This "bwrite" (a.k.a. blog) is a little thick and chewy, like Sicilian pizza. So you might have to read it several times to get through my own hazy writing (long sentences, split infinitives, dangling participles etc. etc.) But maybe there is a little bit of light in it; certainly not brilliance in the sense of gifted thinking that comes from men like Stephen Hawking.
Stephen Hawking's reasoning to justify euthanasia is fundamentally the same as his reasoning for atheism and to some degree "anti-theism". Regarding his recent thoughts on euthanasia, he basis his proposition in support of mercy killing on the presupposition that the condition of suffering, especially in the elderly and the terminal, has no purpose or value. He might go so far as to propose that to disallow someone the choice of killing themselves in whatever way is to infringe upon a right to freedom from what he might call the cruelty of prolongation of life during suffering associated with the accident of terminal illness at the point wherein the person no longer appears cognitive or is so debilitated by uncontrollable pain that they are no longer productive or self-aware of anything but that pain.
To Steven Hawking, a profound scientist himself having a quadriplegic condition, a human being is simply a cerebrally advanced animal; and the complexity of our species' problem-solving capacity is itself an accident of evolutionary nature. And yet, proponents of this hypothesis interject out of such an accidental trajectory, a model that appears to be somewhat predictive, organized, planned, well thought out, and non accidental at all. Substitute a historian's "dialectic" for a planner's Gantt Chart or Critical Path Analysis Flow Chart. In this picture of the evolutionary "tree" we are presented an allegory that allows us to perceive a structure with roots, a trunk and branches. Modern theorists of the "theory of everything" see such an allegory as made up of repeated patterns such as one might see in the weaving of a rug. These theorists use words like "fractals" to describe a geometric pattern that is repeated over and over again and the pattern forms the matrix upon which the ultimate shape of the organism resembles to the human eye. Eventually, these dialectics (as we call them in philosophy) eventually blossom like flowers into the wonder that is called the human "intelligence. "Working backwards, the wonder of this intelligence can then be reduced to the smallest biological fractal even at the sub-genetic level. And then it just stops like a dead end, like a precipice looking upon a dark-scape of enigmatic proportions. But none of this explains phenomena that transcends the edge of any fractal, or the ether surrounding the completed tree of life. It is simply, in Shakespeare's words in his play, Hamlet, "that undiscovered country." This is a country to which the precipice is the experience of what Hawking would consider the ultimate finality of death following the second law of thermodynamics etc. etc.
But none of the laws of thermodynamics explains those instances in human history where interventions from outside our box of existence have caused a dynamic reshaping of language, culture, behavior, morals, and reasons to believe that there is more to existence than a scientific equation as represented by the commutative property of basic arithmetic. One of those interventions happens to be one of Hawking's nemeses, the enigma of the Christian idea of life after death and the resurrection of the dead. Christianity....or let me put it this way, the coming of a little baby named Yeshua bar Youssef and Mary, in a little dirt hovel of a town called Bethlehem, during the reign of the god Cesar Augustus, simply reordered the western world view. As distant as today's modern world is, Christianity is inextricably embedded into our linguistics, how we speak, talk, celebrate, anticipate, congratulate, congregate, segregate, emancipate, and ingratiate.
The whole tree of life evolutionary allegory is impressive. It is even somewhat persuasive from the visual power of the picture it presents. But lets look objectively at such a tree of evolutionary life. It seems to me that the allegory is a kind of thinking that is more art than science. Hawking, like many atheists, venture into realms of definition using words and concepts that are based upon an priori knowledge that they think has empirical basis because of theorems and mathematical formulae as if having been stricken onto unchangeable rock. The method becomes the unchangeable God they would so readily dismiss. They frolic in a never-never land of words and conjectures, a kind of Gnosticism, and do so while ignoring or obliterating the very thought of a God who had Himself stricken or carved onto stone 10 simple propositions, a code if you will, onto rock. Their math and science and their scientific interpolations, paradigms and algorithms delete, annihilate, and obliterate the very real a priori rock of learned human existence as written down in ancient stories passed on for generations. And these stories are judged to be mythical simply because they carry a kind of revelation of knowledge that the scientific method does not necessarily support. They then frolic into a wonderful world of grandiose suppositions and propositions that have basis only in their own nihilism, an empirical data resting on a house of cards. They go about postulating and waxing cosmic and philosophical and in there own minds "definitive," much the same way that Galileo attempted to venture into theological hypotheses. This theologizing is what got Galileo into trouble and not his heliocentric theory which had already been advanced by men such as Tycho Brahe and by a Roman Catholic Priest we know of as, Copernicus.
