Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

I seek an end to politics, whether it is conducted with ballots or bullets. Politics is a battlefield in which not only are there winners and losers but there is a net loss, as well. Politics is a pack of hyenas trying to gulp down as much meat from a kill as possible before everyone else does the same, snarling at each other in hatred. It is not a group of representatives coming together to fashion the best public policy for a society. Indeed, the best public policy would be for these legislators to immediately abdicate never to return. But to what extent can politics be eliminated from society? I think that a crucial limit to this undertaking is manifested in the difference between ex ante and ex post coercion.

Suppose that there is a purely voluntary organization that you want to join, such as a corporation or a condo association. The trick, however, is that setting the policies that affect the members is not done through universal agreement. Rather, a board of directors or a council is elected which then elects the officers, such as the CEO or president, and then they make the decisions. This is indeed the most common way of running organizations, because it is normally much more efficient than subjecting any change to unanimous approval.

So, to what do you consent when you join? Do you consent to the current policies of the officers or the board of directors? Do you consent to the procedure for changing them? To the procedure for changing the procedures? To the constitution of the organization? But all of these are potentially changeable. You certainly expect that joining will be better for you than not joining, but once inside, at any time you have three choices: to exit, to accept the status quo, or, of you are dissatisfied with the current policies, to change things around, if the possibility is there. So, it is inevitable that you will engage in “private politics.”

Suppose that the current members of your condo board (where you bought your house voluntarily) have gone nuts. They have invited drug dealers and prostitutes onto their own property and that owned in common by the association. There has been a string of thefts in the association, and the board has refused to cooperate with the police, suggesting that they are somehow involved. And they have raised the monthly tax for everyone except themselves. What do you do? You can sell the house and move far far away. But you find quickly that the property is now worth only half of what you paid for it. (So by buying it you made an entrepreneurial error.) You can endure the present regime. Or you can try to change the “government” and fix things. If you opt for the last way, you have to participate in politics.

So ex ante by buying the house or shares in a corporation or anything like that you were certainly not coerced. But once you are in, you can be coerced ex post by having your wishes thwarted in some way by your fellow members.

However, the costs of making the error of joining can be minimized. How? By (1) making sure that there is plenty of competition between the associations; (2) by tying the welfare of the members’ agents or officers to the welfare of the members or shareholders themselves; (3) by making it possible to affect a change in the governing order without a great deal of difficulty (e.g., through a “hostile takeover”); and (4) by minimizing exit costs (or, at least, making them explicit to all newcomers), so that there is no such thing as “as soon as I think I’m out, they pull me back in.” — Consider the costs of moving out of one’s apartment. I estimate it may cost a couple of hundred dollars for the truck, a day of packing and loading your stuff onto the truck, several hours driving time, and a few days of unpacking. Compare this to the cost of leaving the United States itself. These are much higher. It is partly for that reason why condo taxes are $100/month, whereas federal taxes can reach 50% of your income. You can’t run away that easily.

There are a number of differences between an action intended to attain a particular end and an act of creation. The former entails a clear separation of the means and the end. The end is well-defined. The utility of the means depends entirely upon the utility of the end. The expenditure of effort required in order to accomplish the task at hand is a psychic cost. Attaining the end changes the psychological state of the person from less satisfied to more satisfied.

In the beginning or during any creative act, on the contrary, the utility of the state of affairs immediately following creation is never known. The motivation lies not in the anticipation of the future conditions in which the obstacle that prevents one from becoming more satisfied has been removed but in the creative process itself. There is no disutility of labor: the process, being the means by which one’s power and competence are actualized, is pleasing in itself, and the final product is merely its culmination to be later enjoyed or discarded depending on its quality. A creative act need not change the person: it is rather the “pouring out” of oneself into a thing (or creature) being created.

This applies as much to work as to procreation (which for the Christians has a good deal of theological significance). Surely, no couple intends to conceive a child by going in the bedroom and deciding heroically to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of their goal. Rather, they engage in a process which for them is an end in itself and of which the child is the final result. The end and the means are one.

