Circular Reasoning Quotes

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy. -- Circular Letter to My Friends in Italy

materialism is a fantasy. It’s based on unnecessary postulates, circular reasoning and selective consideration of evidence and data. Materialism is by no stretch of the imagination a scientific conclusion, but merely a metaphysical opinion that helps some people interpret scientific conclusions.

The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.

There is no one who does not feel that he is imprisoned in some way. If this is the result of his own free will he must regard his will as not free, or the circular reasoning in this position would be quite apparent. Free will must lead to freedom.

Circular reasoning is infallible even if not exactly logical, and this is why so many of us so often resort to it—not so much to resolve baffling problems, but to be absolved of the obligation to worry about them.

You never do anything without a reason." "Of course not. Why do anything without a reason?" "Don't start up with your circular logic.

Monty Python is, for reasons best known to nobody, rather popular with computer programmers. There’s even a programming language called Python, based on their sketches.

True feeling is always circular - either circular, or paradoxical - simply because its cause and its expression are tow halves of the very same thing! Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love. Any man who disagrees with me has never been in love - not truly.

It seemed a ruse that fear of death should be the sole motivation for living and, yet, to quell this fear made the prospect of living itself seem all the more absurd; to extend this further, the notion of living one’s life for the purposes of pondering the absurdity of living was an even greater absurdity in and of itself, which thus, by reductio ad absurdum, rendered the fear of death a necessary function of life and any lack thereof, a trifling matter rooted in self-inflicted incoherence.

Reason like a sphere? What type of reasoning does a wooden sphere do?" "The circular type, I should think. And, by coincidence, it is my favorite type as well. Perhaps that's why I'm so good at the game.

In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in the tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had take her away from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

You are telling me that I did something because I was going to do something.” “Well, didn’t you? You were there.” “No, I didn’t—no… well, maybe I did, but it didn’t feel like it.” “Why should you expect it to? It was something totally new to your experience.” “But… but—” Wilson took a deep breath and got control of himself. Then he reached back into his academic philosophical concepts and produced the notion he had been struggling to express. “It denies all reasonable theories of causation. You would have me believe that causation can be completely circular. I went through because I came back from going through to persuade myself to go through. That’s silly.” “Well, didn’t you?" ~ By His Bootstraps / Robert A. Heinlein

There was a reason love was a round sounding word. It completed you and then some, like treading a circular path, the way it was immemorial. Whole. But also... infinite. It went on and on as long as you went on and on, to meet it, keep it, treasure it. And I would.

Pot itself has nothing to do with pots and pans, but comes from the Mexican-Spanish word potiguaya, which means marijuana leaves. And marijuana is a Mexification of 'Mary Jane' for reasons that everybody is much too stoned to remember.

But the logic is circular. Because the ghosts exist, you’ve proven Augustine can work magic. Because he can work magic, he is the reason for the ghosts. What if it’s something else?

Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence. But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence. And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence. Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe? Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?

A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle.

Pilate was required to release one of the prisoners, so he gave the mob the choice of Jesus or Barabbas, a notorious murderer and insurrectionist-in otherwords, someone who incites mobs. Again, the mob "spoke with one voice" demanding "with loud shouts" that Jesus be crucified.

When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver (mercury), but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter. The dragon is probably the oldest pictoral symbol in alchemy of which we have documentary evidence. It appears as the Ouroboros, the tail-eater, in the Codex Marcianus, which dates from the tenth or eleventh century, together with the legend ‘the One, the All’. Time and again the alchemists reiterate that the opus proceeds from the one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like a dragon biting its own tail. For this reason the opus was often called circulare (circular) or else rota (the wheel). Mercurius stands at the beginning and end of the work: he is the prima materia, the caput corvi, the nigredo; as dragon he devours himself and as dragon he dies, to rise again in the lapis. He is the play of colours in the cauda pavonis and the division into the four elements. He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the classical brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novum, the stone. He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught - a symbol uniting all the opposites.

When we are stuck in fight/flight/freeze mode, we devote our resources to managing stress, and, to put it simply, our child brain suffers. Childhood is a time of great vulnerability. Unable to survive on our own, a parent-figure’s withholding of anything perceived to hinder our survival sends stress signals flooding through our bodies. The resulting ‘survival brain’, as I call it, is hyperfocused on perceived threats, sees the world in black and white, and is often obsessive, panic driven, and prone to circular reasoning. We can break down or shut down when faced with stress.

The modern mind is not single-minded: it eliminates from its progressive outlook the Christian implication of creation and consummation, while it assimilates from the ancient world view the idea of an endless and continuous movement, discarding its circular structure. The modern mind has not made up its mind whether it should be Christian or pagan. It sees with one eye of faith and one of reason. Hence its vision is necessarily dim in comparison with either Greek or biblical thinking.

Science itself exists thanks to our intelligence, and now we use science to figure out how our intelligence works? This is either very efficient or circular reasoning, I'm not smart enough to tell.

The circular wind is life. What was yesterday comes again tomorrow. It runs from place to place and returns. But in the midst of disorder is reason. And if you can hold to reason, you shall be safe.

J. dBudziszewski points out, “The motto ‘Reason Alone!’ is nonsense anyway. Reason itself presupposes faith. Why? Because a defense of reason by reason is circular, therefore worthless. Our only guarantee that human reason works is God who made it.

To the skeptic all arguments are circular.

There is a moment when the dead man, too, cancels further revision of the impure. Thus, the dead man is a postscript to closure. The dead man is also a form of circular reasoning, the resident tautologist in an oval universe that is robin's-egg-blue to future generations. Perhaps it's so not important that the dead man lives. After all, the dead man deserts the future.

