. To be a Man, in the sense that Peterson describes, is — sociopolitically and, that is, ideologically speaking — not that different from being a Communist. It is a declaration that says something about your view of the world and how people should expect you to act within it; indeed, how you should expect yourself to act within it. In this way, his is an individualised ethics — and that is how many contemporary men’s groups, for better or for worse, present themselves on both the left and the right, in defining masculinity as an ethics first and foremost — whilst communism instead strives for a collective and communal viewpoint, a “collective subjectivity”, a collectivised ethics, far broader than Peterson’s consideration of (but of course not ignorant to) these kinds of identity markers.

I want to keep this in mind going forwards because I think Peterson’s framing of masculinity actually gives us a good entry point for talking about communism (and his particular framing of communism) and this may help us understand just how flawed and limiting his conceptions of both these things are.

As I mentioned in passing, over the last few years I’ve started to read more and more of Zizek’s earlier work — particularly his articles on communism and, specifically, “the Idea of Communism“. When writing my Master’s dissertation back in 2017, reading a lot about Maurice Blanchot and his Bataillean conception of “community”, the Idea of communism emerged as a central framework through which the questions Blanchot (and others) raised have been continued into the present, and Zizek — as a writer and an editor — at one time contributed a fair amount to this discourse.

I’ve written a lot about the “Idea of communism” before on this blog, albeit under various different guises — the Idea of communism as an event horizon; as a “community which gives itself as a goal”; as a sort of ethical praxis in and of itself, a sort of politico-philosophical First Principle, rather than a solidified (statist) political ideal — it’s under the surface of a lot of my patchwork stuff.

To be clear, what I mean by the “Idea” of communism here is perhaps something akin to the Platonic Idea. To quote Plato himself, writing about his own philosophy:

There is no treatise of mine about these things, nor ever will be. For it cannot be talked about like other subjects of learning, but out-of much communion about this matter, and from living together, suddenly, like a light kindled from a leaping fire, it gets into the soul, and from there on nourishes itself.

The Idea, in this sense, is a sort of ephemeral thing, an event in a process of becoming. It is fuel for discourse and politics but is not, in itself, either of these two things. It’s something else unique to philosophy.

To many this may sound like the beginning of some wishy-washy apolitical intro to communism, but the intention here is to emphasise — what Deleuze & Guattari, in What Is Philosophy?, call — “the Concept” of communism. (This is, arguably, also the intention of U/Acc, in giving philosophical priority to the Concept of Acceleration over its conditioned political vagaries which leave the concept in the corner to their detriment — i.e. the rejection of a state-accelerationism on the same terms as a state-communism, with both being as sensical as the other despite how the latter is so often understood.)

The Concept, in this sense, is a provocation, an invention. To pin it down, to attack it or defend it, is to condition it and use it — which is fine in most circumstances — but there is always something that comes first which we mustn’t lose sight of in the process putting concepts to use. We must be “critical” — just as Peterson describes his preferred mode of thought, which we’ll discuss in a minute — by which I mean that we must not lose sight of the process of engineering which produces the concept when we put it to use. That is the purpose of the Idea or the Concept: that which philosophy always hopes to produce: the simultaneous product of and originator of thinking. (I’m writing on this in relation to accelerationism for somewhere else at the moment so I won’t go into this too much further or else I’ll start plagiarising myself.)

The Idea of communism, then, becomes this original seed which existed before the horrors of state-communism and continues to exist after them. It is a communism produced communally, lidibinally; a kind of communist consciousness; an outsideness; a view to that which isn’t. It is, in this first instance, the Idea of the future, of the new, of what is to come, held in the minds of those affected by it at the expense of that which is. When Kodwo Eshun called himself a “concept-engineer”, this is no doubt what he was positioning himself in favour of, and against the “great inertia engine”, the “moronizer”, the “futureshock absorber.” That’s what the Communist Manifesto calls for too. It’s a provocation, a call to revolution, not just of politics and economics but, more fundamentally, of thought and thinking.

Masculinity — reconfigured as a concept — (and femininity too, for that matter) can be thought of in much the same way, as a becoming, which may signify certain horrors, past and present, but as a future may instead be something which gives itself as a goal. And there is every chance that that goal might be unrecognisable to our current sense of the cloistered Ideal.