Hawking often is very aware in his writings just how his intellectual gift is one of excellence in that realm of existence, and so argues using that brilliance as a means to fly the high like Icarus struggling to touch the sun. However, instead, unaware, he becomes entrapped outside the box of empiricism and the scientific method. His paradigms no longer work as he muddles and even enjoys weightlessness in the outer realms of metaphysics and philosophy. There his arguments become subject to a different set of rules. The rules of logic govern and the scientific method fades into the stratosphere like a pair of booster rockets ejected from a space shuttle launch. So he remains left behind floating around in outer space without a space suit. Give that boy some oxygen. (I smile.)
With respect to euthanasia, to Hawking it boils down to this: No God; No soul; No soul; we are no different than other species in the animal kingdom; as to the acknowledging the complexity of the human species vis a vis other mammals, or even arthropods for that matter, Hawking, simply has a notion that he is an accident of nature and that it was the evolutionary process of the smaller mandible that allowed for a larger capacity in a skull to have a larger brain. If he were correct, he'd have a point. the problem with his conclusion there is no God is that it is not a scientific conclusion as you cannot come to such an affirmation of the consequence when the knowledge points necessary to make an empirical conclusion are just not there. However, if he would only see that reason, language, thought, communication, invention, even dreaming, and artistry and music all have a basis in a priori information that cannot be discovered under some rock. It simply is present in our species' capability in our "capax" to see a "revealed truth". Revealed? he asks? I answer: "Yes Hawking, like a light is turned on in a dark room showing you what you could not see before. It's that simple." He makes an elementary mistake in logic and perhaps if he had taken more philosophy courses, he might just get it.
Some things are a priori. They just are. You cannot concluded empirically that they are not nor can you prove empirically that they are. That said, um..... there are things you can know how to do without knowing how you learned how to do them. It's like, I hear a piano piece by Mozart....no sheet music in front of me..... I simply am able to have my fingers hit the correct keys to play that piece. What does it prove? It proves that I can know a sound revealed to me by hearing without the complexity of understanding the rudiments of musical theory. So, does the music exist because I play it? or because it is written? Is the knowledge intrinsic in the "beauty" of the playing of the music in the written notes? or the praxis of the notes? Maybe both. But empirically, no one can prove the music exists or does not exist simply by phenomenological and experiential revelations. Animals cannot do this.... no....not even a whale or a dolphin.
Hawking is brilliant. He has many propositions worth investigating further from the empirical standpoint and we now have the capability with complex tools to look into inner space as well as outer space. Like the mere shadow of brilliance put forth by the likes of Carl Sagan, (when compared to Hawking, that is), Hawking begins to expound and affirm consequences for which he has no data to even be scientifically predictive so as to forecast in a way the so called laws of probability even begin to make sense.
In the end, brilliance is as any gift given. It originates from the very source of all spectra of light and thought. Sometimes brilliance blinds. Hawking may have an inner impetus to go beyond his physical incapacity or his profound sense of abnormalcy. He is angry so he will use his brilliance to obliterate ontological truths that place before him the reality that the very notion of God means that God allowed the abnormalness of his physical handicaps and he would then be promoted to ask the question: "Why did you make me like this?" He then would condescend to this God that he, Hawking, is brilliant; but yet he cannot conceive "if" what or "that" God might, in time, answer his question. Instead, he reverts to a nihilization (annihilation) of that God, that first premise, because there is no immediate solution to the stated human equational symbolism that defines his existence. There are too many variables in the calculus of life so like Narcissus, Hawking fails to hear Echo calling to him, and so he finds himself caught in a conundrum of his own introspection that is a process locked up in myopic admiration of his own mental and somewhat angry reflections in the reflecting pond of his terminal view.