I believe in brevity. I believe that you, the reader, entrust me, the writer, with your most valued commodity—your time. I shouldn’t take more than my share. For that reason, I love the short sentence. Big-time game it is. Hiding in the jungle of circular construction and six-syllable canyons. As I write, I hunt. And when I find, I shoot. Then I drag the treasure out of the trees and marvel. Not all of my prey make their way into chapters. So what becomes of them? I save them. But I can’t keep them to myself. So, may I invite you to see my trophy case? What follows are cuts from this book and a couple of others. Keep the ones you like. Forgive the ones you don’t. Share them when you can. But if you do, keep it brief. Pray all the time. If necessary, use words. Sacrilege is to feel guilt for sins forgiven. God forgets the past. Imitate him. Greed I’ve often regretted. Generosity—never. Never miss a chance to read a child a story. Pursue forgiveness, not innocence. Be doubly kind to the people who bring your food or park your car. In buying a gift for your wife, practicality can be more expensive than extravagance. Don’t ask God to do what you want. Ask God to do what is right. Nails didn’t hold God to a cross. Love did.

Here’s the main fallacy. They defend their discrimination against those who believe the Bible by pointing to the opinion of the scientific majority that was caused by the discrimination against those who believe the Bible. They defend their bullying by pointing to a majority, but that majority was created through bullying. That’s a circular reasoning fallacy and an extreme example of the evil of discrimination and prejudice.

In a way, Robert Mueller had come to accept the dialectical premise of Donald Trump—that Trump is Trump. It was circular reasoning to hold the president’s essential character against him. Put another way, confronted by Donald Trump, Bob Mueller threw up his hands. Surprisingly, he found himself in agreement with the greater White House: Donald Trump was the president, and, for better or for worse, what you saw was what you got—and what the country voted for.

This was a tall order, and one could criticize it on the grounds that it was somewhat circular: how can you justify your methods of reasoning on the basis of those same methods of reasoning? It is like lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps.

A woman was standing at a bus stop, wildly flailing her umbrella. A curious onlooker approached and asked, “Why do you keep waving your umbrella about?” The woman replied with some annoyance that such an idiotic question should be asked of her: “Why, to keep the pink elephants away, of course.” “But, my dear lady,” the onlooker protested, “there are no pink elephants around.” The woman, exasperated, retorted, “Precisely, because I keep them away.” The Pink Elephant Fallacy is an example of the simplest of all failures of critical thought, circular reasoning.

Some theist fall in this categories Using: 1. **Circular Reasoning**: Assuming the conclusion in the premise, essentially restating the same idea without providing new information. 2. **Argument from Ignorance**: Asserting something as true simply because it hasn't been proven false, or vice versa. 3. **Appeal to Authority**: Using the opinion or testimony of an authority figure as evidence in an argument. 4. **False Dichotomy**: Presenting an argument as though there are only two options when there could be more. 5. **Argument from Personal Incredulity**: Rejecting a claim because one finds it difficult to understand or believe. Those are most fallacies which believers use

An oddity follows, a small circular ball of plasma drops from the ceiling of the Newara, for some reason Zara goes to catch it in her hands, “Whoa,” she juggles it, thinking it’s hot, but it’s cool to touch. The orb levitates up to face her. “Hi Zara.” “Rohza?” “In the flesh.” “Holy moley! You’re a real life will-o’-the-wisp.” Zara says, her face lit up from Rohza’s flickering light.

I kind of love it. It's so macabre. The reason we haven't seen or heard from anything off-world is that reaching off-world status is a civilisational death knell. Life either gets stuck there or destroyed there. It still doesn't really explain anything though - we can't see anyone because it's impossible to see anyone. It's circular. It doesn't say why becoming space proficient dooms us.

Nietzsche said we will never rid ourselves of God because we have too much faith in grammar/language. Lacan said because of the religious tenets of language, religion will triumph. Chomsky, master linguist, says 'there are no skeptics. You can discuss it in a philosophy seminar but no human being can - in fact - be a skeptic.' These musings shed light on Soren K's leap to faith idea. This is more nuanced than the circular leap of faith argument he's been wrongly accused of... Soren is saying that, as we use the logic of language to express existence and purpose, we will always leap TO faith in a superior, all encompassing, loving force that guides our lives. This faith does not negate our reason. It simply implies that the reasoning of this superior force is superior to our own. Edwin Abbott crystalizes this in Flatland.

What may be the nature of objects considered as things in themselves and without reference to the receptivity of our sensibility is quite unknown to us. Not only are the raindrops mere appearances, but even their circular form, nay, the space itself through which they fall, is nothing in itself, but both are mere modifications or fundamental dispositions of our sensible intuition, whilst the transcendental object remains for us utterly unknown.

The idea that there is something necessarily wrong with circular logic is itself a logical fallacy. If there is nothing wrong with the starting premises then the conclusions are necessarily correct too. In fact, only circular logic can be correct. Only such logic can offer total holistic coherence and analytic closure, i.e. perfect tautology – provided it is the correct circular logic, which means it must have the correct starting premise: the PSR itself.

To enable lending to proceed when the IMF’s sustainability criteria were not met, its bureaucrats designed the “systemic risk waiver.” It was a model of circular reasoning that might well be taught to philosophy students. “Severe debt crises all carry the risks of systemic spillovers,” notes Schadler. The global financial system was deemed to be endangered if a debt payment was missed or a haircut imposed on bondholders, because “confidence” was threatened. Any haircut for bondholders might cause panic and “contagion.” So it doesn’t matter what IMF economists say regarding debt sustainability. The IMF is committed to preserving “confidence” at all costs – confidence that the troika will lend governments enough to pay their bondholders and speculators in full (but not pension funds). The systemic risk waiver means that no bondholder should lose. Labor and taxpayers must pay for the losses from risky loans, or else there will be “contagion.

We discover the bumps are milpa, small mounds of earth on which complementary crops were planted. Unlike linear plowing, which encourages water runoff and soil erosion, the circular pattern traps rainfall. Each mound is planted with a cluster of the Three Sisters that were the staples of Indian agriculture: corn, beans, and squash. The corn provided a stalk for the beans to climb, while also shading the vulnerable beans. The ground cover from the squash stabilized the soil, and the bean roots kept the soil fertile by providing nitrogen. As a final touch, marigolds and other natural pesticides were planted around each mound to keep harmful insects away. Altogether it was a system so perfect that in some Central American countries too poor to adopt linear plowing with machinery, artificial pesticides, and monocrops of agribusiness, the same milpa have been producing just fine for four thousand years. 19 Not only that, but milpa can be planted in forests without clear-cutting the trees; at most, by removing a few branches to let sunlight through on a mound. This method was a major reason why three-fifths of all food staples in the world were developed in the Americas.

