How Green is Your Refrigerator?

Going “Green” is massively politically correct. In fact Obama Motors will be producing greenie-mobiles, regardless of what the consumers really want. The idea of political correctness is intellectually indefensible in the first place, and in the second place it frequently goes against the laws of nature, not to mention logic and economics.

A beautiful case in point is the highly-hyped Sainsbury’s grocery store being built in Gloucester, UK. Amongst the standard environmental improvements being incorporated in the new store are a couple of knee-slappers.

First is the placing of kinetic-energy plates in the street to capture the energy of passing automobiles, which is then converted into electricity which will power cash registers. According to PhysOrg.com, the kinetic plates do not affect the gas mileage of the passing vehicles.

This is a completely bogus approach to energy “savings”. It is actually an energy theft from the autos, albeit at a very small rate per auto. But it is still a theft of energy, which then undergoes another lossy transformation from mechanical to electrical energy. It is like a bank stealing 3 cents from every customer, at thousands of customers, but losing 2 cents along the way to inefficiency. It is both intellectually and morally dishonest. And the ineffeciency inherent in the theft-conversion scheme results in a net increase in the overall usage of the hated fossil fuel that powers the automobiles and therefore an increase in pollution, etc.

But that’s not all, of course. The designers of the store also plan on ”retrieving cold air from refrigerators to keep the checkout area cool.” Every high school physics student knows that this will increase the energy bills, not decrease them.

Pulling cold air from the refrigerator will cause warm air to back-fill it, and cause the refrigerator to run full time attempting to keep its internal temperature low; this will shorten the life of the compression elements and will be inefficient energy-wise. Worse, it will likely result in spoiled food in the fridge, too, because of the room temperature air that is continually flowing into the refrigerator.

Heat pumps and air conditioning units are designed to do the job of cooling environmental air, and very efficiently these days, especially earth contact units. Using a refrigerator in the place of an air conditioner is, well, it is just ignorant. Politically correct, but extremely ignorant. Besides, it’s the UK, why would they need A/C anyway?

If equipment heat is the problem, then a simple fan exhaust system might do the job at a huge reduction in both installation cost and operating cost. What this job really needed was not PC “designers”, it needed a good engineer.

If You Don’t Value Truth, Then What DO You Value? [Updated]

In the previous posts the idea that relativism can be rational, true and absolute is explored, along with the need for truth as an incorrigible absolute, if logic is to exist. Now the question is asked, if you deny absolutes and incorrigibles such as truth, then for you, what exists as a basis for your thought?

For example, Bertrand Russell said, in his Atheistic speech, "Why I am Not A Christian",

“We must require evidence for a thing if it is to be believed”.

[Note: The Russell attribution just above is incorrect. The correct attriution is the following: In "Why I Am A Rationalist", Russell said this: "As far as I can see, the view to which we are committed, one which I have stated on a former occasion, is that we ought not to believe, and we ought not to try to cause others to believe, any proposition for which there is no evidence whatever."
I'm no longer sure where the quote I used actually came from; I read a lot of Russell back at that time.]

For Russell, this was a law of the universe, one upon which to base one’s thought process and worldview. In other words, it is an incorrigible absolute. And further, it is an imperative: a moral statement, and as such no evidence is provided to sustain the truth of the statement, it is to be believed based on the moral force of its intuited truth. And further still, there is no empirical test that could possibly be devised that would produce evidence in support of this statement.

So Russell’s statement is intuited, imperative, moral, without any evidence needed or empirical support. So, evidence is said to be "required", yet evidence is not provided for Russell’s truth statement. This is self-refuting, yet it is commonly used as a law for Materialism

And even further still, Russell does not provide any definition of “evidence”, where it is to be found, How it is to be recognized, and how it is to be measured.

This single error in logic serves as a case study in Philosophical Materialism. It is fairly clear that Russell meant “physical, empirical evidence”. And it is also clear that he had not thought through the self-refutation contained in his declaration of the moral law.

What Is Truth?
It is always necessary to define the terms in use if confusion is to be avoided down the line. So let’s define truth now, in terms of its characteristics.

Truth is an absolute concept, and is an exclusive, discriminatory thing. There is truth, and there is not-truth: falseness; that’s all there is, epistemologically: just the two categories with no in-betweens, no partial truths. And these two entities, truth and not-truth, are mutually exclusive. There is no not-truth in truth. This means that truth is highly discriminatory, discriminating ruthlessly against non-truth. Truth is exclusively truth.

Tolerating falseness as a value is valuing not-truth, and therefore is false.

Truth has one form and is absolute; not-truth can take a great many forms and is unrestricted by any absolutes other than being absolutely not-true.

Truth is totally independent of outside influences; it doesn’t recognize or respond to our opinion of it, how we malign it or abuse it, or even deny it. Truth cannot be eliminated or destroyed. It is. In other words, it is also ontologically incorrigible, as well as epistemologically incorrigible.

