REASON FROM UNREASON

Superior CRAZINESS For Superior LOGIC.

CALM IS OVERRATED, CRAZINESS A LOGICAL NECESSITY:

Abstract: Why do people go crazy? Is it fate, or is it evolution? Is it disease, or is it creativity?

 Two of the creators of modern mathematics and metamathematics, Georg Cantor and Kurt Godel, experienced some craziness. Nietzsche produced some of his best work before he went insane. Van Gogh experienced serious mental difficulties. Bolztman killed himself. All these cases were within a generation. Those may all be unrelated accidents, sure. 

 However I will show below that superior intelligence in a species can only come from an ability to engineer (productive) craziness. (Perhaps the reason why chimps and bears are so unpredictable: they are not just clever, but a bit crazy!)

 What president Roosevelt said of the bankers:”I welcome their hatred!” may sound crazy to some, and it is exactly the opposite of the praises the all too cool Obama bestow on bankers, every chance he gets. But Roosevelt domesticated the bankers, whereas Obama got domesticated by them. Of course the superior intelligent one was Roosevelt, who knew it was smart to go crazy on the bankers. It’s certainly crazy to cling to an appearance of sanity in an insane situation (Eichmann used Kant to justify his crimes, an appearance of philosophy to promote infamy.)

Thus insanity is hardwired in Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Perhaps Homo Wise Wise, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, should be renamed Homo Crazy Wise: Homo Sapiens Demens! 

This has some fascinating, but sinister implications for Artificial Intelligence. In his Turing Test for intelligence, Alan Turing forgot craziness. That was crazy.

 It also means that, as insanity will follow a normal distribution, some substantial part of any human population will be insanely dangerous. 

 As technological capability improves exponentially, the danger exists that this insanity will be also exponentially amplified (as happened with the death camps of WWII).

 Hence the necessity of counterbalancing it by augmenting truth, and thus transparency, just as exponentially, too. 

 If we want survival, we have to become truth fanatics. A new religion.

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 MADNESS AS THE SOLUTION TO LOGICAL INCOMPLETENESS:

[Advanced.]

 The Incompleteness Theorems in logic say that any logical system big enough to contain arithmetic is incomplete, in the sense that there is an infinite number of propositions, about natural numbers, which are true but that cannot be proven in that logical system.

 If it cannot be proven, it has to be assumed (and that, an infinite number of times! It’s a crazy world out there: it turns out that, if a logical system is complete, it’s inconsistent, etc. (If one supposes the usual properties of arithmetic to be true.) 

 These facts were demonstrated in the 20C, but they were true all along. I claim that there is a strict correspondence between brain circuitry and logical completeness. Thus, brain operations stumbled on circuitry incompleteness, all the time, ever since there are advanced brains, and they think. 

 The problem of logical incompleteness is solved in metalogic by making assumptions. The same holds with brain circuitry: logical incompleteness there is also solved by making assumptions. 

 How does the brain make assumptions? Well it just connects different neurons, or different parts of the brain with axons. In other words: Axons for axioms.

 How does the relationship work? Incompleteness in logic is caused by a confrontation between the finiteness of logic on a piece of paper (or in a Turing Machine), and the uncountable infinity it gives rise to (modulo some assumptions mathematicians classically do). Basically the finite axioms allow, modulo some infinite choice procedure (for example Cantor’s diagonalization), to build an infinite number of further axioms.

 The same happens with neuronal and neuroglial networks: they are finite. But, once given, it’s possible to build other neuronal and glial networks different from them. That’s the equivalent of the Godel proposition built from a Godel number. How does one build such a number? Well, with dendrites, etc. That in turn happens if and only if, some astrocytes get in high gear, andthat happens in case of high emotions. In other words, if the brain builds new assumptions through new emotions. And probably, the more different the assumptions, the more different the emotions.

 Hominids who practiced a bit of craziness were evolutionary advantaged, because they found more readily solutions to logical incompleteness at hand. Craziness allowed to find new, necessary axioms. Thus evolution learned to exploit logical incompleteness.

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 NO UNREASON, NO CREATION:

 An excellent example is geometry without the parallel postulate; it’s a logically incomplete system. For more than 2,000years mathematicians tried to prove that it could be made complete. 

 But the solution was very obvious, and very crazy: take a sphere, and try to do geometry on it. Take a saddle, and try to do geometry on it. 

 A modicum of craziness is intelligence’s friend.

 Hence a necessity, to make Creative Artificial Intelligence would be to contrive crazy robots.

 [I will deny all and any responsibility when Artificial Intelligence engineers use that idea to make more clever killer robots.] 

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 LYING AS THE WORST CRIME:

 So there is a hard core of badness out there. If one ignores it, it will grow: fascism, before and during World War Two is an excellent example. The more ignored fascism was, the bigger it got. 

 If one ignores the hard core of badness out there, one is lying, big time. Because one claims that something potentially lethal in giant proportions is of no consequence. That’s a lie, if there ever was one. Lying about nothing is not a lie. Lying about something that can turn into everything is a terrible lie.

 Look at the haggard, drugged out, half dead, passed out face of the cruel and crazed maniac who shot 71 people in a movie theater in Colorado. Or the other crazed maniac in Norway, killing 73 Norwegians to save them from impure blood, or to save Norwegian culture (whatever).

 Such people are bad, they are pathologically bad. Maybe they took too much drugs, maybe their neurohormones are all wrong from more natural causes. The basic fact, though, is that there will be pathologically bad people out there, always. 

 Or at least, there will be crazed out people as long as we do not have a thorough understanding of the human mind. And even then. Because when we understand why people become pathologically insane, some, the same as those who abuse drugs (starting with alcohol and psychoactive smoke), will decide to use their freedom (if they are left any) to become psychologically insane, deliberately so.

 Some will whine when they read this. But they understand neither evolution, nor the logical incompleteness theorems, and even less the fact that evolution has mastered both.

 It is even worse than that. It’s not just that there are bad actors out there. Power attracts bad actors, like flies are attracted by excrements.

 Those who rise up high in human hierarchies, all too often do so precisely because they are bad. This is the Achilles heel of representative democracy.