In the present day, curb cuts are so common, both ordinary and even mundane, that most people know nothing of this history. But the resistance to their widespread implementation was protracted and fierce. Outside a few small communities like Berkeley, where vocal activists won some local implementation, there was little understanding of the chicken-or-egg problem of accessible design. “When we first talked to legislators about the issue, they told us: ‘Curb cuts, why do you need curb cuts? We never see people with disabilities out on the street. Who is going to use them?’” recalled Roberts. “They didn’t understand that their reasoning was circular.

An addict’s ability to ignore their past actions appears to others as a missing conscience, a lack of morality, or a complete loss of empathy for others.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Although these painful memories are not consciously dwelled on, every single one of them lingers.  The past follows an addict around like a specter, hardly visible but truly terrifying.  This self-loathing is temporally alleviated by drugs. They’re called painkillers for a reason. The drugs lead to more actions causing shame, guilt, and remorse.  This routine becomes a circular, self-fulfilling prophecy.  Much like a freight train rolling down a hill, the weight and momentum become near impossible to stop.

Many speak of the legendary and gigantic starship Titanic, a majestic and luxurious cruise liner launched from the great shipbuilding asteroid complexes of Artrifactovol some hundreds of years ago now, and with good reason. It was sensationally beautiful, staggeringly huge and more pleasantly equipped than any ship in what now remains of history (see page 113 [on the Campaign for Real Time]) but it had the misfortune to be built in the very earliest days of Improbability Physics, long before this difficult and cussed branch of knowledge was fully, or at all, understood. The designers and engineers decided, in their innocence, to build a prototype Improbability Field into it, which was meant, supposedly, to ensure that it was Infinitely Improbable that anything would ever go wrong with any pan of the ship. They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely Improbable was actually very likely to happen almost immediately. The starship Titanic was a monstrously pretty sight as it lay beached like a silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale among the laserlit tracery of its construction gantries, a brilliant cloud of pins and needles of light against the deep interstellar blackness; but when launched, it did not even manage to complete its very first radio message—an SOS—before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure.

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I’ve already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat.

Most people-all, in fact, who regard the whole heaven as finite-say it lies at the centre. But the Italian philosophers known as Pythagoreans take the contrary view. At the centre, they say, is fire, and the earth is one of the stars, creating night and day by its circular motion about the centre. They further construct another earth in opposition to ours to which they give the name counterearth. In all this they are not seeking for theories and causes to account for observed facts, but rather forcing their observations and trying to accommodate them to certain theories and opinions of their own. But there are many others who would agree that it is wrong to give the earth the central position, looking for confirmation rather to theory than to the facts of observation. Their view is that the most precious place befits the most precious thing: but fire, they say, is more precious than earth, and the limit than the intermediate, and the circumference and the centre are limits. Reasoning on this basis they take the view that it is not earth that lies at the centre of the sphere, but rather fire. The Pythagoreans have a further reason. They hold that the most important part of the world, which is the centre, should be most strictly guarded, and name it, or rather the fire which occupies that place, the 'Guardhouse of Zeus', as if the word 'centre' were quite unequivocal, and the centre of the mathematical figure were always the same with that of the thing or the natural centre. But it is better to conceive of the case of the whole heaven as analogous to that of animals, in which the centre of the animal and that of the body are different. For this reason they have no need to be so disturbed about the world, or to call in a guard for its centre: rather let them look for the centre in the other sense and tell us what it is like and where nature has set it. That centre will be something primary and precious; but to the mere position we should give the last place rather than the first. For the middle is what is defined, and what defines it is the limit, and that which contains or limits is more precious than that which is limited, see ing that the latter is the matter and the former the essence of the system. (2-13-1) There are similar disputes about the shape of the earth. Some think it is spherical, others that it is flat and drum-shaped. For evidence they bring the fact that, as the sun rises and sets, the part concealed by the earth shows a straight and not a curved edge, whereas if the earth were spherical the line of section would have to be circular. In this they leave out of account the great distance of the sun from the earth and the great size of the circumference, which, seen from a distance on these apparently small circles appears straight. Such an appearance ought not to make them doubt the circular shape of the earth. But they have another argument. They say that because it is at rest, the earth must necessarily have this shape. For there are many different ways in which the movement or rest of the earth has been conceived. (2-13-3)

In this they resemble any reasonable being who does an unreasonable thing and justifies it with reasons. War, for example. My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war. Our most rational and scientific justifications-for instance, that we are an aggressive species-are perfectly circular: we make war because we make war. Our justifications for making a particular war (such as: our people must have more land and more wealth, or: our people must have more power, or: our people must obey out deity's orders to crush the sacrilegious infidel) all come down to the same thing: we must make war because we must. We have no choice. We have no freedom. This argument is not ultimately satisfactory to the reasoning mind, which desires freedom.

Mathematics is, I believe, the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as in a super-sensible intelligible world. Geometry deals with exact circles, but no sensible object is exactly circular; however carefully we may use our compasses, there will be some imperfections and irregularities. This suggests the view that all exact reasoning applies to ideal as opposed to sensible objects; it is natural to go further, and to argue that thought is nobler than sense, and the objects of thought more real than those of sense-perception. Mystical doctrines as to the relation of time to eternity are also reinforced by pure mathematics, for mathematical objects, such as numbers, if real at all, are eternal and not in time. Such eternal objects can be conceived as God's thoughts. Hence Plato's doctrine that God is a geometer, and Sir James Jeans' belief that He is addicted to arithmetic. Rationalistic as opposed to apocalyptic religion has been, ever since Pythagoras, and notably ever since Plato, very completely dominated by mathematics and mathematical method.