Like it or not, the best word we have for this process, related to gender anyway, is queering.

Everything else is cage.

Anyway, I’m rambling…

What does any of this have to do with anything? Well, it has everything to do with Peterson’s opening statement.

The Idea of communism is seemingly an alien concept to him. The very Idea of philosophy seems alien to him, for that matter. He’s a man of blinkered systems and boundaries and “truths”, and to such an extent that “truth” ends up undermining his own arguments. His pursuit of an absolute logic — so common to many North American conservative pundits; “facts don’t care about your feelings” — only makes the holes in his reasoning more apparent. Encapsulated in a wall of logic that he has built around himself, he starts to undermine his own apparent superiority by being incapable of giving himself the room to breath and produce thought. He’s like a real life Vulcan, his ironic flaw being the bemusement which erupts from his consideration of the adaptability of those illogical and mentally vulnerable humans (read: leftists).

What makes this difficult for some to see, however, seems to be the effort Peterson puts into superficially privileging the opposite within his own work. Early on in his opening statement, for instance, he says:

It doesn’t seem to me that either Marx or Engels grappled with one fundamental — with this particular fundamental truth — which is that almost all ideas are wrong … It doesn’t matter if they’re your ideas or something else’s ideas — they’re probably wrong. And, even if they strike you with the course of brilliance, your job is to assume that, first of all, they’re probably wrong and then to assault them with everything you have in your arsenal and see if they can survive.

Such is philosophy — and, on that note, I’m reminded of a particular passage from Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? where they write that the Greeks distrusted the Idea, the Concept, “so much, and subjected it to such harsh treatment, that the concept was more like the ironical soliloquy bird that surveyed the battlefield of destroyed rival opinions (the drunken guests at the banquet).”

And yet, for Deleuze and Guattari, the Concept doesn’t seek truth. It might emerge from certain judgments and appraisals, from thought, but truth is not its end. If truth were the goal for Marx and Engels, it might be called the Truth Manifesto. But it’s not. It is called the Communist manifesto because communism is its goal — a politics of multiplicitous and unruly communality.

Here we see the first glimpse of Peterson’s own nihilism — again, despite his apparent rejection of that -ism and its affects on thought. We might ask ourselves: What is it to introduce your position with a statement as vacuous as “almost all ideas are wrong”? Deleuze and Guattari, again, do a far better job of articulating the stakes of this suggestion which, again, seem totally lost of Peterson:

A concept always has the truth that falls to it as a function of the conditions of its creation. […] Of course, new concepts must relate to our problems, to our history, and, above all, to our becomings. But what does it mean for a concept to be of our time, or of any time? Concepts are not eternal, but does this mean they are temporal? What is the philosophical form of the problems of a particular time? If one concept is “better” than an earlier one, it is because it makes us aware of new variations and unknown resonances, it carries out unforeseen cuttings-out, it bring forth an Event that surveys us. But did the earlier concept not do this already? If one can still be a Platonist, Cartesian, or Kantian today, it is because one is justified in thinking that their concepts can be reactivated in our problems and inspire those concepts that need to be created. What is the best way to follow the great philosophers? Is it to repeat what they said or to do what they did, that is, create concepts for problems that necessarily change?

From this we can say that the prevalence and continued existence of “Marxists” and Marxism is that the problems Marx (and Engels, of course) pointed to remain relevant today because we remain under the problematic system of capitalism. Many further concepts have been added to the arsenal but the original ground remains unresolved. Capitalism — as another -ism — endures for the same reasons. We have yet to settle the problem of capitalism as a response to the end of feudalism and instead treat the conceptual framework of capital as eternal rather than temporal, a being rather than a becoming.

Now, the Idea or Concept of communism can perhaps be summarised in similar terms. Communism is the name of a becoming-to-come, a postcapitalism. Peterson, instead, in wanting to rehabilitate what we already have, doesn’t get this. But still he continues to use the language of someone who does whilst nonetheless remaining trapped in his own circular argument.