 Examples abound with dictatorships: there the worst do best. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, are recent cases. Stalin overcame Lenin (founder and theoretician of the Bolsheviks) and Trotsky (head of the Red Army, and also a theoretician), precisely because Stalin was so much worse. as a human being. That was his best qualification (he started by robbing banks…wait…). 

 However, Stalin’s extreme badness allowed him to out-Hitler Hitler himself: that made him laugh, according to Churchill. That Stalin’s horribleness was viewed as an advantage by those subordinate to him seems unlikely, but it’s thoroughly demonstrated by the facts. 

 Hitler attacked his ally the USSR by surprise. Stalin had been leading the rapprochement with Nazi Germany, so he expected his colleagues in the Politburo to punish him severely. After sulking for days, he finally showed up, expecting the chop, and was enthusiastically confirmed as great war leader. Why? Because all his comrades knew he was the very worst. And indeed Stalin put in place policies considering that anyone not respecting an order was subject to immediate execution. Any soldier knew that his captain could kill him any time, and so on, throughout the Red Army. 

 Thus in Stalingrad, workers built tanks while other drove them to engage the Nazis in combat, at the other end of the factory. 

 The Nazis, who thought of themselves as the meanest characters on the planet, and had demonstrated it with engineers doing suicide attacks with explosives on their backs against the French after crossing the Meuse, could not sustain that level of ferocity.

 Hence not just craziness, but criminal insanity can be an advantage to rise to the fore in society. Certainly, if Alexander so called the Great had not annihilated the cities of Thebes and Tyr (crucifying all the men there), he would have been less Great, because Athens would have taken him, and his general Antipater less seriously.

 Ultimately, though, the criminal mood in the USSR was made possible by systematic lying on such an industrial scale that the connection with reality became increasingly tenuous. When enough truth was projected onto the system, the lying, and the political system that depended upon it collapsed.

 If craziness is so useful to augment those mental powers we need so much to survive as a civilization, how do we survive it? Precisely by augmenting the truth. Thus only craziness compatible with the truth will be able to survive. That is why I have not hesitated to tell various truths about Obama (whom I have intensely supported in all sorts of ways), or Hollande, whom I approved of, until he started to say lies about World War Two (details soon to come).

 Truth is my religion. A touch of craziness my sanity. (Latest demonstration: It’s not like I did not know of the danger in advance. I was slightly charged by a large bad mood moose with calf today on an Alaskan trail, where I was nonchalantly running with a bad ankle; after a high speed retreat, as a good predator, I circumvented the difficulty, and anxiety switched sides, the calf nearly spraining its own ankle in the process… . )

 There is no truth but the full truth, and a touch of craziness is its prophet.

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Patrice Ayme

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Islam Versus Civilization?

WESTERN CIVILIZATION FOUNDED ON REASON, NOT SUPERSTITION.

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Abstract; Some drastic differences between the West and Islam are explored, and explained. That brings forth reflections on some differences between civilization and superstition.

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Strident screaming in France from the politically correct. Claude Gueant, one of the ministers of the discombobulated Sarkozy, observed that:

“Contrary to what the left’s relativist ideology says, for us, all civilizations are not of equal value. Those which defend humanity seem to us to be more advanced than those that deny it. Those which defend liberty, equality and fraternity, seem to us superior to those which accept tyranny, the subservience of women, social and ethnic hatred.” Adding the need to “protect our civilization”, he insisted he had not targeted “one culture in particular”.

[Disclosure: I detest Claude Gueant's immigration policy; but that does not mean I have to detest all his thoughts, especially when they happen to be philosophically correct.]

Islam de France asked Gueant to specify that he did not target Islam. A socialist (related) member of parliament amalgamated Gueant’s observations with Nazism. The French government walked out of the National Assembly, for the first time since 1898.

To progress in the elucidation of things, one has to get where one did not go before. And nothing is best for that than strong emotions. E-motions are called that way, precisely because they move people. Cold logic, per se, is a ship without motion. Logic does not move by itself.

So let me invenominate the debate a bit more. As a public service.

Islam is why the Middle East covered itself with fascist dictatorships.

(Islam is only a proximal cause, however, see below.) OK, let’s roll out Muhammad Himself, Peace Be On Him, He needs it!

“O YE WHO BELIEVE! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and OBEY THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN POWER.” (Quran’s, Sura 4; verse 59).

In other words, obey power, not intelligence, virtue or democracy. I call that Islam’s fascist principle.

The truth can be outrageous. Nothing better than truth to bring rage out. OK, maybe I put the cart, religion, before the donkey, dictatorship. The water crisis in the Middle East forced the establishment of hydraulic dictatorships. As the drought increased, so did the ferocity: the Egyptian religious was softer than Christianism, itself more open minded than Islam.

True, Jesus Christ, a prophet of Islam, ordered to kill non believers. Luke 19:27: “But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”

However Christ’s robust self glorification was not the law in the Imperium Francorum. Probably impressed by what the mighty Franks had done in Occident, emperor Justinian, who reigned 40 years, and reconquered the Mediterranean, ordered to separate the secular and the religious in Roman law.

If a Christian wanted to become a Jew, or a Muslim, it was not a cause for execution.

But the Qur’an is more specific: “And if they break their oaths after their agreement and (openly) revile your religion, then fight the leaders of unbelief– surely their oaths are nothing– so that they may desist.” (Qur’an, S 9, v 12) Passages abound in the Hadith (the second sacred book of Islam, full of sayings attributed to Muhammad) of murderous narrow mindedness:

“Allah’s Apostle [Muhammad] said, “The blood of a Muslim who confesses that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that I am His Apostle, cannot be shed except in three cases: In Qisas for murder, a married person who commits illegal sexual intercourse and the one who reverts from Islam (apostate) and leaves the Muslims.”—Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, 9:83:17

Some with leftist pretentions will erupt:”How dare you? Is not religion good? Do you have something against Islam? Are you an incredible racist?”

No, I am not an incredible racist. Just the opposite. It is precisely because I respect the victims of an all too fascist friendly religion that I intervene.

I spent the essential of my childhood in Muslim countries, and I nearly always respected the individuals I met, and loved the mosques, and the architecture. I even respect several injunctions of Islam: for example no alcohol whatsoever (I am silly enough already on my own to not need adjuvants). However Islam is a system of thought, and thinking is what I eat.