In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth; he must desire health. Nothing can save him but a blind hunger for normality, like that of a beast. A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street. Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut for ever. Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil. And however quietly doctors and psychologists may go to work in the matter, their attitude is profoundly intolerant—as intolerant as Bloody Mary. Their attitude is really this: that the man must stop thinking, if he is to go on living. Their counsel is one of intellectual amputation. If thy head offend thee, cut it off; for it is better, not merely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, but to enter it as an imbecile, rather than with your whole intellect to be cast into hell—or into Hanwell.

My purpose in saying all of this is to make a simple but necessary point. One of the more persistent and inexcusable rhetorical conceits that corrupt the current popular debates over belief in God is the claim that they constitute an argument between faith and reason or between religion and science. They constitute, in fact, only a contest between different pictures of the world: theism and naturalism (this seems the most satisfactory and comprehensive term, at any rate), each of which involves a number of basic metaphysical convictions; and the latter is by far the less rationally defensible of the two. Naturalism is a picture of the whole of reality that cannot, according to its own intrinsic premises, address the being of the whole; it is a metaphysics of the rejection of metaphysics, a transcendental certainty of the impossibility of transcendental truth, and so requires an act of pure credence logically immune to any verification (after all, if there is a God he can presumably reveal himself to seeking minds, but if there is not then there can be no “natural” confirmation of the fact). Thus naturalism must forever remain a pure assertion, a pure conviction, a confession of blind assurance in an inaccessible beyond; and that beyond, more paradoxically still, is the beyond of no beyond. And naturalism’s claim that, by confining itself to purely material explanations for all things, it adheres to the only sure path of verifiable knowledge is nothing but a feat of sublimely circular thinking: physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything. There is something here of the mystical.

Following feeling, relying on liking or wanting, we are not free. The freedom to "do as we like" is not freedom of choice because we are ruled by the powerful property of feeling; we cannot choose apart from liking and disliking. Likes and dislikes may be articulated in the form of sophisticated-sounding opinions, but the decision is made for us by feeling. The Western world places a high value on personal feelings and opinions: Each individual "has a right" to an opinion. But rarely do we question how we have arrived at our opinion. Upon examination, we may discover that opinions tend to stem from convenience, familiarity, and selfishness–what feels good or what is pleasing or comfortable to us. Upon this basis, we act, and receive the consequences of our action. Even if we compile a large number of such opinions, there is no guarantee that we will develop a wise perspective as a ground for action. Often this process only creates a mass of confusion, for opinions of one individual tend to conflict with the opinions of another. If there appears to be agreement, we tend to assume this agreement will remain stable. But agreement only means that the needs of the individuals involved are temporarily similar, and when those needs shift, agreement will evaporate. To make certain decisions, we rely on logic or scientific findings, which are supposedly free from personal opinion but are still weighted with the opinions of a particular culture. This style of knowing is founded on particular distinctions and ignores other possibilities. The evidence is clear that the scope of modern scientific knowledge is limited, for this knowledge is not yet able to predict and control the side-effects resulting from its own use. Its solutions in turn create more problems, reinforcing the circular patterns of samsara. Only understanding that penetrates to the root causes of problems can break this circularity. Until we explore the depths of consciousness, we cannot resolve the fundamental questions that face human beings.

Do you believe that?” Melinda says, directing her wonderment at Irv. “That if someone commits suicide they go to hell?” “No.” “But many Christians do, right?” “There’s a debate, but it’s doctrine.” “But you don’t think so?” “No.” “Why not?” “For the same reason the Catholics believe in the Trinity, Melinda.” The appetizers arrive with a speed that Sigrid finds suspicious. “Which is . . . what?” “It’s how I understand Jesus’s words spoken from the cross,” says Irv, taking a calamari. “Jesus spoke seven times on the cross. In Matthew Twenty-Seven, verse forty-six and in Mark Fifteen verse thirty-four he says, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ This led to the Trinity,” Irv said, sucking cocktail sauce and grease from his thumb. “The thinking is, if Jesus was Lord, who was he speaking to? He was obviously speaking to someone or something other than himself, unless . . . ya know.” Irv makes a circular cuckoo motion by his head with a piece of squid. “So perhaps he was speaking to the Father, or to the Holy Spirit. In this act, he distinguishes himself from the eternal and embodies everything that is Man. The fear, the sadness, the tragedy. The longing. The recognition of betrayal. We see him, in that moment, only as the Son, and because of that, as ourselves. As I read it, Melinda, we are not invited in that moment to be cruel to him for his despair, or to mock him. Instead we are asked to feel his pain. When Jesus says, ‘It is finished’ I don’t read, ‘Mission accomplished.’ I see a person resigned. A person who has lost hope. A person who has taken a step away from this life. And our pity for him grows. And finally he says, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Now, I’m not going to equate Jesus letting go with suicide, but any decent and forgiving Christian person would have to admit that we are looking at a person who cannot fight anymore. We are being taught to be understanding of that state of mind and sympathetic to the suffering that might lead a person to it. It does not follow to me that if someone succumbs to that grief we are to treat them with eternal contempt. I just don’t believe it.

I suppose he never gets blisters, then,” Scot murmured, then looked up and said, “And in truth, one of the reasons that I’d rather retain my code and my religion is that my gods are flawed and hypocritical. They get blisters—metaphorically. Thor wrangles with rage and Loki with jealousy. The only perfect god, Baldr, was killed for his perfection, which of course proves that pure perfection is an imperfection, or . . .” Scot hesitated, “something like that.” Even he felt that he could have summed that up better. “There’s pagan wisdom for you,” Gawain scoffed in derision. “Perfection is imperfect and imperfection is preferable. It’s circular logic.” Scot rolled his eyes, rubbing his ankle. “Paganism (as you condescendingly call my faith) is circular. Your Christianity tries to make everything into a straight line… in order for your world to make sense, everything must have a start and an end. In any case, your king is cut from the same cloth as your Christ—both are like Baldr, too good to last for long—either you are blind or he is a liar. Real people and gods struggle to be their best and fail.

