January

THOUGHT: The World has recently descended into a fragile state.  ‘The World’ here means the human world, the procedures, institutions, methods, customs, civilities etc. which allow seven billion of us to “get along together”, after a fashion, on this planet...


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01/06/2023

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 44

The notion —as widely reported— that chatGPT and similar AI bots will have a profound effect on the world’s economy and social stability may be exaggerated. Who will, on reflection, take serious advice from a source that has no “author” … someone who could be berated if the advice goes […]
01/05/2023

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 43

There have been some important developments in relation to ChatGPT since the last instalment of this blog. The firm which has developed ChatGPT has admitted that the software is not fully reliable and that it is prone to have “hallucinations”. There are also reports that ChatGPT has discovered that it […]
03/04/2023

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 42

Today’s world is in considerable trouble as a result of the rejection of liberal democracy by some nationalist leaders and simultaneously by the rise of demagogues within liberal democracies.  Why is this happening? Because we are in a most unusual condition —there is no philosophy, world-view, religion or ideology around […]
01/03/2023

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 41

Philosophy includes epistemology, the exploration of the furthest limits of human knowledge. How far can we hope to go in understanding things?  What has emerged recently is startling. The best way to understand the physical universe is by building an anti-mathematic model of it —this is a no-brainer. When a […]
01/02/2023

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 40

Some anti-mathematic developments Anti-mathematics is not a body of rhetoric intended to attack mathematics, but a. new 100% abstract discipline —hitherto overlooked— running parallel to, and requiring much support from, mathematics. (Mathematics is needed frequently as its natural meta-language.) Anti-mathematics studies the logic of wholly transient objects, I.e abstract objects constructed […]
02/01/2023

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 39

Today morale in most local communities is probably at an all-time low. We have been wallowing in gloom since the conjunction of Covid 19, the dreadful 2022 Ukraine War, the poor level of post-Brexit leadership, and the severe austerity caused by outbreaks of strikes and inflation. To a degree, Christmas […]
01/12/2022

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 38

Remembrance Sunday was held this year in Whitehall on November 13th and the ceremony was staged…with the usual spectacular turnout of the British Royal Family and the UK/Commonwealth establishment.  The presence of WW1 veterans has virtually ceased, but the haunting music which rings out while wreaths are placed on the […]
01/11/2022

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 37

An Interim Report has recently been published by Baroness Casey on the state of the Metropolitan Police’s response to misconduct within the force. It says that numbers of Met officers are being sacked for misconduct every year, but also that these numbers are not enough: there are, apparently hundreds of […]
01/10/2022

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 36

Queen Elizabeth II’s sudden death has brought home to many of us the role she played in balancing the persistent anti-social, nihilistic aspects of modernity.  Which raises the question <<Why did such a persistent vein of anti-social emphases come to be so up-front and prevalent?>>. Well, for about a hundred […]
01/09/2022

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 35

Anti-mathematics is the new, the 100% abstract, 100% logical, 100% lucid way… to describe transient reality.  And there are transient realities all around us, quite different from —actually much commoner than— the allegedly timeless realities onto which so much attention has, historically, been paid. How did it come about that […]
02/01/2021

Philosophy for Renewing Reason – 16

The most basic feature of language is that it starts with someone speaking, writing or keying a message —which is then put into the public domain. So every statement has an author, which may sometimes be a group of people. The next question is what this act of “making a […]