Consider the frequent charge made by self-proclaimed moralists that wealthy individuals do not “deserve” or “really own” their wealth because they owe it to the existence of society. While this is true enough, the moralists forget that “society,” too, owes its prosperity to the contributions of the wealthy. We can just as easily allege that the not-wealthy do not “really own” their amenities because without the entrepreneurs who became rich by serving them, these latter would have remained in wretched poverty. In short, if A exchanges goods with B, is it not absurd for B to argue that he has a rightful claim on some of A’s gains from trade because without him A would not have been able to gain anything at all? Why can A not reason likewise? Does John not legitimately enjoy his happiness (and must therefore relinquish it) because he owes it to the existence of Mary to whom he is married? The argument proves far too much.

In general, how the gains from trade are split or what the consumer and producer surpluses are, are not questions for economics to answer; they rather depend on the bargaining or negotiating skills of the trading parties.

One may have noticed that we are never shown on television images of everyday life in the “evil” nations, nor read about them in mainstream publications. The reason is that doing so may convert floating abstractions into concrete living and breathing and useful people, exotic locations, and obvious civilizations, the sight of which may cause one to lose interest somewhat in cheering for abstract bombs falling on abstract cities. According to Yahoo, for example, Iraq “used to be one of the best places for shopping in the Middle East.” Information like this may impel the public, bewitched by crude ideologies like “democracy” and statism and various apocalyptic creeds, to focus on what really does go on in the real world. It may redirect irrational gung-ho murderous impulses into business relationships. It may even restore scientific cooperation.

From the point of view of the political class, unfortunately, all of these things would be bad. That is why we are unlikely ever to see anything except a few “liberated” beggars amidst the rubble when it is time, after the war, to shake down the taxpayers for foreign aid.

So as you shiver in the cold and the dark,
Look into the fire and see in its spark –
My eye
Watching over you.

As you walk in the wind’s whistling claws,
Listen past the howling of the wolf’s jaws.
My song
Comes to you.

And when you’re lost in the trackless snow,
Look up high where the eagles go.
My star
Shines for you.

In deep, dark mine or on crumbling peak,
Hear the words of love I speak.
My thoughts
Are with you.

You are not forsaken.
You are not forgotten.
The North cannot swallow you.
The snows cannot bury you.
I will come for you.
Faerun will grow warmer,
And the gods will smile
But oh, my love, guard yourself well –
All this may not happen for a long, long while.

– from Neverwinter Nights

Which I’ll be presidentin’: here.

Mises writes:

Negation, the notion of the absence or nonexistence of something or of the denial of a proposition, is conceivable to the human mind. But the notion of an absolute negation of everything, the representation of an absolute nothing, is beyond man’s comprehension. The Lord, teaches the Bible, created the world out of nothing; but God himself was there from eternity and will be there in eternity, without a beginning and without an end. …

It follows that scientific research will never succeed in providing a full answer to what is called the riddles of the universe. It can never show how out of an inconceivable nothing emerged all that is and how one day all that exists may again disappear and the “nothing” alone will remain. (The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, 52-53)

Thus, nothingness is “inconceivable.” And it should be obvious that it is meaningless to talk about “complete nothingness.” Language itself falters. There “is” or “was” nothing? But when we use the verb “to be” we talk about existence. We cannot even say that “nothingness ‘is not’,” because is-not-ness, too, presupposes a non-existent essence, which still must have an ideal existence in somebody’s mind. Nothingness is obviously a term of some kind, but it does not refer. The absence of both ideal and actual existence is therefore literally inconceivable, because one cannot conceive of something which cannot by definition be not only “out there” but in the mind, as well.

But if absolute nothingness can neither be conceived nor refer to anything, then it is an entirely empty term. There is, however, existence, which as such must be necessary or essential or self-existent. This means that it cannot all of a sudden decide to disappear, because then we’d end up with “nothingness” which as we have seen is not at all meaningful. Now all beings with which we are familiar are contingent; they may have ideal existence but not necessarily actual existence. There must therefore be a being in whose mind all ideal existences take root. Further, this being itself must not be in another’s mind; in it the ideal and the actual coalesce, are one and the same. Moreover, this being must be absolutely necessary, that is, not capable of disappearing. This being would be a self-existent aseic being.

And now, of course, we recognize that being as God.

It may be objected that nothingness is indeed inconceivable, but it may still be possible. Start from “∀x” and delete from existence one object after another. At the end you will end up with nothing. Thoughts?

