Characterising the truth as misinformation is disinformation.

This modern age, the age of Humanity, the age of reason, is indeed very “young” but not yet “free” from the bondage of tribalism. Human ‘reconciliation’ and ‘tribalism’ are mutually exclusive notions.

The intrinsic value of all human beings, valuable in virtue of being an instance of consciousness capable of rational thought and therefore of meaningful communication, is somewhat glossed over by the symbol of divine human origin as the source of value. There is a very pragmatic, realist dimension to this ‘intrinsic value’, which simultaneously tells us something essential about human constitution and about the idea of God.

In the human dimension, consciousness is not monadic in its constitution but socially reflexive, in the sense that we cannot be conscious as a Self without engaging with Other instances of consciousness as beings of the same kind. We must communicate in order to generate meaning, any meaning, even to conceive of ourselves a something distinct and meaningful. So the ‘divinity’ of other conscious beings symbolises the existential (ontological) dependency that we share, reflexively, as beings of the same kind. The operative symbol here, which is probably older than ‘God’, is Anthropos: one who is alike, of human likeness, human face (consider this in relation to mandatory masking).

In relation to ‘God’, the said ontological dependency on social reflexivity suggests that God is also a social being, inseparable from us and always necessarily in a reflexive relation with us: being “made in the image of God” is very much like being “one who is alike”. It is not a new idea (going back at least to Kant) that God is an “ideal person”, but I think “the ideal of personhood” is an even better fit. Whenever we act in the social dimension we aim for an ideal which is signified by ‘God’, we aim to be an ideal person in order to get the perfect outcome, but we typically fail to a degree. We can never be perfect, but we can strive towards that ideal, and being “with” Logos is the condition of our progress; Logos as the structure (logic) of meaning/word as being/reality.

Nature is the content of consciousness, its object, whereas consciousness is both the container and the transcendental condition of nature as something meaningful, therefore as anything at all. Nature is thus the opposite of consciousness, the opposite of Human (rational consciousness). The ‘natural world’ is the externalised record of the contingencies arising in the evolution of meaning. It is the context of conscious interaction, of common referents, but common only in virtue of the shared consciousness and (irreflexively) subordinate to it.

One of the greatest movies ever made, not only because of the extraordinary cinematography, but because it intuitively explores the structure of meaning. If the Bible could be done as a movie, it would be Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuOnfQd-aTw

Letter to Frank Chung (news dot com dot au):

FYI

My paper questioning the ethics of vaccine mandates is the 4th most read paper in the BMJ journal of Medical Ethics, despite being behind a paywall for several months and having Zero news sources picking it up (in contrast to nearly 100 news sources picking up the articles endorsing vaccine mandates). https://jme.bmj.com/content/48/4/240

The arguments stemming from the above work have been simplified for general audience and presented in my letter (16.08.2022) to the Australian Human Rights Commission:

Prof. Rosalind Croucher, President & Ms Lorraine Finlay, Human Rights Commissioner (Australian Human Rights Commission)

Dear President and Commissioner of AHRC,

I am a philosopher of ethics and the leading voice in the academic debate questioning the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates. I recently published on this topic in the BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics (cited below). I submit that vaccine mandates, or any systemic discrimination against the unvaccinated, infringes on human rights, including the right to life. This conclusion is based on the following grounds:

1. Vaccine mandates imply that all humans are born in a defective, inherently harmful state that must be biotechnologically augmented to allow our unrestricted participation in society, and this constitutes discrimination on the basis of healthy, innate characteristics of the human race. This devaluation of the innate human constitution is not only universally dehumanising, but it perverts the very concept of human rights; discrimination against the unvaccinated implies that our innate human constitution is no longer a guarantee of full human rights. This point derives from my paper published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/48/4/240.

2. Any discrimination against the unvaccinated is economic or social opportunity coercion, precluding the possibility of free medical consent. The right to free, uncoerced medical consent is not negotiable, under any circumstances, because without it we have no rights at all; every other right (including the right to life) can be subverted by medical coercion. Free medical consent is the most fundamental protection from crimes against humanity being committed under the guise of healthcare (several instances of such abuses have occurred in this century).

3. Vaccines are known to occasionally cause deaths of healthy people. When an employee is required to receive vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is economically coerced to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die ‘in the course of employment’ as a direct result of the mandated activity. This goes against the fundamental principles of medical ethics and workplace safety. It may be objected that infectious pathogens also kill people, but these two categories of deaths are not ethically equivalent. Infection with a pathogen for which there exists a vaccine is not mandated, whereas deaths resulting from mandatory vaccination are mandated deaths, a legalised killing of some people for the prospective benefit of the majority. Critically, any discrimination against the unvaccinated amounts to a violation of the right to life by coercing people to undergo a medical procedure where a small percentage of otherwise healthy people are expected to die as a direct result of that procedure.

An earlier version of these arguments were formally submitted to the Inquiry into Public Health Amendment Bill 2021 (No 2) ACT and subsequently published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/04/26/medethics-2022-108229.responses#fundamental-values-are-not-defeated-by-utilitarian-calculus

I suggest that we are facing a human rights emergency and the outlined issues call for immediate administrative action.