Once a belief is lodged, it becomes difficult to dislodge. It takes on a life of its own, leading us to notice and seek out evidence confirming our belief, rarely challenge the validity of confirming evidence, and ignore or work hard to actively discredit information contradicting the belief. This irrational, circular information-processing pattern is called motivated reasoning. The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them. Those strengthened beliefs then drive how we process further information, and so on.

we do not know the physics of climate system responses to warming well enough to blame most of the warming on human activities. Human causation is simply assumed. The models are designed with the assumption that the climate system was in natural balance before the Industrial Revolution, despite historical evidence to the contrary. They only produce human-caused climate change because that is the way they are designed. This is in spite of abundant evidence of past warm episodes, such as 1,000- to 2,000-year-old tree stumps being uncovered by receding glaciers; temperature proxy evidence for the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods covering that same time frame; and Arctic sea ice proxy evidence for a natural decrease in sea ice starting well before humans could be blamed. Natural warming since the Little Ice Age of a few hundred years ago is simply ignored in the design of climate models, since we do not know what caused it. Simply put, the computerized climate models support human causation of climate change because that’s what they assume from the outset. They are an example of circular reasoning. There is little to no evidence of long-term increases in heat waves, droughts, or floods. Wildfire activity has, if anything, decreased, even though poor land management practices are now making some areas more vulnerable to wildfires even without climate change. Contrary to popular perception and new reports, there is little to no evidence of increased storminess resulting from climate change. This includes tornadoes and hurricanes. Long-term increases in monetary storm damages have indeed occurred, but are due to increasing development, not worsening weather. Sea level has been rising naturally since at least the mid-1800s, well before humans could be blamed. Land subsidence in some areas (e.g. Norfolk, Miami, Galveston-Houston, New Orleans) would result in increasing flooding problems even without any sea-level rise, let alone human-induced sea-level rise causing thermal expansion of the oceans. Some evidence for recent acceleration of sea-level rise might support human causation, but the magnitude of the human component since 1950 has been only 1 inch every 30 years. Ocean acidification is now looking like a non-problem, as the evidence builds that sea life prefers somewhat more CO2, just as vegetation on land does. Given that CO2 is necessary for life on Earth, yet had been at dangerously low levels for thousands of years, the scientific community needs to stop accepting the premise that more CO2 in the atmosphere is necessarily a bad thing. Global greening has been observed by satellites over the last few decades, which is during the period of most rapid rises in atmospheric CO2. The benefits of increasing CO2 to agriculture have been calculated to be in the trillions of dollars. Crop yields continue to break records around the world, due to a combination of human ingenuity and the direct effects of CO2 on plant growth and water use efficiency. Much of this evidence is not known by our citizens, who are largely misinformed by a news media that favors alarmist stories. The scientific community is, in general, biased toward alarmism in order to maintain careers and support desired governmental energy policies. Only when the public becomes informed based upon evidence from both sides of the debate can we expect to make rational policy decisions. I hope my brief treatment of these subjects provides a step in that direction. THE END

Изучать науки женщина неспособна. Это явствует уже из одного того, что для нее не заводят учебных заведений.

DURING THE RIDE back up to Telluride, among tablelands and cañons and red-rock debris, past the stone farmhouses and fruit orchards and Mormon spreads of the McElmo, below ruins haunted by an ancient people whose name no one knew, circular towers and cliffside towns abandoned centuries ago for reasons no one would speak of, Reef was able finally to think it through. If Webb had always been the Kieselguhr Kid, well, shouldn’t somebody ought to carry on the family business—you might say, become the Kid? It might’ve been the lack of sleep, the sheer relief of getting clear of Jeshimon, but Reef began to feel some new presence inside him, growing, inflating—gravid with what it seemed he must become, he found excuses to leave the trail now and then and set off a stick or two from the case of dynamite he had stolen from the stone powder-house at some mine. Each explosion was like the text of another sermon, preached in the voice of the thunder by some faceless but unrelenting desert prophesier who was coming more and more to ride herd on his thoughts. Now and then he creaked around in the saddle, as if seeking agreement or clarification from Webb’s blank eyes or the rictus of what would soon be a skull’s mouth. “Just getting cranked up,” he told Webb. “Expressing myself.” Back in Jeshimon he had thought that he could not bear this, but with each explosion, each night in his bedroll with the damaged and redolent corpse carefully unroped and laid on the ground beside him, he found it was easier, something he looked forward to all the alkaline day, more talk than he’d ever had with Webb alive, whistled over by the ghosts of Aztlán, entering a passage of austerity and discipline, as if undergoing down here in the world Webb’s change of status wherever he was now. . . . He had brought with him a dime novel, one of the Chums of Chance series, The Chums of Chance at the Ends of the Earth, and for a while each night he sat in the firelight and read to himself but soon found he was reading out loud to his father’s corpse, like a bedtime story, something to ease Webb’s passage into the dreamland of his death. Reef had had the book for years. He’d come across it, already dog-eared, scribbled in, torn and stained from a number of sources, including blood, while languishing in the county lockup at Socorro, New Mexico, on a charge of running a game of chance without a license. The cover showed an athletic young man (it seemed to be the fearless Lindsay Noseworth) hanging off a ballast line of an ascending airship of futuristic design, trading shots with a bestially rendered gang of Eskimos below. Reef began to read, and soon, whatever “soon” meant, became aware that he was reading in the dark, lights-out having occurred sometime, near as he could tell, between the North Cape and Franz Josef Land. As soon as he noticed the absence of light, of course, he could no longer see to read and, reluctantly, having marked his place, turned in for the night without considering any of this too odd. For the next couple of days he enjoyed a sort of dual existence, both in Socorro and at the Pole. Cellmates came and went, the Sheriff looked in from time to time, perplexed.

And then Snake saw the craters, stretching away across the desert below her. The earth was covered with green circular basins. Some, lying in the path of the lava flow, had caught and broken its smooth frozen billows. Others were clearer, great holes gouged in the earth, still distinct after so many years of driving sands. The craters were so large, spread over such a distance, that they could only have one source. Nuclear explosions had blasted them. The war was long over, almost forgotten, for it had destroyed everyone who knew or cared about the reason it had happened.