A particular problem with Islam is the way it treats women. As women educate small children, mentally underperforming women means mentally underperforming children, and thus mentally underperforming adults, hence mentally underperforming societies.

So Islam becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. There is no senility like senility, and stupidity is its prophet.

Some with leftist pretentions will hammer their war drums, the way they have been taught is supposed to be correct:”We don’t see you criticizing the West, the Christian civilization!”

Well, you should read me more. I enjoy dogfights with Christianism. My answer is that there is not such a thing as Christian civilization. “Christian civilization” is an oxymoron, except in the most primitive places. 

By definition of what a civilization is, civilization cannot be just a religion, especially not a superstitious religion. And, historically, the West was not founded by the Franks as a religion, but as a reaction against the superstitious organization of society by Catholic bishops.

Contrarily to a commonly accepted myth, the West, the synergetic civilizational aggregate imagined by the Franks, was not founded on a particular superstition, or even a particular nation or language. Quite the opposite. It was intrinsically omnirole, and even anti-plutocratic. (The multivaried nature of the empire of the Franks make it closer to the present European Union, than to a conventional empire; the Imperium Francorum was a sort of European Union in its time, but with the world’s mightiest army.)

In the Imperium Francorum, Christians could become Jews, and they did, and, no, they did not have fewer rights, and no, they did not have to wear signs on their clothing warning of their particular superstition.

Whereas in Islam, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, although had lived there for centuries, when not millennia, were discriminated against by the heavily armed newbies. Non-Muslims had to wear special clothing to warn of their presence, they did not have equal rights, and enjoyed special supplementary taxes. To this day it is forbidden for a Muslim woman to marry a non Muslim. 25% of Lebanese weddings happen in Cyprus, to turn around that interdiction.

According to the Qur’an believers are suppose to kill Pagans and Non Believers:

“But when the forbidden months are past, then fight the pagans wherever you find them, and seize them and beleaguer them and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war). But if they repent and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them, for Allah is oft-forgiving, most merciful.” [Qur'an, Surah al-Tawbah: verse 5]

Taken at face value in the short, 80,000 words Qur’an, this verse is as clear as it gets. Some Islamists try to wiggle out of it, see Islam Tomorrow.(I enjoy reading Islamists.)

So why such a huge difference between Christian Francia and the contemporaneous first Islamist Caliphate? At first sight, this is strange, because Christianism and Islamism are variants of the same religion of Abraham. (Maybe I should call that mother religion Abrahamism, to rhyme with Shamanism.)

Islam, by promoting jihad, interpreted by Muhammad Himself as a war effort against the West allowed to build the world’s largest empire in one generation. That immense succession of battles was launched from just one city, Medina (where Muhammad is buried).

Muhammad admonished Roman authorities to convert, while telling his followers that, for the first time in 1,000 years, the Greco-Romans and their successor regimes (such as the Persian Sassanids) were weak (from a terrible war between them, and the civil war of the Christians against the Pagans and Thinkers inside the Greco-Roman empire). And it was the time to attack.

In the Orient, jihadist rage, lots of luck, and tremendous overconfidence and incompetence in one major battle by the Roman army high command, led the Arabs to the gates of Constantinople. There they were defeated by a high tech weapon, Grecian fire. Grecian fire, secret to this day, was used successfully against Muslims for centuries. Even in Saint Tropez in the Tenth century when a combined effort of the Frankish army and the Roman navy threw the Islamist armies out of Francia.

Blocked by the enormous walls of Constantinople and its fire spitting navy, the Islamists conceived to go around, and catch Constantinople from behind.

After quickly overrunning Gothic Iberia, massacring 20% of its natives, the armies of Islam met the Franks, in Francia. Not only the franks had defeated the Goths, two centuries prior, but they had sent spies to figure out the Muslims, as soon as Islam swept Palestine and Egypt. The Franks represented legal Roman power, and applied Roman law, with an addition, Salic law, initially written in Latin by Roman jurists around 300CE (it was amended enormously in the following millennium). No religious law for the Franks. Zilcht.

In a succession of three terrible invasions (721-750 CE), the Arab and Berber armies and navies tried to break through Francia, and, instead, were the ones broken to smithereens. Not only were the obnoxious invaders thrown out, bones rotting in the sun, but, exhausted, the Caliphate in Damascus fell (750 CE).

Civilian Muslims left behind were left alone and not discriminated against. They reproduced in peace, as genetics studies on the French population have shown.

The Franks were not fighting in the name of Christianity. They viewed the Sarah-sin as a type of Christian, originating from the Bible’s Sarah. The Franks had a long tradition of fighting fanatical Christians. That is why the Franks organized a succession of coups, wars and elected several scholars as emperors, to break the Christian theocracy in Constantinople. They finally captured Francia in 476 CE (and Constantinople in 1204 CE, vengeance is best cold!)

The Franks viewed in Islam more of the same they knew all too well, and they had fought for five centuries, ever since they were the Free, the Franks.

The Frank Reich had always been multinational and multilingual. They spoke old Dutch, Latin, German…By the time the Islamists invaded, the Franks called themselves “EUROPEANS“.

There was their fundamental religion, what bound them together again: Europe.

Thus, contrarily to the Islamist empire, the West was founded on tolerance and reason, and the secular law. The west of the Franks was not founded on the adoration of the would be child killer, adulator of his boss, Abraham his name. Just the opposite.

A demonstration of this occurred unwittingly when Christianism was unleashed to help reconquer the Middle East. What happened? Christianism soon re-engaged in what it does best, namely plutocratization. Plutocratization, the instauration of the Dark Side. In contrast to civilization.

Why are Christianism and Islam so prone to plutocratization? It is not an accident.

The myth of Abraham is the very foundation of Christianism and Islam. And what do we observe?

The religion of Abraham is founded on the most insane torturous obsession imaginable, the killing of the child by his parent, to please the boss. Worse than that cannot be found. Think about it. That’s what Islamist regimes are founded on.

The Aztec philosophers viewed their own superstition as more humane than Abraham’s pedophobic obsession, and contradicted the Christian theologians point by point.

Remark: the clueless Vatican wonders why so thousands of obsessed priests tortured children. May I remind them of Abraham? Torturing children is what their god does. See what happened to David’s son, according to their little book of horrors.

