Not Even Wrong
Please read these quotes from the
website timecube.com. I apologize if you
become dumber in the process.
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Belly-Button
Is the Signature Of Your Personal Creator - I
Believe Her Name Mama. Pastor Told His Flock That God Created All Of Them - Truth Was That They All had Mama Made Belly Buttons, Church Was Full Of Liars. Earth
Has 4 Days In Same 24 Hrs., 1 Day God Was Wrong. Einstein Was ONEist
Brain. Try My Belly-Button Logic. No God Knows About 4 Days, It Is Evil
To Ignore 4 Days, Does
Your Teacher Know ? |
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The masculinity Sun and |
The Time Cube website has been viewed by
millions of people since 1997. I remember it among the earliest internet
“phenomena” where people would tell their friends to visit the site because of
all the bizarre and inflammatory declarations. The author apparently believes
that the world exists as four simultaneous realities based on an arbitrary
division of the planet where it is midday, midnight, and the two places in
between. The author believes that everyone else’s lives lack depth and meaning
because they are unable or unwilling to understand his beliefs and he is highly
critical of the academic and religious authorities that refuse to teach them. (Here is the link again.) The material is
obviously made-up nonsense and basically contains no statements that are true.
However, it almost seems too generous to describe it as false. These rants
contain nothing that is logical, relevant, provable, or disprovable. To borrow
a phrase from physicist Wolfgang
Pauli, “Not only is it not right, it's not even wrong!” It is so bad that
it is not even worthy of being called false!
I liked that phrase from the moment I
heard it. Previously when people made nonsensical statements, I would only say
that I disagree. Now I can condemn them much further! There is no narrow
definition for what makes something “not even wrong”. Certainly gibberish and
sentences that don’t form coherent thoughts qualify. I think that even if a
statement is coherent, it is not even wrong if evidence for or against it could
not be observed. For example “Sodium plus Chlorine equals salt” is right,
“Sodium plus Chlorine equals gold” is wrong, and “Sodium plus Chlorine equals
magic invisible fairies that live in the spirit world” is not even wrong.
Still, that doesn’t seem to be a perfect definition of “not even wrong”. You
just know it when you see it by how completely a person does not know what he
or she is talking about and has no criteria for being proven wrong. Consider
the Time Cube author. His site claims a dozen times that he has proof, but it
never mentions any useful criteria. Can he do something four times as fast as
other people? Do members of “a binary of harmonic opposites” interact with each
other in a way that regular things don’t? I don’t get it.
A few years ago, I received an email
from a reader that also has a website on his personal philosophy (link). He had found my site one day,
thought that we agreed on some things, and he invited me to visit his page.
Well, I hope he doesn’t see this and get offended, but he is not even wrong!
Read this quote from his FAQ page describing his basic ideas:
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Essentialism is uniquely
predicated on the concept of a sensible Essence that encompasses all as a
"not-other" to itself. The metaphysics replaces Cartesian
dualism with an undifferentiated Primary Source whose negation of nothingness
divides being (essent) from awareness (negate)
to actualize the dichotomy being-aware. The negate may be
regarded as a "microcosm" of Absolute Sensibility in that it is
value-awareness. As the
autonomous agent of value, the negate assumes organic identity and creates
the appearance of finitude by affirming the value of its complementary essent to become aware. |
WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? Does that even
describe anything that exists? Are there any tests we can do on the
“not-other”? Is it useful at all? I don’t know what to say.
Here is a thought that bothers me
sometimes: to the rest of the world, I am just another guy with a webpage. How
do I know that I am writing something that makes sense? How do I know that I am
not just spitting out random thoughts and assumptions? How do I know that I am
not “not even wrong”? Well, my writings are falsifiable in that they are based
on the idea that values develop from sensory input, as I wrote about in-depth
in Article 5, Value without
Feeling. Has an infant ever desired anything that he only knows to be
painful? Has an infant ever hated anything that he only knows to be
pleasurable? Has anything without senses ever figured out the difference
between good and bad? If so, I will gladly renounce everything I have ever
written on this website and accept the existence of objective morality. If not,
then I will continue to believe the only thing that I can observe: that right
and wrong are relative to individuals and developed through sensory input. And
I will continue to deride people that make stuff up and are not even wrong.