George Crews

@_10delta_ "I’d say the surest sign you’re inside a mythology is that you can’t even see it." We all have beliefs, metabeliefs, and on top of it all—blind myth, the level at which our beliefs become reality.

What you find operating in the West today are 6 main distinct meaning systems or religions: providing its adherents with a cosmology, a moral code, a community, & a vision of what salvation looks like.. The fact that most adherents would deny being religious is itself evidence of how deeply embedded these belief structures have become. I’d say the surest sign you’re inside a mythology is that you can’t even see it. 1st & what I’d say is the largest by sheer number of adherents is what I would call “therapeutic individualism”. This is the operative religion of the American middle. Its creed is the pursuit of personal happiness, the minimization of suffering, & the sacredness of authenticity. It has its rituals (self-care, wellness, therapy), community (social media affinity groups, lifestyle brands), & metaphysics (the Self as the highest object of devotion). It has no formal priesthood or explicit eschatology, which is why most might not see it as a religion, but it fulfills every criteria for one. The contested group that all the other factions fight over. The vast population of Americans who are not committed to any ideology but whose behavior shifts with economic conditions, cultural mood, & whichever narrative feels most personally compelling at a given moment.. (the meaning crisis group) 2nd is “institutional progressivism”. This is the managerial class religion, descended from the Marxist tradition but substantially mutated from it. Its priesthood occupies academia, media, HR departments, & the NGO complex. DEI functions as its liturgy, equity as its eschatology. 3rd is “evangelical Protestantism”. Personal salvation, biblical literalism, American exceptionalism as providential mission, the Rapture as eschatology. Institutionally congregational, (i.e. no central authority, no pope, no magisterium). Politically consolidated around the Republican Party. This is the bedrock of Trump’s religious support & the faction most resistant to papal influence (Reformation). When the Pope speaks, evangelicals do not feel compelled to listen. 4th is “Catholic Christianity”. Institutionally bound to Rome, intellectually grounded in a continuous tradition from the Church Fathers through Aquinas to Catholic Social Teaching, & currently undergoing a strategic renewal under Leo. This is the *critical* swing religion in American politics. Catholics make up roughly 1/4th of the electorate, respond to papal authority to varying degrees, & their behavior is increasingly diverging from evangelicals. 5th is what I call the “techno optimists”. The faction centered around the Thiel-Musk-Andreessen axis. Perhaps relatively small vis-a-vis the other religions, but it wields enormous institutional power through capital, platforms, & political access. Its adherents believe with genuine fervor that the Singularity (the moment artificial intelligence reaches exponential self-improvement) will fundamentally alter the human condition. This functions as their Rapture. Thiel’s Antichrist lectures are the explicit articulation of the cult’s theology: progress is divine, regulation is demonic, & the builders are stewards of humanity’s future. 6th is “vitalism”. Also relatively small, but growing rapidly, concentrated among young men, encompassing red pill culture, evolutionary psychology, Nietzschean aesthetics, & the broader conviction that hierarchy is natural, competition is the fundamental reality, & strength is the terminal value. This faction is intellectually underdeveloped & politically volatile, currently being contested between the trad Cath pipeline & the secular/techno right. Where it ends up will shape the trajectory of American conservatism for future generations.. More generally, the “culture” wars &, in large part, the future direction of American (& western) party politics will be influenced by how these groups evolve.

If the data can't speak for itself, then exactly who do scientists listen to?

@beowulf888 @BigBrainPhiloso Scientists have a different mindset than technologists. The former are interested in how the world is, the latter are interested in how the world could be. Physicists might be willing to give up causality, but engineers? Engineering is built on reliability.

@gmcrews @BigBrainPhiloso NB: Although I think Einstein was more of a Kantian when it came to causality, he did tip his hat to David Hume for forcing him to think skeptically about the questions involved in Special Relativity. The leading physicists of the early 20th were all deeply grounded in philosophy

Hume's most dangerous idea: cause and effect is an illusion. We assume it. We built civilisation on it. But we've never actually seen it.

@ErrorTheorist If a tweet is a brain fart and no one is around to mute it, does it make a sound?

Here’s a paper arguing that there is no progress in philosophy. The author claims that if Aristotle visited a modern university, he would be amazed by modern physics but feel at home in the philosophy classes, since the debates haven’t fundamentally changed. What do you think?

Guilty: I ask Grok to sharpen my draft tweets before I post. In a world of unedited brain farts, is using AI the new integrity—or just smart?

@esrtweet @Devon_Eriksen_ Giving Issac Newton a smartphone would have required him to "alter his state of consciousness first" in order to use it. Sophisticated technological user interfaces are magical.

Speaking as an engineer who is also a mystic and occasional mage myself, I'm going to disagree with you slightly on this one, Devon. There is a principled difference between magic and engineering. The difference is this: engineering doesn't care about the state of your consciousness when you push the button. Magic very much does. In fact, the realm of magic could be defined rather precisely as "those parts of natural law that you can't access or manipulate without putting your mind in a significantly altered state of consciousness first". Note that I said nothing about the "supernatural". That's because one of the first things you have to learn in order to do magic in the *very* limited way that is possible in the real world is that there ain't no supernatural anything. In this sense the epistemological monism you ascribe to ancient sorcerers is correct, but their understanding of causality was so poor that being philosophically correct didn't do them much good.