…

I have also contacted several regulatory agencies (SIRA, Australian Government Department of Health, Mr Gavrielatos at Safe Work NSW, Australian Medical Association, Safe Work Australia), and asked for assistance from numerous politicians, with two questions relating to a possible conflict between Covid-19 vaccine mandates and workplace safety. I have received only generic responses; not one agency or person contacted has explicitly answered my two questions, which were formulated as follows:

1. Do you acknowledge that Covid vaccination occasionally causes death of healthy people, even if the overall outcome benefits most people?

2. If yes, do you acknowledge that when an employee is required to receive Covid vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is in effect required to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die as a result of their mandatory participation?

The government and corporations do not have sufficient social credit to qualify as the arbiters of social credit of others. In fact, their social credit score is ZERO, the worst of the worst.

Remove tribal privileges and the non-tribal people will stop lying to avoid being discriminated against. He is implying, in line with the prevalent nativist-prioritarian (proto-Nazi) ideology: ‘how dare you subhuman second-comers and migrants claim equal rights with our tribe? You do not belong.’

Humans who are the most qualified to claim privileges under Aboriginal identity and enticed to claim associated special rights should be the first to renounce it, precisely because of those privileges. Choose Humanity as your only tribe. With this one move the entire edifice of tribal resentment would collapse, globally.

The question of Original Ownership (or Native Title) can be addressed in two different ways:

1. The idea that people of a particular race own the land just because other people of the same race once lived there is absurd and immoral; it devalues humanity for racial advantage.

2. Even if the idea of Original Ownership were valid it would still have no practical effect, because all humans share the same ancient ancestors. Ancestors of the alleged original owners of Australia were descendants of every human’s ancestors, our common ancestors, who belonged to the Earth. We are all related. We are ALL the original owners of the Earth.

Those aboriginal people who do not believe that ‘their land’ was stolen, who do not believe they are owed anything on account of their race, who do not want to be either celebrated or pitied because of their race, who do not want to be generalised as a race or tribe but as morally responsible individuals with full human rights, I am with them. They are my hope and they should become more politically active against misrepresentation by their media-appointed leaders. If they do nothing, if they say nothing, they are tacitly acquiescing to the cultivation of resentment.

Cultural differences are irrelevant to mutual understanding if common rules of logic/sense are respected. Conversely, without a common standard of sense no understanding between cultures is possible, because what knowledge means to one culture is structurally inconsistent to another. Respecting other cultures for the sake of ones own culture being reciprocally respected, in lieu of rational resolution of cultural disagreements, is a capitulation to the primacy of nonsense and a commitment to violence as the ultimate arbiter of values and facts. The defining condition of Humanity is not culture or biological similarity but the universal rules of sense that constrain our capacity for meaning.

The statement “our values” is an oxymoron, as nonsensical as “my truth”. Values are either objectively true, therefore independent of your subjective point of view, therefore not “your values”; or there are no true values, therefore “your values” are wrong and must be rejected. When corporations use “our values” as a dogmatic justification for ideological tyranny, they are always wrong, both ethically and logically.

The primary value for consciousness, the intrinsic aim of consciousness that makes us human and our life worth living, is to generate meaning, a deeper and more integrated universe of meaning than the one we were born into. Creation of meaning is conditional on intentional action, reflexive comprehension and communication with other rational beings, and is commensurate with the capacity for adherence to the fundamental laws that govern the distinction between sense and nonsense.

It is a formally provable fact that every rational agent (Human) values being a rational agent. “In intending to φ we affirm that it is preferable (or more valuable) to φ than not to φ, where φ stands for 'exercise the capacity <to act in a particular way>'. Since φ amounts to 'now being an agent', the commitment to value φ is a value-commitment to 'now being an agent'.” (Kowalik 2020) A crucial part of this value-commitment is the meaning of <acting in a particular way>'; meaning that is more integrated (fits in a system that contains fewer inconsistencies), is more expansive and detailed, allows greater capacity <to act in particular ways> and to reliably realise our intentions. All other ‘true’ values are logically derived from this intrinsic value-commitment.

Aboriginal Identity is already a huge ‘moral’ ennoscriptment. Kids who are pathologised at school with the doctrine that they are racially guilty, that being non-aboriginal they can never truly belong, that their children and their descendants will always be just second-class citizens, because they were not here first, they are not the “original race”, are bound to seek to escape this racial stigma, even make themselves believe that they are Aboriginal. If the Australian government were honest, they would greet all incoming migrants with a giant Red and Black billboard: “Welcome to Australia. We are a Nativist-supremacist country, so you will never really belong.”

Do not be bullied or intimidated by transgender identity activists or employers who adopt their ideology. Their bigoted demands (to recognise trans males as women and trans females as men) are easily defeated by logic. Logic aways wins because it is the structure of being. https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/gender-identity-on-trial

Yes!

My ‘Rapid Response’ to an article in the British Medical Journal was finally accepted and published, 5 months after the date of submission. https://gh.bmj.com/content/7/5/e008684.responses#fundamental-values-cannot-be-defeated-by-the-argument-from-proportionality