For example, again in his opening statement, he calls Marx and Engels “typical” — as opposed to “critical” — thinkers because they accept things (that is, the problems of capitalism) as they are, as given and self-evident (to capitalism), and don’t think about their own thinking, which is to say that they also present their critiques to their readers as if they were self-evident. Peterson says no — these problems are inherent to nature, not capitalism. But in shifting the goal posts rather than engaging with the text directly he portrays himself as guilty of what he decries in them.

In doing this, Peterson sidesteps the entire point of the Marxist project, particularly as it is framed in the Manifesto: a project which attempts to systematise a deep understanding of capitalism (as in Marx’s Capital) and then critique the material reality of capitalism, provoking action against it (as in the Manifesto). If anything, Peterson might have come out of this better if he’d read anything but the manifesto. Instead, he misses the entire point, failing to get under the skin of Marxism because he fails to acknowledge its attempts to get under the skin of capitalist realism and reveal to us the ways in which that which is, that which we see and accept as the nature of reality, is instead a contingency. In this sense, “all ideas (capitalism tells you) are wrong” could be the brainlet summary of the Manifesto in itself, and in this sense, if it is an ideology, it is one which defines itself by what it escapes.

It is here that the circle of Peterson’s argument completes itself before its even really begun. What is it to critique critical thinking in this way? What is it to critique critique through naturalised tradition? Does this make Peterson a critical-critical thinker? Or is he instead just a critical-typical thinker? Either way, his is a position that eats itself. Peterson, however, seems good at supplying the gall to ignore your own inability to take your own medicine.

This is the entire problem with Peterson’s argument going forwards too, which might be summarised as: “Marx and Engels say that this is self-evident within capitalism and must be challenged — I say, actually it is self-evident within nature and nature is sacrosanct so back off.” Peterson’s form of “critique” is simply to take pre-existing critiques of our sociopolitical world and place them within a broader (supposedly) scientific context and, in the process, turn his own critical thinking back into (by his own definition) a typical thinking. He’s literally bending backwards over his own arguments.

Take, for instance, his analysis of the first “axiom” of the Communist Manifesto — his summary of Marxist historical materialism being that the very engine of history is economic class struggle. Peterson flippantly throws out the relevance of economics and says, sure, class struggle exists, hierarchies exist, but they exist in nature too so why are we so upset about them and put all the blame on economics?

In framing it this way, he seemingly misses the main point that our hierarchies are not “natural” — they are instantiated by capitalism as an economic system. To say that hierarchies have always existed ignores the sense in which economics defines class. It is to ignore the very nature of our hierarchies, in the present epoch, as economic — that is, how economics forms them — which we can interpret as not just being about how much your earn but also how much you are worth, connecting slavery to wage-slavery and encompassing the fallouts of both. Contrary to this, Peterson’s is the sort of argument that takes scientific observations of the natural kingdom and then uses them to reconstruct a sort of secular Divine Right of Kings. It is a gateway to a racist and eugenic thinking.

It is from this flawed analysis that Peterson goes on to make the point that went viral in the aftermath of the debate. He says:

it is finally the case that human hierarchies are not fundamentally predicated on power and I would say that biological / anthropological data on that is crystal clear. You don’t rise to a position of authority that’s reliable in a human society primarily by exploiting other people. It’s a very unstable means of obtaining power.

This clip has done the rounds online already, as it gets a very audible laugh from the crowd, and rightly so. It’s perhaps the most moronic comment anyone could make — but it is also a comment that can be split into a right half and a wrong half, further demonstrating Peterson’s circular reasoning.

People do rise to positions of authority through exploitation — that is true not just of capitalism but the feudalism that birthed it and it is also, arguably, true of the animal kingdom too (depending on how you define exploitation — the exploitation of behaviours, habits, circumstances?) — but it is also right to say that this is an unstable means of obtaining power. Rather than that instability meaning people don’t do it, it leads to the sort of resentment and protest that Peterson dismisses as unfounded. His entire logic system starts to fall into place. Reading the Communist Manifesto at aged 18 and presumably reading it with all the nuance of an 18 year old, Peterson has embarked on a career of self-fulfilling criticism based on the logical fallacies of a teenager.

From this point, it is very hard to take anything else he says seriously. What follows is a long, meandering and confused rant that ends with the basic point: “Actually, relatively speaking, the poor are richer now than they once were… As are the rich…” Thank you, Dr. Peterson. Truly insightful.