Just Thomist has his own opinion to the effect that as wayfarers we know God through creatures but love Him in Himself. Therefore, the will is a higher faculty than the intellect. But in heaven we will both know and love God as He is in Himself. Therefore… the will is as noble as the intellect? Or less noble?

By way of comment, all things are done for pleasure, whether they belong to action or contemplation. The practical intellect perpetually churns out means to one’s ends, the general end being satisfaction of desires or contentment of the will. Thus, prudence is a slave to passion (by which I mean both the sensitive and the intellectual appetites). Nor does a man contemplate unless doing so gives him pleasure. The intellect then is a tool with the help of which desires are satisfied. As Mises writes,

It is man’s innate nature that he seeks to preserve and to strengthen his life, that he is discontented and aims at removing uneasiness, that he is in search of what may be called happiness. … Human reason serves this vital impulse. Reason’s biological function is to preserve and to promote life and to postpone its extinction as long as possible. (Human Action, 882)

According to Aquinas, ultimate pleasure results from the operation of the intellect in contemplation of the “very Essence of the First Cause” (ST, II-I, 3, 8) as its proper accident. Delight, he writes, ranks after vision of God, because the delight is due to the suitability of the vision for the repose of the will. (ST, II-I, 4, 2) Vision comes first, and pleasure follows upon it. Pleasure then is what a good man will naturally feel while seeing God. Delight is merely “attendant” on vision. (ST, II-I, 4, 1) But this is obvious and does not entail that the purpose of the vision is not pleasure or peace and joy. It could be said, alternatively, that vision is a necessary constituent of happiness, such that without the attainment of the Sovereign Good, true happiness cannot be had, but that vision ministers to pleasure nonetheless.

Further,

[According to Aristotle,] “good and evil,” which are objects of the will, “are in things,” but “truth and error,” which are objects of the intellect, “are in the mind.” When, therefore, the thing in which there is good is nobler than the soul itself, in which is the idea understood; by comparison with such a thing, the will is higher than the intellect. But when the thing which is good is less noble than the soul, then even in comparison with that thing the intellect is higher than the will. Wherefore the love of God is better than the knowledge of God; but, on the contrary, the knowledge of corporeal things is better than the love thereof. (ST, I, 82, 3)

Here, I think, he is being too smart for his own good. In the final analysis, the will and the intellect are united into one person, something which is peculiar only to humans, angels, and God, for no dumb animal has either, and though separating them for study is useful, trying to find out which one is above the other is vain.

I finally decided to heed the advice of some of the respondents to my article on Star Trek and bought Firefly. Man, what a show! And they canceled it after only 9 episodes? Are they out of their minds? This is the most entertaining, well-made, and fun sci-fi series with razor-sharp dialog I have ever seen. There is no techno-babble nor the evil close-ups. I just fell in love with the characters. Some episodes stand out, like “Our Mrs. Reynolds”: I tell you, I did not see that coming (you’ll know what I’m talking about). “Ariel” advanced the plot by leaps and bounds, and the special effects were amazing. And “War Stories,” featuring the psychopathic Niska, was absolutely hilarious, torture notwithstanding.

All characters are Artisans, unlike the all-NT Star Trek which explains the show’s tactical cleverness. Jayne is a bit of a caricature of an ISTP but a deliberate one used for comic relief. (But something could have been made out of him had the show had a chance to progress.) There is not a trace of political correctness or of the momentary victim group obsessions of the political class. In other words, men are men, etc. (The economics of the show is not always up to par: in “Ariel” it is never explained why there is a black market in medicine. Are there price controls? Is the industry socialized? The hospital was strangely enough government-run, and we all know that government-run anything is useless and inconsistent with high civilization.)

The acting is exceptionally good, as well.

One of the coolest things is how each episode starts pretty much where the previous episode leaves off. References to earlier episodes are abundant and natural.

I recommend Firefly to anyone. It’s only $20 on Amazon.com. Get it and enjoy the ride.

Multiple Attributes Disproofs of the Existence of God

(2) Omniscience and Immutability
(3) Omniscience, Eternity, and Time

2. Omniscience and Immutability
by Norman Kretzmann

3. Omniscience, Eternity, and Time
by Anthony Kenny

Here we come back to the problem of whether an immutable God knows what time it is. God must know that it is now t₁ and not t₂, and at a later time God must know that it is now t₂ and not t₁, which seems to cause His knowledge to be variable and God to be mutable.