So what is civilization? The term appeared around 1600 CE in France, after seven religious civil wars in quick succession (instigated by the Catholic fanatic Spanish emperor, son of his French father, Charles V!).

Henri IV built on the tremendous work of his great predecessor Henri III (assassinated by a Catholic fanatic). He put his war marshal the duke of Sully in charge of the economy. The new society was a welfare state (“a chicken in every pot!”), a stimulus program, and a planification of the economy was introduced, with an accent on high tech.

When the protestant Henri de Navarre was told it would be better if he became catholic to sit on the throne of France, he scoffed:”Paris vaut bien une messe!” (“Paris is worth a mass!”)

Civilization is not religion. Civilization is a process, a progress towards a more civil society. Civilization lives in its time (that’s what “secular” means), and on the ground (it’s not standing-over, which is what super-stition means).

Religion is an old, wet rat clinging to an old branch sinking in the middle of the ocean. A superstitious religion is just a revelation. Some guy in the desert, way back, walking on the water, making fish out of wine, listening to archangels in his head, threatening to kill whoever he is unwilling to “believe” in him, and venerate those ready to kill a child, if the boss says so.

Henri III and Henri IV were both assassinated by religious fanatics (after several dozens attempts!). Their crime? Pushing forcefully for a more civil society. For civilization.

Let’s remember that, next time we are told that a religion can be a civilization.

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Patrice Ayme

Why French Parents Are Superior.

IT’S ALL ABOUT REASON:

“While Americans fret over modern parenthood, the French are raising happy, well-behaved children without all the anxiety. Pamela Druckerman on the Gallic secrets for avoiding tantrums, teaching patience and saying ‘non’ with authority.”

Such is the abstract of the article “Why French Parents Are Superior” found in the Wall Street Journal on February 4, 2012. [See notes.]

To say “non” with authority, one needs to have intellectual authority to start with. The French develop the latter through a love of mental jousts (many of them about politics, sociology, ecology, history, geography, science, poetry, litterature, etc…). That intense Gallic practice of mental activity leads typical young French adults to have gone through at least 10,000 hours of intra familial debate by the end of their teenage years. So they are expert at it. They are also expert at being interesting, and being able to answer inquiries the little ones will have from all directions.

Inasmuch as the WSJ author tried her best, three years of study she says, she extracted very little from it: talk a bit firmer, sound more self assured. Step by step under the direction of a 34 year old French mom. Pathetic. To see why she so thorougly failed, keep on reading.

In truth French parents develop in their children a greater ability to present, develop arguments, and respond to them intelligently. This is done mostly through the intense practice of speech. That, in turn, comes from the love of speech, which is also imprinted, right from the start.

French parents talk more, with a richer speech between themselves, and back and forth to their children. Children are taught to not interrupt the conversations adults are having with each other. Learning not to interrupt, is viewed not as an exclusion, but an instruction, a fundamental part of education.

Speech also allows to communicate values. A child endowed with higher values, and the perspective of even the higher ones grandes personnes are responding to, understands that orders given by parents have themselves reasons. Those reasons have to be mastered to access to higher learning. It’s all about reason.

I asked two Californian parents who live (very well) in Cambridge, England, with their two American children, if they saw a difference between American and European kids. They immediately replied that European children were much better educated. This corresponds to the main difference the Wall Street Journal reporter saw in France, when she pondered why her own child was ruining her outings:

“After a few more harrowing restaurant visits, I started noticing that the French families around us didn’t look like they were sharing our mealtime agony. Weirdly, they looked like they were on vacation. French toddlers were sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There was no shrieking or whining. And there was no debris around their tables.

Though by that time I’d lived in France for a few years, I couldn’t explain this. And once I started thinking about French parenting, I realized it wasn’t just mealtime that was different. I suddenly had lots of questions. Why was it, for example, that in the hundreds of hours I’d clocked at French playgrounds, I’d never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why didn’t my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids were demanding something? Why hadn’t their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours had?

Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life. When American families visited our home, the parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids’ spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by themselves… a 2009 study, led by economists at Princeton, comparing the child-care experiences of similarly situated mothers in Columbus, Ohio, and Rennes, France. The researchers found that American moms considered it more than twice as unpleasant to deal with their kids. In a different study by the same economists, working mothers in Texas said that even housework was more pleasant than child care.

Rest assured, I certainly don’t suffer from a pro-France bias. Au contraire, I’m not even sure that I like living here…”.

I will explain why she cannot like to live in France; it is directly related to her child trouble.

I asked a mother born and raised in the USA who considers herself ‘fortunate‘ that her parents, although American from a young age, were not American born. She has also lived and worked in France, and has a child who has never thrown a temper tantrum, even at the age of two and a half: “Why Are French Parents Superior?“

She was haughtily irritated by the question and did not try to hide it. Talking to me as if I were a dimwit she had little time for, she blasted the following reply:

“Why French Parents Are Superior, you ask? For the same reason as French are generally superior.

The key is that one has to provide reasons to the child, and, most importantly, those reasons have to make sense. These are two necessary conditions.

Americans would say that they do that. But, instead of telling the children what to do, and why, they let the children decide. But children don’t know anything, they are just children, they can’t decide, using reason. Or then American parents make up stories that don’t make sense, and, or, are not truthful, and lose all credibility that way.

You see that in adult conversations all the time, so it naturally shows up in adult-child conversations. It is in fact the lazy man’s way of communicating. Hence the continual usage of non sequiturs and constant sport analogies. As far as I can tell, only Americans do this.

When American parents say “no”, they just say “no”. They don’t say why they are saying no, they don’t explain to their child why the child’s behavior or request should be denied, and if they do, they don’t wait for the child to articulate an answer, which can take up to ten minutes. They lose all credibility that way.

American parents also expect children to throw temper tantrums, so when one happens, they rarely try to explore why. When American children ask their American parents why? or, why not? the parents typically don’t make a genuine effort to provide an understandable and coherent answer. They just think that asking someone for their reasons or motivations is hostile. It’s a cultural limitation that cannot be overcome.

And when one tells them that they should provide children with reasons, American parents think that you do not understand parenting, children just behave like that. And if your child is different, she was born with a different character, and you are lucky.

