Imagined Reality

Is it just Gamma projection?

So, yesterday I published a new book, called Veriphysics: The Refutation of Kant, which will be of absolutely zero interest to the vast majority of the readers here, but it is usefully illustrative of the sort of things that Sigmas do, and furthermore, you can utilize as a useful response whenever someone questions the legitimacy of the SSH and the credentials of its inventor.

“Yes, well, he successfully refuted Kant’s unknowability doctrine, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that his observations on human behavioral patterns may be somehow relevant.”

That’s a bit of a joke, you see, because the credentialists’ attempt to dismiss the SSH as illegitimate due to it being non-scientific is, completely unbeknownst to them, itself dependent upon the Enlightenment limitation of explanation to mechanism and efficient causation, which itself relies upon the Kantian assertion of the absolute unknowability of das Ding an sich. Which assertion this book has, as you might be able to glean from the title, refuted.

And this is why they say never explain a joke…

Anyhow, the book is serious, it’s already a bestseller in the epistemology and metaphysics categories, it is the most intellectually significant thing I have done with the possible exceptions of creating a) the Triveritas and b) the first-person shooter escort mission, and the first two and last two chapters are perfectly comprehensible to any intelligent reader.

Chapters 4 and 5, not so much, and you can forget about chapters 6-8 if you’re not accustomed to playing around with mathematics that looks like Chinese ideographs on a regular basis. But the two appendices are quite good and reasonably accessible.

The reason the book is historically important is that it liberates reason and human cognition from the mechanistic chains artificially and erroneously imposed upon them 245 years ago by Immanual Kant, hence the imagery of the key and the subtitle: The Fault in the Foundation and the Key to the Closed Door.

But Kant isn’t the only intellectual figure of note to have confused his intellectual meanderings about reality with the genuine article. Consider the way in which the Nobel-winning author of Lord of the Flies postulated, quite incorrectly, juvenile man’s inhumanity to juvenile man in direct contradiction to actual historical accounts of the way in which groups of young survivors behaved.

The Nobel laureate Sir William Golding, whose novel Lord of the Flies turned notions of childhood innocence on their head, admitted in private papers that he had tried to rape a 15-year-old girl during his teenage years, it emerged today.

Golding’s papers also described how he had experimented, while a teacher at a public school, with setting boys against one another in the manner of Lord of the Flies, which tells the story of young air crash survivors on a desert island during a nuclear war.

The revelations will appear in a forthcoming biography of the writer, who died in 1993 at the age of 81.

John Carey, the emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford university, was given access to a personal journal kept by Golding – who carefully guarded personal information during his life – for 20 years…

The attempted rape involved a Marlborough girl, named Dora, who had taken piano lessons with Golding. It happened when he was 18 and on holiday during his first year at Oxford. Carey quotes the memoir as partially excusing the attempted rape on the grounds that Dora was “depraved by nature” and, at 14, was “already sexy as an ape”.

It reveals that Golding told his wife he had been sure the girl “wanted heavy sex”. She fought him off and ran away as he stood there shouting: “I’m not going to hurt you,” the memoir said…

The author’s psychological experiments with his classes at Bishop Wordsworth’s school, in Salisbury, caused his eyes “to come out like organ stops”, according to his private journal. He divided pupils into gangs, with one attacking a prehistoric camp and the other defending it.

Lord of the Flies is pure Gamma projection. It says absolutely nothing valid about the human condition, but it does say an awful lot about the sewer that was flowing inside Mr. Golding’s head.

And the fact that it was awarded a Nobel prize says even more about the nature of what passes for the 20th Century intellectual elite.