One interesting but incorrect, in my view, solution is to posit that God does change but only in such a way so as to preserve His perfection of omniscience. That is, God’s knowledge of the current time or of present-tense propositions changes with time or the truth-value of those propositions but only in order to keep Him all-knowing. God knows at t₁ that it is then t₁, and He knows at some later time t₂ that it is then not t₁, but this changing knowledge merely safeguards His omniscience. Thus, although at any given time the content of God’s knowledge is different from the content of His knowledge at any other time, He still knows everything there is to know at all times. (That may be the reason for William Lane Craig’s suggestion that logically prior to creation God exists in “undifferentiated time,” and after creation God is in time.) Nor does God appear to lose His pure actuality on this theory, since at all times His mind remains “adjusted” to all truths, changing as they are.

This solution, however, is to be rejected, because it unbecomingly anthropomorphizes God.

Kenny’s paper begins with a critique of the doctrine of divine timelessness. According to Aquinas, he says, God can know future contingents “because God does not see future contingent facts as being future but as being present; future contingents are present to God. It is, St. Thomas says, nearer the truth to say that if God knows a thing, then it is than to say that if he knows it, then it will be.” (The Impossibility of God, 210) Now this is correct, to a degree. What Aquinas really says is that

all things that are in time are present to God from eternity, not only because He has the types of things present within Him, as some say; but because His glance is carried from eternity over all things as they are in their presentiality. Hence it is manifest that contingent things are infallibly known by God, inasmuch as they are subject to the divine sight in their presentiality; yet they are future contingent things in relation to their own causes. (ST, I, 14, 13)

To see future things “in their presentiality” means to see them as if they were present, already having come to be. It does not mean that God thinks that future events really are present. (The important question is how does God know these future events. We can’t surely be content with saying that God sees the future as if it were present and that it just magically happens to be exactly like the real future. So, my answer is that God knows future contingents by perfectly predicting them.) Kenny continues that “on St. Thomas’s view, my typing of this paper is simultaneous with the whole of eternity. Again, on this view, the great fire of Rome is simultaneous with the whole of eternity. Therefore, while I type these very words, Nero fiddles heartlessly on.” (211) There are two ways of getting out of this difficulty. First is to argue that only the present moment, the now is simultaneous with the whole of eternity. The fire of Rome was simultaneous with God’s eternal present, but is no longer such. In fact, on some theories the fire of Rome no longer even exists. The second is to point out that the simultaneity in question is merely metaphorical. Perhaps what this term means with respect to the time-relationship between God and the world is that for God the presentiality of a past event looks as vivid as the presentiality of a future event. But nothing about this admittedly awesome characteristic entails an annulment of the difference between tenses for us creatures.

Back to time. Kenny points out that Aquinas thinks that God knows propositions (”enunciable things”), but

not after the manner of enunciable things, as if in His intellect there were composition or division of enunciations; for He knows each thing by simple intelligence, by understanding the essence of each thing; as if we by the very fact that we understand what man is, were to understand all that can be predicated of man. This, however, does not happen in our intellect, which discourses from one thing to another, forasmuch as the intelligible species represents one thing in such a way as not to represent another. Hence when we understand what man is, we do not forthwith understand other things which belong to him, but we understand them one by one, according to a certain succession. On this account the things we understand as separated, we must reduce to one by way of composition or division, by forming an enunciation. Now the species of the divine intellect, which is God’s essence, suffices to represent all things. (ST, I, 14, 14)

Our author attributes to Aquinas, correctly, it seems, the view that God does not express His knowledge in propositions. Moreover, just as two different sentences can express a single proposition (e.g., “It is raining” in English and “Дождит” in Russian mean the exact same thing, viz., that it is raining), so two different propositions can express the same item of knowledge. An example is, “Today is Friday” (uttered on Friday) and “Yesterday was Friday” (uttered on Saturday). “God’s knowledge is not expressed in propositions, and so he can know the same item of knowledge permanently and unchangingly. It is only because we are temporal changing beings that we have to express the one item of knowledge first in one proposition and then in another.” (217) Kenny is not satisfied with that solution for a number of reasons, but it is surely an interesting attempt to escape the problem.