Americans, in fact, view questions about their reasons and motivations as hostile interrogation. So, when children attempt to explore that with them, they view it as an hostile inquiry, unlike the French and many other cultures. Rather than try to cultivate that form of inquiry, as French parents do, Americans try to suppress it.

And why do you ask me all these questions? There is no hope, Americans don’t have the concepts!”

I suggested that it was a bit like explaining the Hahn-Banach theorem to someone who does not know there is such a thing as functional analysis. The francophile American mother threw a Gallic shrug:”Yes, for Americans, reason is like a foreign language they never encountered before!“

If anything her very French like reaction showed that Americanization is fully reversible. 

Here is Pamela from the Wall Street Journal again:

“France is the perfect foil for the current problems in American parenting. Middle-class French parents (I didn’t follow the very rich or poor) have values that look familiar to me. They are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes and interactive science museums.

Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren’t at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this… French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves…

Of course, the French have all kinds of public services that help to make having kids more appealing and less stressful. Parents don’t have to pay for preschool, worry about health insurance or save for college. Many get monthly cash allotments—wired directly into their bank accounts—just for having kids.

But these public services don’t explain all of the differences. The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children, it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. “Ah, you mean how do we educate them?” they asked. “Discipline,” I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas “educating” (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.

One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait…

After a while, it struck me that most French descriptions of American kids include this phrase “n’importe quoi,” meaning “whatever” or “anything they like.” It suggests that the American kids don’t have firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything goes. It’s the antithesis of the French ideal of the cadre, or frame, that French parents often talk about. Cadre means that kids have very firm limits about certain things—that’s the frame—and that the parents strictly enforce these. But inside the cadre, French parents entrust their kids with quite a lot of freedom and autonomy.”

Authority is one of the most impressive parts of French parenting—and perhaps the toughest one to master. Many French parents I meet have an easy, calm authority with their children that I can only envy. Their kids actually listen to them. French children aren’t constantly dashing off, talking back, or engaging in prolonged negotiations.”

[—Adapted from "Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting," to be published Tuesday by the Penguin Press. ]

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PHILOSOPHICAL DEEPENING OF THE PRECEDING:

Well, what to dare add for more enlightenment? Fasten seat belts, we are going to philosophical warp speed. The problem with American parenting is deeply entangled with a formal superficiality which is devouring American society, and reason itself. This decerebration is, of course, very comfortable for the “masters of the universe” based in Wall Street.

The USA is supposed to be a democratic republic. The law is the skeleton of such a state, and it is the paradigm of mental organization, collective and individual. The American parenting deficit is a manifestation of an American cultural deficit and its nexus is a sense of justice (or lack thereof).

That cultural deficit is of foremost importance, worldwide, considering the military-economic importance of the USA.

The article in the New Yorker “The Caging Of America” laid the blame of the dismal American “justice” system on the “Bill Of Rights“. That Bill is inferior, experts say, because it emphasizes formality, formalism, and superficiality, in other words, justice as fairness (something Rawls and his “liberal” followers got all confused about).

Instead justice ought to be justice as justice. The Declaration des Droits de l’Homme insisted simply on that:”Be Just!” For the Declaration, justice is a primary notion, not a derivative notion. Who speaks of justice speaks of judgments, sentences, reasons, causes, attenuating circumstances, discovery… Justice begs for strong, inquisitive, rational, well informed minds, in other words, minds toddlers will respect.

Toddlers respect good judgment. Toddlers instinctively rebel against bad judgment, and any mockery of the nobility of the human spirit, such as a travesty of reason.

The New Yorker points out that formalism has devoured true justice in the USA, and has made the incarceration mood pervasive throughout American society, from individuals covered with tattoos to clothes mimicking prison garb, to shoes without laces.

But formalism has devoured other things, all the way to parental facial expression, and viewing any explanation as a conflict to be avoided absolutely.

The emphasis on formalism throughout American society is striking. Murderers bathing in the blood of their victims have walked free, in the USA, because the police had no warrant (don’t try that in France!). A Chinese contractor formally presents a lower bill for a giant bridge, it gets formally accepted. Never mind that the USA loses industrial substance as a result. Etc.

Formalism, in the beginning, looks pragmatic, because it is easy to bestow. Formalism is reason reduced to its most basic. Formalism is a parody of rationality.

Toddlers have a deep instinctive dislike of irrationality. They observe, early on, that reason makes them strong, whereas irrationality assaults them. Parents choosing irrationality choose the Dark Side, as far as toddlers are concerned.

Exerting formalism blocks the exertion of reason as much as exerting justice requires. In any case the reign of formalism is how outrageous American meta principles such as “don’t be judgmental”, “don’t argue”, “stop rationalizing” have appeared.

How can a toddler sit in judgment of his own behavior, if his parents refuse, or are incapable, to do so? And, even worse, if they have not learned to exert enough judgment to establish the cadre of what is acceptable, and what is not?

And sure enough, the toddler in chief could not bring himself to find reasons to judge bankers, because it was a case where he had to find within himself, enough to transcend the formalism of formal politeness he owed to his sponsors. Looked at it formally, the USA is doing OK. Looked at it in all justice, not that much.  

And why can’t our Wall Street Journal reporter like to live in France, in her present state?

I went back to the francophile American mother who knows France much better than the WSJ reporter. She told me:

“Living well in France is all about loving reason, more than authority.

Instead, the WSJ reporter feels it’s all about French parents having more authority. She does not understand authority has a foundation, and its name is reason. She completely misses the mark, even after three years of studying it intensely. Why? Because she is American. Case closed.”  

France’s main pastime is not cheese and wine, it’s contradicting authority with reason.

This was already the case in the Middle Ages during the “Jacqueries” (14 C), and before that, when the philosopher Abelard (and the people behind him) opposed the religious, crusading fanatics led by Saint Bernard and the papacy (12C). Actually French history is all about a perpetual war between authority and reason.

The very foundational act of “Francia”, by the Franks, in 486 CE, was the act, tried persistently by the Franks for two centuries before that, to pry reason out of the jaws of fascist and theocratic authority (these notions were at the heart of the conflict between Greco-Romans and Celto-Germans, for a full millennium prior).

Submitting, and boosting, authority with reason is the master value of French culture. Thus it should show up on French children’s playgrounds, and it does.