I’m left wanting to bail out at this point. I feel like I’ve wasted 40 minutes of my life but I try and stick it out for Zizek’s opening statement at least.

From the outset, it is far more interesting. Taking on the three topics of the debate’s title — Communism, Happiness, Capitalism — he considers the ways in which “Happiness” is not such a simple and virtuous goal for us to give ourselves, especially under a system like capitalism which does all it can to grab the steering wheel of our desires. (It’s an argument I’ve made myself before when writing about Mark Fisher’s Acid Communism — a communism that is “beyond the pleasure principle”.) Zizek says:

I agree that human life or freedom and dignity does not consist just in searching for happiness — no matter how much we spiritualise it — or in the effort to actualise our inner potentials. We have to find some meaningful cause beyond the mere struggle for pleasurable survival.

Zizek’s statement from here is actually quite brilliant, and subtle. He eschews any temptation to echo Peterson’s polemic book report and instead implicitly skewers everything wrong with Peterson’s own body of work and, indeed, the entire situation of their meeting under the cover of the debate’s own title. It’s very cunning.

For instance, he says a few minutes later:

Once traditional authority loses its substantial power it is not possible to return to it. All such returns are, today, a post-modern fake. Does Donald Trump stand for traditional values? No. His conservatism is a post-modern performance; a gigantic ego trip.

Whilst Zizek takes firm aim at Trump, Peterson lingers on the edge of his seat. You wonder how much he knows that he is also in Zizek’s sights. Whilst Peterson through criticisms at a 170-year-old target that just don’t stick, Zizek DESTROYS his opponent in a philosophical proxy war.

If Trump is, according to Zizek, the ultimate postmodernist president, Peterson appears, by proxy, to be the most successful postmodernist public intellectual — the attack-dog of YouTube conservatism, the spewer of the very postmodernism he declares his enemy through his snake-oil salesman act of Making Men Great Again as a neo-traditional ideology.

Zizek powers through point after point from here and everything starts to blur into one. It’s not easy to follow without the post-stream benefit of stopping and starting, but there is substance here — substance, I am nonetheless told by the better informed, that Zizek has already repeated again and again through his most recent books and public appearances. There is nothing new here, but it is in part worth listening to just to see Peterson’s face. He is out of his depth. And it shows.

Whereas Peterson’s history lesson is under-informed, Zizek’s history lesson, encapsulating the 20th / 21st century development of hegemonic ideologies, ends simply with a door through which Peterson blindly walks, being the capstone to Zizek’s own argument simply by being himself. Little else needs to be said. The undertone of Zizek’s argument seems to be: “You want postmodernism? You’ve just seen a masterclass… And wasn’t it shit!” It’s very entertaining.

But honestly, I’m burnt out. It’s hard to adjust to Zizek’s rapid-fire drive-by of our contemporary moment after Peterson’s lacklustre ahistorical ramble. Maybe I’ll come back and watch the follow-up back and forth at a later date… But I doubt I’ll want to blog about this any further.

UPDATE: This, from Quillette of all places, is spot on:

The debate about whether there’s a straight line from Marx to Stalin is an important one, especially given the revival of interest in socialism in the contemporary West. Everyone should want the key participants in that debate to be as well informed as possible. Marxists should want to sharpen their minds by having to confront the best versions of anti-Marxist arguments, while anti-Marxists should want a champion for their position who knows Marx’s writings inside and out. Unfortunately, as he’s shown on many occasions, Jordan Peterson doesn’t fit this bill.

#xenogothic

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piceousbonded · 6 years ago

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DICHOTOMY TESTS: KEITH’S PHILOSOPHY.

Materialism ( 34% ) vs SPIRTIUALISM ( 66% )

spiritualism, in philosophy, is a characteristic of any system of thought that affirms the existence of immaterial reality imperceptible to the senses . so defined, spiritualism embraces a vast array of highly diversified philosophical views . most patently, it applies to any philosophy accepting the notion of an infinite, personal god, the immortality of the soul, or the immateriality of the intellect and will . less obviously, it includes belief in such ideas as finite cosmic forces or a universal mind, provided that they transcend the limits of gross materialistic interpretation . spiritualism as such says nothing about matter, the nature of a supreme being or a universal force, or the precise nature of spiritual reality itself.