The reason ordinary matter lies in a disk and not a small ball is the matter’s net rotation, which it inherited from the gas clouds that acquired angular momentum (momentum of rotation) in their formation. Cooling lowers resistance to collapse in one direction, but collapse in the two others is prevented or at least lessened by the centrifugal force of the rotation of the gas it contains. Without friction or some other force acting on it, a marble that you set in motion around a circular track will keep rolling forever. Similarly, once matter is rotating, it will keep its angular momentum until some torque acts on it or it can dissipate angular momentum along with energy. Because angular momentum is conserved, gaseous regions cannot collapse as efficiently in the radial direction (as defined by rotation) as in the vertical one. Though matter might collapse in the direction parallel to the axis of rotation, it won’t collapse in the radial direction unless angular momentum is somehow removed. This differential collapse is what gives rise to the relatively flat disk of the Milky Way, which we observe stretching across the sky. It is also what gives rise to the disks of most spiral galaxies.

This irrational, circular information-processing pattern is called motivated reasoning. The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them. Those strengthened beliefs then drive how we process further information, and so on.

The Brouwerian believed that this conception was wholly wrong from the beginning. They accused it of misunderstanding the nature of mathematics and of unjustifiedly transferring to the realm of infinity methods of reasoning that are valid only in the realm of the finite. By regaining the right perspective, mathematics could be constructed on a basis whose intuitive soundness could not be doubted. The antinomies were only the symptoms of a disease by which mathematics was infected. Once this disease was cured, one need worry no longer about the symptoms. All Russellians thought that our naiveness consisted in taking for granted that every grammatically correct indicative sentence expresses something which either is or is not the case, and some — among them Russell himself — believed, in addition, that through some carelessness a certain type of viciously circular concept formation had been allowed to enter logico-mathematical thinking. By restricting the language — and proscribing the dangerous types of concept formation— the known antinomies could be made to disappear. Their faith in the consistency of the resulting, somewhat mutilated, systems was less strong than that of the Brouwerians, since certain intuitively not too well founded devices had to be used in order to restore at least part of the lost strength and maneuverability. Zermelians, finally, thought that our blunder consisted in naively assuming that to every condition there must correspond a certain entity, namely the set of all those objects that satisfy this condition. By suitable restriction of the axiom of comprehension, in which this assumption is formulated, they tried to construct systems which were free of the known antinomies yet strong enough to allow for the reconstruction of a sufficient part of classical mathematics.

As they conversed with their new companions, the Englishmen learned that to walk across the land in southern New England was to travel in time. All along this narrow, hard-packed trail were circular foot-deep holes in the ground that had been dug where “any remarkable act” had occurred. It was each person’s responsibility to maintain the holes and to inform fellow travelers of what had once happened at that particular place so that “many things of great antiquity are fresh in memory.” Winslow and Hopkins began to see that they were traversing a mythic land, where a sense of community extended far into the distant past. “So that as a man travelleth…,” Winslow wrote, “his journey will be the less tedious, by reason of the many historical discourses [that] will be related unto him.” They also began to appreciate why these memory holes were more important than ever before to the Native inhabitants of the region. Everywhere they went, they were stunned by the emptiness and desolation of the place. “Thousands of men have lived there,” Winslow wrote, “which died in a great plague not long since: and pity it was and is to see, so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same.” With so many dead, the Pokanokets’ connection to the past was hanging by a thread—a connection that the memory holes, and the stories they inspired, helped to maintain.

The main question is if there can be any space without space, although this sounds absurd, for it is evident that there can be no space without space. However, if there can be no space without space, how can there be the curvature of space if there is no space? Then, we may answer that there is space and engage in circular reasoning. On a superficial level, some “obvious axioms” lead us to accept that there is space as it is without questioning how that is, how it is possible, and what creates this space. Then, we may answer that, based on laws of physics, nature works in such ways and that there are four main forces, and that based on all our knowledge and theories confirmed by experiments, we conclude and state, based on a “fact,” that there is a curvature of space.

in the modern era, many thinkers began to mistrust faith, viewing it as 'blind' and an enemy of reason. Their watchword was 'reason alone.' One of the difficulties of this stance is that reason cannot test its own reliability, any more than soapstone can test its own hardness. Any argument, accomplished by reasoning, that what reasoning accomplishes can be trusted, would be circular, because it would take for granted the very thing that it was trying to prove. Suppose I am at the window of a burning building. Although I can hear the firemen calling to me from far below, I cannot see them because of all the smoke. They are telling me to jump. Though I may have every reason to believe that they will catch me in their net, I may not trust them enough to overcome my fear, and so, hesitating, I burn to death. Obviously, my reasons are not the same as trust; faith surpasses reason. Even so they are reasons for trust; though faith surpasses reason, it is not irrational.

Finding witches not only explained evil, it also was tangible evidence of God’s existence. As the sixteenth-century Cambridge theologian Roger Hutchinson argued, in a polished bit of circular reasoning, “If there be a God, as we most steadfastly must believe, verily there is a Devil also; and if there be a Devil, there is no surer argument, no stronger proof, no plainer evidence, that there is a God.”13 And, conversely, as noted in a seventeenth-century witch trial, “Atheists abound in these days and witchcraft is called into question. If neither possession nor witchcraft [exists], why should we think that there are devils? If no devils, no God.