The distinction between engineering and magic is entirely a modern linguistic conceit. To the ancients, a wizard, a magus, a sorceror, was not a man who commanded forces outside the laws of nature. He was a man who commanded the forces of nature, by manipulating them through his understanding of natural law. But the modern word for a man who commands the universe by understanding its laws is "engineer". Yes, the ancient sorceror would try to commune with the spirits of the dead, or read the destiny of kings in the stars, or perform fertility rites to make the crops grow, but this wasn't some special supernatural discipline to him. This was simply his model of how the natural world worked. He would not have made a distinction between understanding heat and phase changes, and thereby distilling alcohol, and cutting out the intestines of a bird to predict the fortunes of a business venture. Both, to him, were philosophy and natural law. But as our understanding of the laws of physics grew more sophisticated, we gradually exiled the term "magic" to that which had not been proven to work, and to that which had been proven not to work. Were we given the opportunity to take an ancient Egyptian king on a tour of modern society, riding in an electric car, he would remark that we are a rich people, because we have many powerful magicians. Some of us might hasten to correct him, telling him that there is no magic used here. But he would not, in fact, be wrong.

The more factories a country has, the stricter its environmental regulations must be. Consequently, I am a supporter of strict environmentalism. Let's build more factories! The alternative is not only anti-growth, it's accelerated decline.

@StillTr05207382 @nathancofnas So how about the philosophy behind the scientific method? Did Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Popper, and Bayes just make the method's rules up? We live in a reality where free will exists. Expect all the important moral questions to be on a fractal edge. No simple, easy answers.

@gmcrews @nathancofnas Those that turn to "reality's creator" are turning to something somebody else made up.

Eric Turkheimer (former president of the Behavior Genetics Association) says race is skin deep because there's an "ethical principle" that says it must be so. Ppl sometimes accuse me of quoting him out of context. But no one has explained how the "context" makes it any better.

@StillTr05207382 @nathancofnas The scientific method can only inform us about how physical reality is, not how moral and cultural reality ought to be. Those that don't turn to reality's Creator (God) for their moral and cultural rulebook (Bible) must invent their own.

@nathancofnas Religious people always think doctrine outranks reality.

@Infinite_Logiz This is math-fi; the mathematicians version of sci-fi.

The maintenance engineers of the human body like to call themselves "doctors." It's a status thing.

@TOEwithCurt Could I prove this true using the principle of proof by contradiction?

The only honest way to live is to be consistent. And the only honest way to think is to be contradictory.

@TMNguyenSFT @TOEwithCurt What are the new engineering ramifications of your theory? Engineers don't care if you are a nobody. But we aren't exactly geniuses either. Your theory's relationship to advancing technology needs to made obvious.

That’s me right now. Developed a theory that explains consciousness that produced a single lagrangian where General Relativity, Electromagnetism, a dynamical wave function collapse equation and the Born rule all fall out of with zero additional postulates but at the end of the day, I’m just a nobody no matter how clean the math is or how internally coherent my theory is.

For any student, researcher, academic, and / or self‑learner, it's debilitating to think of your own abilities. Most people think of imposter syndrome, but that's just one tiny smidge in a larger collection of doubt. Here are 7 reasons why you're (likely) brighter than you think. curtjaimungal.com

@PhilosophyOfPhy Poor example of simplicity. I asked Grok why the outer moon appeared to be orbiting faster than the inner moon. A seeming paradox. Grok generated over a 600 word reply, plus some equations, explaining that the video represented the view that the orbiting Cassini spacecraft saw.

“Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it, we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?” - John Wheeler

@DoozerDiffuser @PhilosophyOfPhy I can attest engineers still intuitively use Leibniz's infinitesimals in real life even though Cauchy's limits were forced down our throats in college. Recently, smooth infinitesimal analysis come to the infinitesimal's rescue. Long live dy/dx as actual division! 😀

@gmcrews @PhilosophyOfPhy its literally just zero. a deferred zero. nilpotency isn't even necessary.

Physical meaning of the Calculus.

I agree. I think the universe may be intentionally structured to be ambiguous and unpredictable. This structure protects human agency by the fact it allows for interactions with higher intelligences that appear to be God-like, super-advanced scientifically, or even magical since any underlying technology would have to far exceed ours. The idea that God created a special universe such that even He cannot know the future (to protect free will) is called Open Theism (iep.utm.edu/o-theism/). Jacques Vallée, in his book Passport to Magonia, argued that what we call "UFOs" today are the same thing people used to call "angels" or "fairies"—a physical mechanism used by a higher intelligence to interact with and observe us. The British philosopher John Hick (for example) argued that scientific theories must be "religiously ambiguous" so that humans can remain autonomous (plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine…). There is also the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

@gmcrews @ArtemisConsort @michaeljknowles Maybe UFOs are messengers, sure. But I disagree about the “scientifically plausible” part, since the concept of “scientifically plausible” is man-made. We are free to interpret UFOs as whatever we want: scientific, magical or divine.

I want to believe in the supernatural in some form. Physical closure feels boring. I want the portal to open, the angels to descend, etc. But I absolutely refuse to be lulled into believing in something fake just because I want to, and so far no such claims are convincing.

@wavesandgrace @ArtemisConsort @michaeljknowles If free will exists, God created a universe where not even He knows what people will decide. Perhaps His mechanism for keeping tabs looks like UFOs to us. Perhaps unlikely—but whatever He does will look scientifically plausible to us in order to maintain free will.

@ArtemisConsort What do you think of @michaeljknowles’s opinion that UFOs are angels or demons?

@ArtemisConsort It remains scientifically plausible that we live in a universe where both free will and the Christian God exists. Christians believe that God planned things this way. But you must choose for yourself, no one else can.