Egoism ( 24% ) vs ALTRUISM ( 76% )

altruism, in ethics, a theory of conduct that regards the good of others as the end of moral action . as a theory of conduct, its adequacy depends on an interpretation of “ the good . ” if the term is taken to mean pleasure and the absence of pain, most altruists have agreed that a moral agent has an obligation to further the pleasures and alleviate the pains of other people .

IDEALISM ( 63% ) vs Pragmatism ( 37% )

idealism is, in philosophy, any view that stresses the central role of the ideal or the spiritual in the interpretation of experience . it may hold that the world or reality exists essentially as spirit or consciousness, that abstractions and laws are more fundamental in reality than sensory things, or, at least, that whatever exists is known in dimensions that are chiefly mental --- through and as ideas .

Hedonism ( 39% ) vs ASCETICISM ( 61% )

asceticism, ( from greek askeō : “ to exercise, ” or “ to train ” ), the practice of the denial of physical or psychological desires in order to attain a spiritual ideal or goal . hardly any religion has been without at least traces or some features of asceticism .

NIHILISM ( 54% ) vs Moralism ( 46% )

nihilism ( from latin nihil, meaning “ nothing ” ) is the philosophical viewpoint that suggests the denial or lack of belief towards the reputedly meaningful aspects of life . most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism, which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value . moral nihilists assert that there is no inherent morality, and that accepted moral values are abstractly contrived . nihilism may also take epistemological, ontological, or metaphysical forms, meaning respectively that, in some aspect, knowledge is not possible, or reality does not actually exist .

Rationalism ( 38% ) vs ROMANTICISM ( 62% )

romanticism is a philosophical movement during the age of enlightenment which emphasizes emotional self-awareness as a necessary pre-condition to improving society and bettering the human condition . like the german idealism and kantianism with which it is usually linked in a philosophical context, romanticism was largely centered in germany during the late 18th and early 19th century . it stands in opposition to the rationalism and empiricism of the preceding age of reason, representing a shift from the objective to the subjective .

SKEPTICISM ( 50% ) vs ABSOLUTISM ( 50% )

skepticism is generally any questioning attitude or doubt towards one or more items of putative knowledge or belief . philosophical skepticism comes in various forms . radical forms of skepticism deny that knowledge or rational belief is possible and urge us to suspend judgment on many or all controversial matters . more moderate forms of skepticism claim only that nothing can be known with certainty, or that we can know little or nothing about the " big questions " in life, such as whether god exists or whether there is an afterlife .

absolutism is an ethical view that all actions are intrinsically right or wrong . stealing, for instance, might be considered to be always immoral, even if done for the well-being of others ( e.g., stealing food to feed a starving family ), and even if it does in the end promote such a good . moral absolutism stands in contrast to other categories of normative ethical theories such as consequentialism, which holds that the morality ( in the wide sense ) of an act depends on the consequences or the context of the act .

#as stolen from #hismanners #*( headcanon )* ↝ 「 it is a fire which consumes me but i am the fire. 」

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abstroyer · 4 years ago

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“But what are we studying when we are doing mathematics?

A possible answer is this: we are studying ideas which can be handled as if they were real things.” - Yuri Manin, Mathematics As Metaphor

The key operational point of difference I read in this quote is not the word “real”, but in the word “handled”. What is mathematics to those who know how to handle unreal things? Realness has been bonded with physicality here, which answers my reaction to reading this line: isn’t all thoughts real things? In the word “handled” I am told that I can use these math ideas as tangible “things”, do something with them. To do this mathematicians create artificial physical laws for these ideas, foundations, literal grounds and metaphysical forces metamathematics. The metaphors for these move from centering manipulatability with sets and groups of “things” to recognizing their ideaness in categories and how ideas are necessarily grounded in a physical reality, ideas exist from toposes of experienced reality.

The Earth and sky magic has never left math because its blended into its epistemology by means of physical experience. True is coded language for known experience from the view of (some) humans embedded experience of their earthly reality. Math becomes a practice of creating idea-things that are so similar to experienced things that they’re functionally indistinguishable from things, but not exclusively bound to specific experienced things. That is, the idea-things exist as their own things.