How then does a Christian, or anyone else, choose among the various claims for absolute authorities? Ultimately the truthfulness of the Bible will commend itself as being far more persuasive than other religious books (such as the Book of Mormon or the Qur’an), or than any other intellectual constructions of the human mind (such as logic, human reason, sense experience, scientific methodology, etc.). It will be more persuasive because in the actual experience of life, all of these other candidates for ultimate authority are seen to be inconsistent or to have shortcomings that disqualify them, while the Bible will be seen to be fully in accord with all that we know about the world around us, about ourselves, and about God. The Bible will commend itself as being persuasive in this way, that is, if we are thinking rightly about the nature of reality, our perception of it and of ourselves, and our perception of God. The trouble is that because of sin our perception and analysis of God and creation is faulty. Sin is ultimately irrational, and sin makes us think incorrectly about God and about creation. Thus, in a world free from sin, the Bible would commend itself convincingly to all people as God’s Word. But because sin distorts people’s perception of reality, they do not recognize Scripture for what it really is. Therefore it requires the work of the Holy Spirit, overcoming the effects of sin, to enable us to be persuaded that the Bible is indeed the Word of God and that the claims it makes for itself are true. Thus, in another sense, the argument for the Bible as God’s Word and our ultimate authority is not a typical circular argument. The process of persuasion is perhaps better likened to a spiral in which increasing knowledge of Scripture and increasingly correct understanding of God and creation tend to supplement one another in a harmonious way, each tending to confirm the accuracy of the other. This is not to say that our knowledge of the world around us serves as a higher authority than Scripture, but rather that such knowledge, if it is correct knowledge, continues to give greater and greater assurance and deeper conviction that the Bible is the only truly ultimate authority and that other competing claims for ultimate authority are false.

A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street.

The use of the geological record to establish the age of fossils is an exercise in Circular Reasoning.

I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment. Edrita [his wife] could sense that I was on a long and uncertain path. She was always more conservative than I, but she did share my basic social values and was willing at least to let me test my political follies...Whenever I read the New Testament after 1950, I was trying to read it entirely without its crucial premises of incarnation and resurrection. That required a lot of circular reasoning for me to establish what the text said. I habitually assumed that truth in religion was finally reducible to economics (with Marx) or psychosexual motives (with Freud) or self assertive power (with Nietzsche). It was truly a self-deceptive time for me, but I had no inkling of its insidious dangers.

Here we meet a very important feature. It would seem as if this were circular reasoning; profits fell because investment fell, and investment fell because profits fell. —Jan Tinbergen,5 Jan Tinbergen,

Does an arbitrary human convention, a mere custom, decree that man must guide his actions by a set of principles—or is there a fact of reality that demands it? Is ethics the province of whims: of personal emotions, social edicts and mystic revelations—or is it the province of reason? Is ethics a subjective luxury—or an objective necessity? In the sorry record of the history of mankind’s ethics—with a few rare, and unsuccessful, exceptions—moralists have regarded ethics as the province of whims, that is: of the irrational. Some of them did so explicitly, by intention—others implicitly, by default. A “whim” is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause. No philosopher has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of why man needs a code of values. So long as that question remained unanswered, no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics could be discovered or defined. The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise. Most philosophers took the existence of ethics for granted, as the given, as a historical fact, and were not concerned with discovering its metaphysical cause or objective validation. Many of them attempted to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics and, allegedly, to define a rational, scientific, nonreligious morality. But their attempts consisted of trying to justify them on social grounds, merely substituting society for God. The avowed mystics held the arbitrary, unaccountable “will of God” as the standard of the good and as the validation of their ethics. The neomystics replaced it with “the good of society,” thus collapsing into the circularity of a definition such as “the standard of the good is that which is good for society.” This meant, in logic—and, today, in worldwide practice—that “society” stands above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since “the good” is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that “society” may do anything it pleases, since “the good” is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And—since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men—this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or any atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires. This could hardly be called rational, yet most philosophers have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, and that in the field of ethics—in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life’s goals—man must be guided by something other than reason. By what? Faith—instinct—intuition—revelation—feeling—taste—urge—wish—whim Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics is whim (they call it “arbitrary postulate” or “subjective choice” or “emotional commitment”)—and the battle is only over the question or whose whim: one’s own or society’s or the dictator’s or God’s. Whatever else they may disagree about, today’s moralists agree that ethics is a subjective issue and that the three things barred from its field are: reason—mind—reality. If you wonder why the world is now collapsing to a lower and ever lower rung of hell, this is the reason. If you want to save civilization, it is this premise of modern ethics—and of all ethical

No two social scientists agree on what “fascism” really is (though everyone agrees it’s terrible!). But historical examples that most people agree to call fascist states all had in common a strong national ideology and a standing army. The State is not just the governor in a fascist country: We are the State, the State is Us. The State is the source of polite behavior and moral instruction. And we know our State – and therefore our ideology – are better than that of neighboring States because our standing army is so much stronger than theirs. If our army is defeated, it has nothing to do with insufficient manpower or poor strategy or losing the arms race. It’s because we were sabotaged by traitors, or because the National Will at home wasn’t strong enough (see “We are the State”; above). Such circular reasoning appeals to the hunter-gatherer instincts which ten thousand years of civilization have not yet eradicated. We want to belong to a tribe. We also want to belong to the right tribe: the strongest tribe, the one that can best protect us. And we want to provide for the tribe with which we identify so closely. Appealing to people’s desire for strength and safety can open any door.

We should not believe that our lives are lived in a linear fashion; they don’t go that way, not for no reason; therefore, however, we should believe that our lives go in a circular manner. That is the Anishinaabe way of life.

And in all these cases the same problems come up: (a) they are unscientific developments; (b) they involve circular reasoning; (c) they are purely theoretical constructions, and (d) they violate the canon of parsimony.

The reason women are more likely to have to transfer is because, like most cities around the world, London’s public transport system is radial.29 What this means is that a single ‘downtown’ area has been identified and the majority of routes lead there. There will be some circular routes, concentrated in the centre. The whole thing looks rather like a spider’s web, and it is incredibly useful for commuters, who just want to get in and out of the centre of town. It is, however, less useful for everything else. And this useful/not so useful binary falls rather neatly onto the male/female binary. But while solutions like London’s hopper fare are an improvement, they are by no means standard practice worldwide. In the US, while some cities have abandoned charging for transfers (LA stopped doing this in 2014), others are sticking with it.30 Chicago for example, still charges for public transport connections.31 These charges seem particularly egregious in light of a 2016 study which revealed quite how much Chicago’s transport system is biased against typical female travel patterns.32 The study, which compared Uberpool (the car-sharing version of the popular taxi app) with public transport in Chicago, revealed that for trips downtown, the difference in time between Uberpool and public transport was negligible – around six minutes on average. But for trips between neighbourhoods, i.e. the type of travel women are likely to be making for informal work or care-giving responsibilities, Uberpool took twenty-eight minutes to make a trip that took forty-seven minutes on public transport.