Another related command: only reason can contradict authority, and authority is full of reason. (The resulting respect for authority sometimes backfire in French society.)

Thus, when authority is exerted, it better be full of reason, so it is full of reason. French toddlers learn this, and if they perceive the authority, they know reasons are not far behind, and they plead no contest, as it is the path of less effort.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note 1: Yes, the Wall Street Journal is francophile nowadays. (Amazingly, Murdoch’s WSJ does not censor me, and publishes me within three seconds, whereas the New York Times does all sorts of naughty things to my comments: thus, I have nearly stopped commenting in the NYT. This to point out that the NYT is not as “liberal” as the mob has it.)

***

Note 2:

French Lessons [Wall Street Journal]:

Children should say hello, goodbye, thank you and please. It helps them to learn that they aren’t the only ones with feelings and needs.

When they misbehave, give them the “big eyes”—a stern look of admonishment.

Allow only one snack a day. In France, it’s at 4 or 4:30.

Remind them (and yourself) who’s the boss. French parents say, “It’s me who decides.”

Don’t be afraid to say “no.” Kids have to learn how to cope with some frustration.

Further French Lessons [Tyranosopher]:

Children also have to learn delayed gratification and being satisfied with what they have. Otherwise they would end up, or rather down, like Americans, with debts up the wazoo, enslaved by banks and Wall Street.

Inasmuch as speech with the vocal chords is important, facial and body language are even more readily understood, by the little ones. The “big eyes” the Wall Street Journal reporter is obsessed by is only part of the story. The rigid, expressionless faces of all too many American women go a long way to explain their dysfunctional relationship with their children.

Intellectual Fascism

THE MOST EFFICIENT WAY TO RULE MINDS IS BY SIMPLIFYING THEM. 

 Abstract: The Open Mind, has driven the evolution of topmost civilizations. As Pericles said in his Funeral Oration:”Our city is open to the world… We are the school of Hellas…” Pericles talked of Athens as an open school, and society. But he emphasized that its strength came from making Athenian minds as open, and richer, minds: “our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters.”

 Rousseau pointed out that, everywhere one looked, man was in chains. OK, it may be less true now, but we are going back there. Fast. And the real question is: why do the subjugated people love it?

 How come? Minds are brainwashed, and imprinted in simplified forms where core human wants, like curiosity, are reduced to pathetic forms, such as fascination for celebrities. (That is why the kings of France wore extravagant, hyper expensive clothing, for more than a millennium; not just because they could, but because that gave the rabble something to dream of!)

 The general drive for simplifying minds is a deliberate strategy, well engaged in the Roman empire by the year 300CE (so pre-Christian; Christianity was an afterthought). I call it Intellectual Fascism.

 Intellectual Fascism is a neglected concept. It is the opposite of the Open Mind. The Open Mind is the core of progressive civilization, whereas Intellectual Fascism is the ultimate strategy of repressive plutocracy. 

 Intellectual fascism is a form of fascism specific to human beings. It is the higher, more subtle, form of political fascism, itself an expression of group fighting as one, a trick many social species have evolved. Even wasps do it, when they swarm and attack. Intellectual fascism gathers the People tight around a few ideas, again with a combative aim.

  Superstitious religions are a typical example of Intellectual Fascism. God(s) have answer to everything, and the answer is always the same: God(s) Great, the shameful incantation of the subjugated. More generally, Intellectual Fascism views individual reason, the capacity of individuals to think for themselves, as the enemy, and always looks for some reason to subjugate it.

 In modern times, the idiocy of submitting ancient ‘gods‘ has become much less popular, because our civilization requires more brains. Thus a new startegy to subjugate reason had to be found, by the enemies of free minds, those who Pluto fascinates.

 Thus intellectual fascists have come to pretend that democracy is the ultimate reason for reason. In its most hypocritical version, intellectual fascism pretends that all ideas, or even reason itself, ought to emanate from the People (which, of course, has leaders, so it is truly these leaders who determine what reason is). Whereas the truth is that it is the other way around

 Verily, reason is the ultimate reason for reason. Reason is how what is veiled becomes defined in its full glory. Reason is the unveiler of truth. Democracy, well done, is just a mean to better reason.

 Reason emerges from truth. The best civilizations know this evidence, and act accordingly.

***

WHEN FOOLS PRETEND TO THINK, SO THAT THEY CAN DOMINATE:

Before WWII, the young philosopher Paul Nizan, a friend of Sartre, published “Les Chiens de Garde” (“The Watchdogs“). He argued that many famous intellectuals and philosophers just enforced the established order. An example was Bergson, a Nobel Prize winner.

Initially a communist, Nizan broke up with Stalinism, especially when he loudly condemned the alliance between Stalin and Hitler. He was thereafter reviled by the French Communist Party. That explains why he is not well known.

Nizan was killed in combat on May 23, 1940, at Dunkirk (the heroic delaying battle by the French army which gave enough days for the one and only entire British army to escape Hitler’s army).

A lot of the present world economic crisis has to do with the intellectual analysis of the situation not being up to snuff. The watchdogs have barked up the wrong trees, as they are supposed to. Often deliberately so. Ex PM Blair of Britain goes around, heaping spite on “Occupy Wall Street” and the outraged. Nobel Krugman told us that Greece would be better, off, ruined by abandoning its currency, and switching to monkey money (OK, recently Krugman changed his tune, it seems, but much damage has been done).

Main Stream Media (and that includes websites set up by the plutocracy such as the “Huffington Post”, or by the CIA and the like, such as the “Daily Kos”) reinforce points of view typical of pure intellectual fascism. Here is a spectacular example, straight out of the New York Times.

More than once in the NYT, Michael Lynch, professor of philosophy (University of Connecticut, Northern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen), author of the forthcoming “In Praise of Reason,” “True to Life” (2004) and “Truth as One and Many” (2009), was allowed to claim authoritatively, as a “philosopher“, in various editorials that:

“our faith in reason, as it were — is not blind. It is an expression of our commitment to democracy itself.”

Sounds good, but it is full of lethal venom. Watch the subliminal message. Because we are committed, we reason? To think we need to be crazy? Next Professor Lynch will probably claim that reason was invented by “liberal democracy” aka Wall Street. After all, Fukuyama (RAND, Stanford) did that before him, and was revered for it.