Hector-Neri Castañeda’s approach is different. He first points out that the two “now”s in the statement

(4a) First X knows that it is now t₁ and not t₂, and then X knows that it is now t₂ and not t₁.

express indexical references by the speaker and not by X. That is, if I utter (4a), then by “now” I mean my own present and not X’s present. Reformulating (4a) in order to get rid of such indexicals yields

(4b) At t₁ X knows [tenselessly] that it is [tenselessly] then t₁, but not t₂, and at t₂, later than t₁, X knows that it is then t₂, but not t₁.

Castañeda comments: “semantically the difference is enormous: (a) ‘now’ does, while ‘then’ does not, express an indexical reference by the speaker; (b) ‘then’ does, while ‘now’ does not, attribute to X an indexical reference to time t₁ in the first and to time t₂ in the second conjunct; (c) whereas sentence (4a) cannot be used by Kretzmann or anybody else to make exactly the same statement at times other than t₁ and t₂, sentence (4b) can be used repeatedly at any time by anybody to make exactly the same statement on each occasion of its utterance.”

Note that (4b) is not equivalent to

(4c) At t₁ X knew that it was t₁ at t₁, but not t₂, and at t₂ he knew that it was t₂ at t₂, but not t₁.

This is because X does not need to know what time it is at either t₁ or t₂ in order for (4c) to be true. It is always obviously t₁ at t₁, etc.

What have we accomplished? We have rephrased (4a) into an equivalent statement (4b), such that X can potentially know all four propositions in which we are interested (”it is then_t1 t₁” ; “it is then_t1 not t₂” ; “it is then_t2 t₂” ; “it is then_t2 not t₁” ) at both t₁ and t₂. To show how this can be true, our author uses a trick. Given the principle

(P) If a sentence of the form ‘X knows that a person Y knows that …’ formulates a true statement, then the person X knows that statement formulated by the clause filling the blank ‘…’,

we can transform (4b) into

(4d) Time t₂ is later than t₁, and at t₁ X knows both (1) that it is then_t1 t₁, but not t₂, and (2) that somebody knows (or would know) at t₂ that it is (would be) then_t2 t₂, but not t₁.

Why do we need a “somebody” to replace X? Because X is in time, namely, at t₁, and while he is at t₁, he cannot be at t₂ to know that it will then be t₂. But if somebody else knows it at t₂, and X knows (at t₁) that that person knows it, then he in effect knows (at t₁) that at t₂ it is (or would be) then t₂, etc. All four relevant propositions are thereby known by X at t₁. Clever, isn’t it? However, I don’t think that this rather elaborate procedure is necessary. For

(4e) Time t₂ is later than t₁, and at t₁ X knows both (1) that it is then_t1 t₁, but not t₂, and (2) that if X were at t₂, then it would be then_t2 t₂, but not t₁

is equally effective. X can conclude from the fact that he knows that the counterfactual in (2) is true at t₁ that the second pair of propositions is true as much as the first pair is.

Thus, if God can know all four propositions at any time, then Kretzmann’s inference from God’s knowing what time it is to His being mutable is invalid. But we are not done yet, for with God we can rephrase (4d) in yet another way. Let

(4f) be: Time t₂ is later than t₁, and at t₁ God knows both (1) that it is then_t1 t₁, but not t₂, and (2) that, because He is omniscient, God knows at t₂ that it is then_t2 t₂, but not t₁.

God knows at t₁ that He knows at t₂ that p. Hence God knows at t₁ that p. QED.

Conclusion. With enough ingenuity, solutions to questions such as “Does God know what time it is?” which preserve both His omniscience and immutability can be found even if one does not accept the B theory of time.

References:

Castañeda, Hector-Neri. “Omniscience and Indexical Reference,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 64, No. 7. (Apr. 13, 1967), pp. 203-210.

There is first the enemy of the body: entropy. Things unwind, wear and tear, break, grow old and die, and in general go from order to disorder. This force of “death and decay,” as I put it here, is ever-present and impersonal to match the fact that bodies cannot be persons.

Then there are enemies of the soul, viz., the demons, which are, on the contrary, personal opponents to square off against the intelligence and will of the human souls.

The first enemy eventually wins no matter what; the second, hopefully, loses.

Information here.