The strangeness in this is that the artificial physical laws are completely breakable, as the space of ideas is still the space of ideas. The only thing backing their reality is a certain group-consensus that these laws are so well defined that they functionally mimic physical reality, making them interoppable with physical reality.

Breaking the artifical laws of math requires presenting a reality where other idea physics exist. Mathematicians encounter these and say “this doesn’t make any sense” and explain why using the grammar of their idea-physics, which is so compatible with experiential reality that anything that violates it must also be physically meaningless or inapplicable.

Mathematics being true implies a physically-applicablism of a limited set of ideas. It only says what says what it can be allowed in itself, and this is a crucial point, because with that unmathematical ideas are free from being not physically-applicable, they are only not compatible with a set of ideas that is guarantied to be extremely similar to physical that is interoppable with physical reality. If someone thinks that something incompatible with math is unrealizable, they’re saying that it doesn’t work with artifical-physics, why would it work with real physics? Math cannot offer any permanent guarantee of this of course, that’s why it allows for the expansion of its laws, but since it’s a mimic of physics’ physical laws, everything that once worked should keep working.

If something unmathematical becomes mathematical later somehow, it would have to be in a way that doesn’t make the previous ideas not work, because they have been shown to work with physical reality or relate to that which works with physical reality as in the case of math ideas that haven’t found an application yet. If an application comes after an idea, it shows only that ideas can precede actualization into physical realities (besides the physical reality neurons or whatever is the literal physical component of a thought). This is especially true if they’re communicated in a way that has worked before. It all adds on to the experience of living as a physical Earth being, as another set of things on it.

Any unmathematical idea can be communicated in a way that makes it extremely clear and physically evocative to others. If an idea being communicated evokes a response related to a physical experience, than it must relate to physical reality. Thus, lawless ideas evoke truth too.

Math becomes a trust network of people cannot trace the physical origins of their own evoked feelings, wishing to communicate clear and wonderful thoughts that always work. Math can be decontextualized and inappropriate but it can’t be meaningless, because it has a core group of believers in its meaning. This generates a community of people who can share ideas guaranteed to evoke certain physical realities if performed in the prescribed way. Poets fill a room with people whose physical realities are evoked with ideas too, but each evocation is bounded by the physical experiences each person there. Ideas at a poetry reading become operable in totally uncontrollable ways, and physical reality is enacted through every individual in the room’s memory and attention interacting.

The sameness of application, ideas having the same results every time, is something that is variable in poetic thoughts, maybe influenced by shared experiences and preferential attachment of understanding one another. There’s a finite history bounding the interpretations to a poetic evocation, though the interpretations are open ended. Math differs from poetry in this sense because the methods of interpretation include prescriptions for interpretations that should work the same way every time you do it in exactly that way. Errors become misinterpretations. Errors make something happen still unless it leads to something undefined.

Undefined is its own entity in math, it is not zero or infinity it is simply unknown. Undefined could imply truth or falsity of the idea. It’s only true in bounded laws of math. If one takes a mathematical universe where undefined=false, it would imply that every operation can happen, even if the operation itself leads to a false result. 1/0= something defined, you just can’t find it, so you don’t know what to say next, there is a definite idea-physical effect to what you’re doing with dividing by zero there, it is defined, but you don’t know what it does or how it’s defined.

Putting this into algebra terms makes undefined the same as a variable. n/0=x, solve for x: (n/0)0=x*0 = 0=0, doesn’t say anything about x, none of the tricks work. you can’t define it, but it is defined according to the rules above. You just don’t know the definition. x = ... something that happens when you divide n by 0, you just don’t know what that is because you don’t know what it’s like to divide n by zero.

Numbers evoke something, so does zero, so does division, they all have a lot written about what they are which comes from what people feel they are. but for some reason dividing 0 into smaller parts doesn’t make sense to people because they’ve never known the absence of something to have a particular magnitude that can be portioned.