Seriously, the operative core of the doctrine of Hitler and company was exactly this principle. Hitler made clear statements to that effect, up to a small modification: “our faith in reason, as it were — is not blind. It is an expression of our commitment to National Socialism itself.”

One has to know, to appreciate the parallel fully, that the top Nazis argued, half jokingly, that Nazism was a “total democracy“.

Nazism was all about the rule of the mob, when civilians broke the law massively: see the Kristallnacht. This sort of tradition, to make the social contract the primary causative agent of the human mind, and of what is right, or wrong, goes back to Locke, Kant, Rousseau, and Herder. In the case of the latter three, it clearly led to murderous, racist fascism, straight as the arrow flies. Even an idiot such as Eichmann pointed that out, waiting calmly for his rope in Jerusalem.

Eichmann argued that he did not hate Jews. He was just doing his job, and did it well, as the (German) People had asked him to. He paid the Jewish girl who taught him Yiddish. His best friend was a Jew, he tried his best to save him from Auschwitz, even asking Himmler to intervene.

Eichmann claimed that he did what Germans had been told was the good: follow common interest and the will of the (German) people to determine what reason was. That is the core of Kant’s doctrine, Eichmann pointed out. And was not Kant an absolute good?

In the modern USA the argument was duplicated by Rawls, for justice (so Lynch borrows from Rawls who borrows from the usual suspects).

Rawls has a theory of “Justice As Fairness“. That is not supposed to mean explicitly that only people with a fair complexion gets justice. But maybe that is the subliminal message. Indeed, it might as well, because it rests, basically on mob justice (as in Kant, Rousseau and Herder).

Indeed that is what a critical inspection of Rawl’s “two principles of Justice-as-Fairness” reveal. The second principle admits social inequalities, and justify them by social justice (JF, pages 42-43). What Rawls forget is that everybody, even Hitler, agreed with “his” principles. So they are far from just, and his contrived argumentation leaves him in the neighborhood of the Reichstag, 1930s version.

The time honored characteristic of justice, instead is justice as balancing the facts to find the truth out of reason alone (and not from appearances).

The devil is within what is true, or not. Cognition primes even volition. This is what happens to those who make incantations about “If God wants it, Insha Allah, Deo Volente”. They have been imprinted upon subjecting what they want to what they know.

There is nochoice. Any human being has to do this. That is why Cognition Primes Volition.

***

SOCIAL CONTRACT AS THE MIND IS THE ESSENCE OF FASCISM:

Believing that the social contract is the end-all, be-all, is more than a mistake to those who trust in reason. But, of course, the primacy of the mob has been the main argument of intellectual fascism: reason ought to be submitted to the madness of crowds (themselves manipulated by their own fascist leader(s)).

The submission of reason to collective passion is a denial of the essence of man, which is wisdom. And that comes  from the independent mind. To subject reason to the rule, or approval of the mob, or to the rule of the people, is not reasonable in the fullness of civilization. Because civilization, and human progress, rest on truth, not feel-good-as-a-mob.

Verily, I think, because I independent.

***

WHY WOULD PSEUDO PHILOSOPHERS NOT KNOW WHAT A LEOPARD KNOWS?

A snow leopard reasonably thinking does not ‘commit to democracy’. She tries to do the right thing, such as habituating the prey to little noises from the particular direction where she is crouching, by pushing little stones, just so.

The antelopes she is hunting then come to believe that some melting or crumbling process of non animal origin is creating the sound, in that particular direction, and pays no more attention to little noises from there. Thus, when the leopard will sneak and dash, she may gain the two seconds which will allow her to kill. The leopard gets to eat, and survive. Thanks to her theory of other creatures’ minds.

For the leopard, and not just the leopard, truth is in the kill. The leopard has faith in reason. No democratic process is involved. Only truth.

Pseudo philosophers do not teach people how to think better, but how to think worse. They are paid for that, and that is why Main Stream Media (NYT, WSJ, Murdoch, Huffington, etc) advertize them, loud and clear. That is also why the truth about the economic crisis is not brought to the fore.

Verily, among the characteristic of Pluto is invisibility. A confused mind cannot see well, because one sees mostly through the mind. A deliberately confused mind is a marvellous thing to ride. Ask any potentate.

***

TRUTH IS ABSOLUTE:

Indeed, there is such a thing as truth. Simply because there is something as the universe. The one and only. Not everything is relative, or false. Newtonian mechanics is still true, same as ever was, in its domain of application. Same for ancient Ptolemaic optics, or Archimedes principle, or Pythagoras theorem. All true, just as on day one. In their context (or “universe” to use semantics from logics). If one throws a two kilogram stone on some opponent’s head, it is still most injurious, a million years later. That is what it is, it is the truth. 

Truth, ultimately, is just what is. Nothing could be clearer. If it is, it’s true, if it is not, it’s not true.

OK, Martin Heidegger could not have understood that one, that ground for evidence, because all he wanted, deep down inside, was Nazism to be of the essence, but he could not say it, so he went around in circles, looking for the “ground”. Truths provide with grounds. Nazism, though, was, fundamentally a masochistic denial of reality, thus truth. So Heidegger could not find any ground that he could boast about.

To get to unobvious truth, reason(s) may have to be found. Truth rarely stand naked in all its glory on a denuded plain.

Faith in well known reasons reinforces reason, that faith is necessary to make reason all it can be.

Well established science in general, and mathematics, in particular, are reservoirs of well known reasons.

Mathematics consist in two pieces:

1) axioms, which depict some reasons we believe are crucial, or just interesting to believe in.

2) theorems, which are unobvious truths derived from axioms, which are unveiled through complex reasons.

The derivation of theorems itself uses other axioms, such as the Principle of Induction, which we have faith in (I gave a strong reason to believe the PI actually fails in my essay Largest Number, a modest full upside down of all of mathematics and logics that I apologize profusely for).

To believe in the Principle of Induction is an act of faith (all the more now that I gave a reason not to believe in it!), which, itself had been proven true by countless usage. What do we mean by this? Theorems proven by using the Principle of Induction have led to observable phenomena (such as jet engines purring) which were true and true according to predictions.