Stephen Hawking's reasoning to justify euthanasia is fundamentally the same as his reasoning for atheism and to some degree "anti-theism". Regarding his recent thoughts on euthanasia, he basis his proposition in support of mercy killing on the presupposition that the condition of suffering, especially in the elderly and the terminal, has no purpose or value. He might go so far as to propose that to disallow someone the choice of killing themselves in whatever way is to infringe upon a right to freedom from what he might call the cruelty of prolongation of life during suffering associated with the accident of terminal illness at the point wherein the person no longer appears cognitive or is so debilitated by uncontrollable pain that they are no longer productive or self-aware of anything but that pain.
To Steven Hawking, a profound scientist himself having a quadriplegic condition, a human being is simply a cerebrally advanced animal; and the complexity of our species' problem-solving capacity is itself an accident of evolutionary nature. And yet, proponents of this hypothesis interject out of such an accidental trajectory, a model that appears to be somewhat predictive, organized, planned, well thought out, and non accidental at all. Substitute a historian's "dialectic" for a planner's Gantt Chart or Critical Path Analysis Flow Chart. In this picture of the evolutionary "tree" we are presented an allegory that allows us to perceive a structure with roots, a trunk and branches. Modern theorists of the "theory of everything" see such an allegory as made up of repeated patterns such as one might see in the weaving of a rug. These theorists use words like "fractals" to describe a geometric pattern that is repeated over and over again and the pattern forms the matrix upon which the ultimate shape of the organism resembles to the human eye. Eventually, these dialectics (as we call them in philosophy) eventually blossom like flowers into the wonder that is called the human "intelligence. "Working backwards, the wonder of this intelligence can then be reduced to the smallest biological fractal even at the sub-genetic level. And then it just stops like a dead end, like a precipice looking upon a dark-scape of enigmatic proportions. But none of this explains phenomena that transcends the edge of any fractal, or the ether surrounding the completed tree of life. It is simply, in Shakespeare's words in his play, Hamlet, "that undiscovered country." This is a country to which the precipice is the experience of what Hawking would consider the ultimate finality of death following the second law of thermodynamics etc. etc.
But none of the laws of thermodynamics explains those instances in human history where interventions from outside our box of existence have caused a dynamic reshaping of language, culture, behavior, morals, and reasons to believe that there is more to existence than a scientific equation as represented by the commutative property of basic arithmetic. One of those interventions happens to be one of Hawking's nemeses, the enigma of the Christian idea of life after death and the resurrection of the dead. Christianity....or let me put it this way, the coming of a little baby named Yeshua bar Youssef and Mary, in a little dirt hovel of a town called Bethlehem, during the reign of the god Cesar Augustus, simply reordered the western world view. As distant as today's modern world is, Christianity is inextricably embedded into our linguistics, how we speak, talk, celebrate, anticipate, congratulate, congregate, segregate, emancipate, and ingratiate.
The whole tree of life evolutionary allegory is impressive. It is even somewhat persuasive from the visual power of the picture it presents. But lets look objectively at such a tree of evolutionary life. It seems to me that the allegory is a kind of thinking that is more art than science. Hawking, like many atheists, venture into realms of definition using words and concepts that are based upon an priori knowledge that they think has empirical basis because of theorems and mathematical formulae as if having been stricken onto unchangeable rock. The method becomes the unchangeable God they would so readily dismiss. They frolic in a never-never land of words and conjectures, a kind of Gnosticism, and do so while ignoring or obliterating the very thought of a God who had Himself stricken or carved onto stone 10 simple propositions, a code if you will, onto rock. Their math and science and their scientific interpolations, paradigms and algorithms delete, annihilate, and obliterate the very real a priori rock of learned human existence as written down in ancient stories passed on for generations. And these stories are judged to be mythical simply because they carry a kind of revelation of knowledge that the scientific method does not necessarily support. They then frolic into a wonderful world of grandiose suppositions and propositions that have basis only in their own nihilism, an empirical data resting on a house of cards. They go about postulating and waxing cosmic and philosophical and in there own minds "definitive," much the same way that Galileo attempted to venture into theological hypotheses. This theologizing is what got Galileo into trouble and not his heliocentric theory which had already been advanced by men such as Tycho Brahe and by a Roman Catholic Priest we know of as, Copernicus.