Truth must exist if we are to be logical and rational; if there is no truth, then logic is impossible, having no solid base. If that is the case, then our thoughts have no value whatsoever. We consistently presume otherwise.

So Bertrand Russell must have valued truth, since he used the concept as the basis for his declaration of the necessity of evidence as the basis for belief in a thing.

But what about this evidence? We need to define that too, a challenge that Russell ignored.

Types of Evidence
There are two types of evidence for a thing, (a) objective and (b) subjective.

Objective evidence is evidence of the material world, which can be shared with other observers, measured, re-measured and so on. This is the universe of empirical discovery. Empiricism admits up-front that it is capable only of objective measurements of those things with physical, material characteristics that can be demonstrated in a physical, material experimental fashion. So empiricism is voluntarily materialistic, restricting what it will deal with to material entities. Additionally material evidence is never without the possibility of being overturned by future empirical findings: it is never incorrigible[1].

Subjective evidence is inferentially derived from internal, intuited mental explorations. This is the case of Russell’s ruling on the necessity of evidence. Intuited truths are not testable empirically, because they are not material in and of themselves, even though they might refer to material things, as Russell’s declaration does. Because they are not hampered with a physical, material existence, it is possible for subjective evidence to be incorrigibly valid.

Subjective evidence of this type includes the First Principles of Logic and Rational Thought; mathematics; language. These are intuited and can be represented second-hand by symbols for use in assisting thought and communication of thought. This subjective evidence exists in a non-material reality, where meaning exists but materiality does not.

There can also be false subjective evidence, such as imagined, deluded, anti-rational, and deceptive. Frequently the real incorrigible intuited evidence is charged with being one of these false types. But this can be tested by examining the rational, logical basis underlying the charge.

Going back to the original issue, what is it that one values, if one does not value the absolute, incorrigible truth? Devaluing truth eliminates the subjective evidence that is needed for rational thinking. It opens thought to an uncontrolled baseless anarchy of meaningless fluctuations. But there are other consequences too.

By eliminating absolutes, character values and cultural values float adrift. In fact, the term “values” hardly applies, since there is no differentiation in “value” between competing theories of behavior, ethics and morality: they are all relative and may be chosen as convenient. Gone are such valued permanent character traits as responsibility, honesty, truthfulness, reliability, trustworthiness, persistence.

But oddly and illogically (what else) new absolutes are put in place of the rejected absolutes: tolerance-of-everything, and equality reduction of all outcomes (the new “justice” for victims). These become the New Rights, which dominate when juxtaposed with the diminished old rights: Tolerance over free speech; equal outcomes over equal opportunities.

Tolerance-of-everything produces this Daughter Right: the right not to be offended; it’s a hate crime to offend through thought or deed. Tolerance-of-everything conflicts directly with liberty. Intolerance of intolerance is self-refuting.

Equal outcomes requires the leveling of wealth, which in turn requires the theft of wealth from those who have it and redistributing it to those who don’t. But those who don’t have it now will squander what they are given, requiring more wealth to be removed from the now-poor populace; it’s a never-ending spiral downward to complete impoverishment of the entire population (except of course those in charge of the redistribution).

The new absolutes are part of an “absolute-free” doctrine, and this alone puts the doctrine into self-refutation. The idea that absolutes don’t exist, are not important, and everything is relative is not merely flawed, it is false, blatantly irrevocably, and incorrigibly. It is not “absolutely true that absolute truth does not exist”, another self-refutation.

This all resolves to personal valuations. A person may choose to be tough minded and discriminatory, valuing truth over falseness, agendas and irrationality. Or a person may choose to be open-minded and anti-discriminatory: valuing diversity over truth; valuing tolerance of any and everything over liberty; valuing variable falseness over absolutes such as truth.

Are there any in-betweens? Being in-between is just as irrational as pure falseness. This means that there are really only the two choices: choosing absolute truth as the basis for you worldview; or choosing whatever. Which do you choose?


[1] Except for being incorrigibly unincorrigible: Godel’s discovery and Russell’s lament.

Is There Truth and How Could I Know? An Essay

Occasionally I run into Relativists who insist that nothing is constant, the world is in a continual state of flux, and therefore there is no Truth; certainly not absolute truth – nothing is absolute. What was thought to be true 50 years ago now seems quaint and erroneous. Not only is this the case for the progress of science and technology, it is also the case for our culture and its view of values and morality. In fact, nothing in the physical universe is the same, moment to moment, as particles move, are created and destroyed, masses move, and energy is deployed.

This idea of change over truth is so ingrained that it is used as an axiom, a basis for an entire panoply of beliefs. This axiom is a statement of complete variability, randomness and instability. “Whatever we think now will seem quaint and obsolete in the future; we cannot predict what will be 'truth' in the future”. This, then, justifies the idea that there can be no absolutes and that those who claim otherwise are irrational, or at least misguided, at best. At worst they are dangerously deluded, needing to be isolated for the good of all.