Did I just contradict myself? No. For all practical purposes we know nowadays, infinity exists. So the PI is true within its present context.

Democracy is most useful, because it allows debate, and debate helps in finding the truth, by putting many minds in parallel. So democracy creates reasons mechanically.

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WHEN DEMOCRACY IS IN THE WAY OF REASON:

In the case of the ephemerally proposed Greek referendum, the reasons given for the decision to conduct a referendum on the exact nature of a rescue plan were clearly abysmal: people cannot judge upon such arcane financial technicalities. The Greek people was at 60% against the rescue plan. And that only for a bad reason: European inspectors are cracking down on amazing tax cheating in Greece.

Problem: in spite of the fact I want revolution now, I must admit, one must admit, that there is no immediate alternative to the rescue plan. It has the immense advantage to implement what I advocated for a long time, the immediate cancellation of 50% of the Greek debt, by the plutocrats themselves.

Moreover, if France and Germany don’t give oodles of money to Greece, right away, it will default uncontrollably, causing instantaneously a drop of per capita wealth in Greece of 50% and soon enough, 70%, with no way out. Instead France and Germany are trying to keep on going with the present orderly default (the Greek state has differed payments of some bills since 2010). The Greeks know that France and Germany will not make huge sacrifices for no good reason whatsoever.

Thus Merkel and Sarkozy correctly ordered instead that the referendum be on a non technical, but deeper question: do you Greeks want to be in the Euro zone or not? 

The answer to that one was known too: the Greeks are, by and large, very favorable to the euro. It has made them rich in more ways than one, be it only through subsidies. So not only they were then asked about whether something they liked should keep on happening, but also whether they would like not to drown.

So this was a case where a democratic consultation was not going to help.

Have all the truths been revealed in connection with the debt situation? Clearly not. And that, the People should try to start thinking about it.

How come the Greek debt, which is something like 120% of GDP, is supposed to explode to 200% of GDP, after a full year of a strict austerity program? It does not compute. Nobody explains that one. What kind of Dark Twist enables that sinister trick?

That is exactly what the watchdogs don’t want to talk about. So they will distract you with other things. I will dissect that fascinating riddle, crux of the problem, in another complex essay.

Let’s just say that both the problem, and its solution, are not localized to a few countries, such as Greece. They are global.

As far as the watchdogs of the established (plutocratic) order are concerned, the G20 at Cannes, distracted by the Greek crisis, was a great success: nothing was done about a Financial Transaction Tax. Britain, hypocritically, keeps on opposing it (they already have one, called the “Stamp Tax”, but on stocks only, not on the much more crucial derivatives; stocks are for vulgar investors, derivatives are for full blown plutocrats).

The USA is of course against a FTT as transacting the world into oblivion has become the last, and greatest, expression of American plutocratic power.  

Let’s also say that transacting away is how countries are brought to their knees by the world’s richest men.

***

NUKED REASON:

The U.S. department of energy just announced that CO2 emissions, worldwide, jumped up by 6% between 2009 and 2010. The emission due to coal burning jumped by 8%. more than half the increase is due to China and the USA (the same plutocratic mega organization: maximize coal burning, maximize profits for the richest of the rich).

This is an important failure of reason: we are puffing away towards a disaster which will make WWII seem like an anecdote. And it’s not just the reigning leaders who are at fault.

Ecologists puffing away obsessively against nuclear energy are also at fault: they make the bed of coal, and the results are blatant (I am not defending present reactors, which are dangerous, and ought to be phased out; but coal burning is not just dangerous, but guaranteed to be lethal on the largest scale). Nuclear, with its energetic intensity 100,000 more than anything else, is the only alternative to coal.

Let’s vituperate against fracking too: the USA is getting dangerously dependent upon fracking for natural gas. Let’s frack! Greedy bullies scream. Who needs water, when one can breathe gas and drink oil?

A well is not fracked once, but many times. Dozens of times. One can suspect that the process will lead to migration of the strong and nasty chemical agents fracking uses, over a few hundred meters in a few decades, polluting the water table. All the more since the concrete lining the wells will decay. The long term effects on the water table don’t look good, with a pretty high probability. If it turns out that there is a problem, it will be energetically disastrous. 

That is why France outlawed the technique (although the country has large reserves of shell gas). More modern, less dangerous techniques may be available in the future.

In the false debates about energy, one can see the failure of informed reason versus the reason of the mob. The mob does not like the word “nuclear” because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

Better to breathe mercury vapor from coal plants, and eat mercury laden fish, because it gnaws at the brain, source of all our troubles.

***

TO SINK NOT, THINK SOME:

Another question, related to the meaning of reason, is whether animals are machines programmed by genes. This selfish gene theory was suggested by Hamilton. It is erroneous, or, let’s say, deeply misleading.

Living organisms are programmed by genes, true. But even much more so by the environment. And the more sophisticated organisms are, the more programmed by the environment they are. This is made obvious by the fact that sophisticated species have often fewer genes than grossly inferior, mindless species. Genes are just subtle keys which allow to unlock a development which, in turn, gets programmed interactively by the environment. This, I claim, will be true even at the level of the ten million insect species (and indeed hints that wasps have emotions have come to the experimental fore recently; emotions partly come from the environment).

The environment is not digital, as genes are. Instead, like Quantum physics, the environment is continuously differentiable, and completely adaptive. No wonder: the environment itself is an outgrow of Quantum physics. To describe either, our full mathematical and logical panoply, from C* algebras, to quantum logic, while larger than any human can muster, is not enough.

There is no physics but the Quantum, and Muhammad is not its prophet. By this I mean that truth is not determined by social agreement, whatever Rawls, Lynch, Herder, and billions of Judeo-Christo-Islamists think.

Reason is a capability that evolved to allow organisms to make models of the environment. It is intimately related to minds which can create baby universes. Those models answer questions not just about what is, but also about what could-be, IF. Thus the organism can judge which universes are available, and which one, among them all, it prefers, and select for it.

Notice that the multiverse thus exists. But it’s all in our heads. And we are the ones determining which, among these possibilities, is going to be the universe, looking forward.

If we tried to do this with fully determined classical minds, it would be impossible. But we do it with Quantum minds, which escape local determinism, through non locality. That’s how reason gets entangled with freedom.

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Patrice Ayme