Hawking often is very aware in his writings just how his intellectual gift is one of excellence in that realm of existence, and so argues using that brilliance as a means to fly the high like Icarus struggling to touch the sun. However, instead, unaware, he becomes entrapped outside the box of empiricism and the scientific method. His paradigms no longer work as he muddles and even enjoys weightlessness in the outer realms of metaphysics and philosophy. There his arguments become subject to a different set of rules. The rules of logic govern and the scientific method fades into the stratosphere like a pair of booster rockets ejected from a space shuttle launch. So he remains left behind floating around in outer space without a space suit. Give that boy some oxygen. (I smile.)
With respect to euthanasia, to Hawking it boils down to this: No God; No soul; No soul; we are no different than other species in the animal kingdom; as to the acknowledging the complexity of the human species vis a vis other mammals, or even arthropods for that matter, Hawking, simply has a notion that he is an accident of nature and that it was the evolutionary process of the smaller mandible that allowed for a larger capacity in a skull to have a larger brain. If he were correct, he'd have a point. the problem with his conclusion there is no God is that it is not a scientific conclusion as you cannot come to such an affirmation of the consequence when the knowledge points necessary to make an empirical conclusion are just not there. However, if he would only see that reason, language, thought, communication, invention, even dreaming, and artistry and music all have a basis in a priori information that cannot be discovered under some rock. It simply is present in our species' capability in our "capax" to see a "revealed truth". Revealed? he asks? I answer: "Yes Hawking, like a light is turned on in a dark room showing you what you could not see before. It's that simple." He makes an elementary mistake in logic and perhaps if he had taken more philosophy courses, he might just get it.
Some things are a priori. They just are. You cannot concluded empirically that they are not nor can you prove empirically that they are. That said, um..... there are things you can know how to do without knowing how you learned how to do them. It's like, I hear a piano piece by Mozart....no sheet music in front of me..... I simply am able to have my fingers hit the correct keys to play that piece. What does it prove? It proves that I can know a sound revealed to me by hearing without the complexity of understanding the rudiments of musical theory. So, does the music exist because I play it? or because it is written? Is the knowledge intrinsic in the "beauty" of the playing of the music in the written notes? or the praxis of the notes? Maybe both. But empirically, no one can prove the music exists or does not exist simply by phenomenological and experiential revelations. Animals cannot do this.... no....not even a whale or a dolphin.
Hawking is brilliant. He has many propositions worth investigating further from the empirical standpoint and we now have the capability with complex tools to look into inner space as well as outer space. Like the mere shadow of brilliance put forth by the likes of Carl Sagan, (when compared to Hawking, that is), Hawking begins to expound and affirm consequences for which he has no data to even be scientifically predictive so as to forecast in a way the so called laws of probability even begin to make sense.
In the end, brilliance is as any gift given. It originates from the very source of all spectra of light and thought. Sometimes brilliance blinds. Hawking may have an inner impetus to go beyond his physical incapacity or his profound sense of abnormalcy. He is angry so he will use his brilliance to obliterate ontological truths that place before him the reality that the very notion of God means that God allowed the abnormalness of his physical handicaps and he would then be promoted to ask the question: "Why did you make me like this?" He then would condescend to this God that he, Hawking, is brilliant; but yet he cannot conceive "if" what or "that" God might, in time, answer his question. Instead, he reverts to a nihilization (annihilation) of that God, that first premise, because there is no immediate solution to the stated human equational symbolism that defines his existence. There are too many variables in the calculus of life so like Narcissus, Hawking fails to hear Echo calling to him, and so he finds himself caught in a conundrum of his own introspection that is a process locked up in myopic admiration of his own mental and somewhat angry reflections in the reflecting pond of his terminal view.
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