Poets evoke magnitudes of absence often, and grouping evocations of feelings can be ordered by intensity. It makes sense in poetry to talk of strong absences or slight absences as long as those ideas evoke something in someone, even if it’s only the poet. Dividing an absence by one could be the whole of the evoked feeling of absence, and 2 would be twice that. Bit this is counting feelings, not magnitudes of absence. Here poetry makes its own promise: if you interpret my words you should have a physical reaction somehow related to the meaning of the words. The meaning of a multiplicity absence can exist in that space because it’s an open ended interpretation. Absence has meaning to an interpreter and multiplicity has meaning, and putting the meanings together can have meaning if interpreted in a way that is meaningful to the person interpreting.

If a poem tells me of a big nothing or little bits of emptiness, i interpret those phrases as a great feeling memory of nothingness or absence, and fleeting moments of noticing bits of vacuity flitting by. There’s a physicality to that, so poetry gives physical meaning to dividing by zero in a way that math lets go of, simply saying it’s undefined in response to the challenge.

This shows that mathematics do not encompass all that is physically enactable, and that something false within math is not necessarily false within physical reality. Probability might be evoked and someone could say that n/0 probably has no physical meaning, but if someone says in a poem something about a piece of zero and it evokes a physical response, then that idea is embedded in physical reality, and it seems the model they selected for their reality didn’t include the space of vague felt evocations of meaning. It only means it will probably never work within strict definitions of proportionality, which exists on a clearly defined metric, which corresponds so often to reality that it forgets special case situations, like when 0 means a relational absence. Words relating to large absences have different feelings than words relating to small absences: grief measures 0, unless grief is always an absolute quality of absence. There’s even positive evocations of different magnitudes of zero, like ideas about total nothingness vs something with an essence of nothingness. There’s a kind of two sizes of zero thing happening that I hope to communicate more clearly. Right now it’s only a feeling within myself, hoping that the feeling can be at least vaguely evocable in whoever else.

For those who need reason, I’m saying that since there can exist a felt magnitude of absence, there can be mutiple magnitudes of zero itself. This only can be so within a relational picture, as total nihilism is relative to essential emptiness, and those two concepts are also relative to the concept of something coming out of and leading to nothing (like the universe from nothing idea). It’s not as much that they’re talking about different nothings, but one nothing that feels different and seems to have different properties. 0-1-0 of nothing becoming something becoming nothing has 2 nothings in it, 0_1 ^ 0_2, and 0_3 = 0-sub-zero because after there’s something there’s only one other nothing, so far. The first zero exists independentally of the second zero in relation to the 1, nothing before and nothing after are two different nothings. Something with nothingness-essence is 1&0 because the something is operable as something and not nothing, even though it eventually shows itself to operate as nothing. The nihilist interpretation of only 0 can be a different zero because its existence relates only to itself: there exists only 0 and 0=0.

If 0 = all that is nothing, then these different 0s would sum to 0, because they each are nothing. We have 3 in the first case, if we start counting from zero, one in the second and one in the third. making it so |5/0|=5 at least in this hypothetical space of a blog post, simply because i’ve listed 5 instances of 0 once, but meaningfully 5/0=0*0*0*0*0=0, which is a 6th zero. If every zero has its own relevant instance, then they can be seen as all unique zeros, and the set of all 0s is greater than zero. What I’m really doing is dividing by the subset of all zeros, not any of the zero members of it.

The set of all zeros is not the same as the empty set if the empty set is the set of zero objects, because that only has one zero in it.

A brief reminder that I’m not trying to communicate ideas that are guaranteed to be true to physical reality. I am working in the space of all the conceptual 0s in existence. In math only, it could be that all the zeros of one algebra, even if only one zero, can be seen as a different zero than the zero of a different algebra, but the zero of a language containing only those two algebras would have a yet different zero. All these zeros still = 0, but they’re all different zeroes. The set of all zeros is partially countable in this space.

The space of all the zeros of a polynomial can be countable, applying operations to the sets of zeros allows for a cardinal arithmetic of zeroes. If one polynomial has a finite number of zeros, that’s a set with a magnitude of as many zeros are in it, and that magnitude can have regular mathematical operations performed on it and it can operate with the magnitudes of the sets of zeros of other polynomials. Even though it’s all the same 0, something is happening where a magnitude is created by how something becomes nothing: anything that can be counted and made to = 0 makes a zero which can also be counted.

If one made a set of all the different ways something can equal 0 in all of math of all time, then there’d be a maximum sized set of zero, and this set is strangely huge...

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