The previous two posts deal with rational thought and logic, and the need for a solid, permanent foundation on which to build ones ideas, a foundation known as the First Principles. I have made the case for the absolute need for consistency in order to produce coherence and stability in thought. Because without consistency and coherence there is absolutely no stable logic in our statements: it would all be untethered and irrational.

While there is much of our thought process that is merely functional daily activity oriented thinking, our worldviews are definitely in need of a rational, logical foundation. What could be worse, we might think, than an irrational worldview? Empirical science requires consistency in its axioms, or researchers would be wasting their time taking data in an inconsistent universe. Empirical science also requires that its axioms be valid, at least in the boundaries of the field that is being investigated. So some of the axioms of science incorporate the known variability of the universe, such as entropy, for example. But mostly empirical science depends on the invariability of physical laws across time and space, within our universe.

But not our worldviews; they have become relative and variable, without absolutes and morphing to fit the culture at the moment. If our worldviews are fluctuating, truth-free and value-free, accommodating the momentary convenience and not the eternal decencies, then why bother to have one? This is precisely the issue with Relativism: it engenders intellectual anarchy, which is the definition of irrationality. And intellectual anarchy engenders moral anarchy.

Enlightenment values seem to favor such an anarchy, certainly over the hated absolutism which the Enlightenment pretends to have overthrown. It allows the imagination of a discomfited proletariat where in reality there is no proletariat, much less a discomfited one. It allows the imagination of personal and class and racial superiorities based only on subjective proclivities. It allows the rationalized manufacture of axioms that are convenient, but not true, and the use of those axioms in a worldview. Relativism and its accompanying intellectual anarchy are dangerous.

The idea that there can be logic requires that there be a consistent base of truth available to those who would use that logic in deriving their worldviews. This body of consistent truth is a problem for Relativists, for whom it cannot exist, absolutely: there can be no absolutes in a fluctuating universe. So are there, really, universal, consistent truths?

If there were to be consistent, absolute truths in the universe, how would we know them? For a start, and to make it easy on ourselves, we will question the philosophers, for whom such questions make their careers. I like to go straight to Nietzsche, who denied their truth, thereby revealing their existence, at least intellectually. These principles and others are contained in the previous posting today, here.

We can examine these principles and see immediately that there is nothing there that can be measured, empirically. These principles are not physical, material things; they are metaphysical. So they cannot be validated or invalidated, empirically, using weights and measures or any physical techniques.

Next we can see that they are true, obviously and incorrigibly. They cannot be otherwise, even though they can be denied, obstreperously and without any accompanying validation. But viewed objectively and without prior agenda, they are so intuitively valid that they cannot be reasonably denied. Their truth is incorrigible.

And we can also see that without these intellectual foundations in play as axioms, logic cannot exist as a principled endeavor and rational thought becomes impossible.

So we can know, without material validation, that they are true, inexorably and incorrigibly. And because of this, we can also know that truth exists, that it is non-material (metaphysical) in nature, and that it must be either intuited as are the First Principles, or developed rationally from an intuited base.

Relativists, Materialists and Atheists deny – or at least decry – intuition. Either it doesn’t exist for the Relativist, or it is inherently faulty and subjective. This is in part the Nietzschean argument, which led him to develop Anti-Rationalism. But Anti-Rationalism is once again an absolute-free intellectual anarchy. And if nothing is true, then why bother thinking about anything at all? This produces a self-oriented, declining narcissism, a decay of purpose for being, a devaluation of life and self. (In fact, Nietzsche came to produce a power-based totalitarian philosophy that was needed to overcome the enervation of such intellectual and moral anarchy.)

But Relativists and other Enlightenment fans claim to be rational, not irrational. And they seem to succumb to irrational proofs of their rationality, such as placing the conclusion (agenda) into the premises in order to 'prove' the conclusion/agenda; or rationalizing false or fantasy premises to support a presupposed conclusion. The analysis of Materialist arguments always seems to turn up such fallacious reasoning.

In order to be truly rational and logical, the order must be reversed: it is the process which must be held dear, not the conclusion. The conclusion must roll naturally out of the process, and regardless of one’s opinion of the conclusion, if the process is valid, the premises are valid, and the testing against the First Principles succeeds, then the conclusion – whatever it is – will be valid. If such a conclusion contradicts ones agenda, it is the agenda that must be rejected, not the conclusion.[1]

Further, if there is Truth, if Truth is metaphysical, and if there is support from the process of rationality and the First Principles, then “incorrigibility” follows: it makes no difference what anyone thinks about it, says about it, does about it, it is totally independent in both existence and validity. Non-belief and denial have no effect on incorrigible truth.

Are there other metaphysical truths, incorrigible and independent? If one asks the questions, “Is there a source for this incorrigible truth? And if so what is it?”, a new level of answers becomes apparent. But that is not the subject of this essay.

[1] It is this process that drove me out of my Atheist, Materialist worldview.