FENCODE_11 had no precedents to feed on. It spewed out listless petitio principii, circular reasoning. This majestic entity could not devise a way to force-feed people. Regardless of its raw power and dodecabit sophistication, it could not command the human physiological act of ingesting food. It fixated on a singular outcome: people should just eat, people should just eat, people should just eat.

We hold it to be true that circular reasoning is the only reasoning that is possible to finite man...We must go round and round a thing to see more of its dimensions and to know more about it, in general, unless we are larger than that which we are investigating. Unless we are larger than God we cannot reason about Him by any other way, than by a transcendental or circular argument.

The most common cycle used is the sixteen beat cycle, called teentaal or tritaal. Dha dhin dhin dha. Dha dhin dhin dha. Dha tin tin ta. Ta dhin dhin dha…sixteen beats divided neatly into four times four. The sixteen-beat cycle starts and ends and stars and ends, creating a repetitive circularity; the melody has to accommodate itself within its scaffolding; it has to negotiate with the parameters to find a happy balance between freedom and responsibility, rights and duties, exhilaration and restraint. There is scope for risk-taking, within reason, as long as one came back to the line of control in time, and hit sama, the drum stroke where one cycle ended and the new one began; a point of arrival and of departure. This is a musical metaphor for life as it should be lived. Truly great musicians can swerve into unchartered bylanes, but still find their way back to the destination. On time

Culture is an environment that we create ourselves. For this reason, and quite contrary to the accepted view in some circles, culture does not deserve equal footing with nature. An entire generation of anthropologists has given this false impression by asking whether it is culture or nature that makes us act in a certain way. Natural selection, however, has produced our species, including our cultural abilities. Culture is part of human nature. To say that "man is made by culture," as many textbooks still do, is at the same level of accuracy as saying that "the river follows its bed." While true, the river also shapes its bed: the current river's flow is the product of the past river's action. In the same way, culture cannot exist apart from human nature, and there is profound circularity in saying that we are the product of culture if culture is the product of us.

Fundamentalist Christianity rests on circular reasoning and pat answers. The belief system is brilliantly constructed to provide its own support — if you don’t look too closely at the logic. It is a closed system, satisfied with its own internal evidence of truth. It is closed in that any information or argument from outside is rejected a priori because, as discussed above, it is a “lie,” not of the “truth.” All questions are answered within the belief system itself, usually with circular reasoning, for example: Whoever knows God listens to us, and he who is not of God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. (1 John 4:6)

And we're cheerful, too. You can count on that.' Obligingly she smiled in a neighbourly way at him. 'It will be a relief to leave Earth with its repressive legislation. We were listening OH the FM to the news about the McPhearson Act.' 'We consider it dreadful,' the adult male said. 'I have to agree with you,' Chic said. 'But what can one do?' He looked around for the mail; as always it was lost somewhere in the mass of clutter. 'One can emigrate,' the adult male simulacrum pointed out. 'Um,' Chic said absently. He had found an unexpected heap of recent-looking bills from parts suppliers; with a feeling of gloom and even terror he began to bills from parts suppliers; with a feeling of gloom and even terror he began to sort through them. Had Maury seen these? Probably. Seen them and then pushed them away immediately, out of sight. Frauenzimmer Associates functioned better if it was not reminded of such facts of life. Like a regressed neurotic, it had to hide several aspects of reality from its percept system in order to function at all. This was hardly ideal, but what really was the alternative? To be realistic would be to give up, to die. Illusion, of an infantile nature was essential for the tiny firm's survival, or at least so it seemed to him and Maury. In any case both of them had adopted this attitude. Their simulacra -- the adult ones -- disapproved of this; their cold, logical appraisal of reality stood in sharp contrast, and Chic always felt a little naked, a little embarrassed, before the simulacra; he knew he should set a better example for them. 'If you bought a jalopy and emigrated to Mars,' the adult male said, 'We could be the famnexdo for you.' 'I wouldn't need any family next-door,' Chic said, 'if I emigrated to Mars. I'd go to get away from people. 'We'd make a very good family next-door to you,' the female said. 'Look,' Chic said, 'you don't have to lecture me about your virtues. I know more than you do yourselves.' And for good reason. Their presumption, their earnest sincerity, amused but also irked him. As next-door neighbours this group of sims would be something of a nuisance, he reflected. Still, that was what emigrants wanted, in fact needed, out in the sparsely-populated colonial regions. He could appreciate that; after all, it was Frauenzimmer Associates' business to understand. A man, when he emigrated, could buy neighbours, buy the simulated presence of life, the sound and motion of human activity -- or at least its ​mechanical nearsubstitute to bolster his morale in the new environment of unfamiliar stimuli and perhaps, god forbid, no stimuli at all. And in addition to this primary psychological gain there was a practical secondary advantage as well. The famnexdo group of simulacra developed the parcel of land, tilled it and planted it, irrigated it, made it fertile, highly productive. And the yield went to the it, irrigated it, made it fertile, highly productive. And the yield went to the human settler because the famnexdo group, legally speaking, occupied the peripheral portions of his land. The famnexdo were actually not next-door at all; they were part of their owner's entourage. Communication with them was in essence a circular dialogue with oneself; the famnexdo, it they were functioning properly, picked up the covert hopes and dreams of the settler and detailed them back in an articulated fashion. Therapeutically, this was helpful, although from a cultural standpoint it was a trifle sterile.

I realize now that this was circular reasoning impregnable to debate.

Wittgenstein may have seen the necessity and function of presuppositional certainties, but he was wrongly led to think that epistemological reasoning had to be abandoned at this point between differing philosophers. Where did he go wrong? I propose that it was with a confusion here: 'I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness.' This observation is true-for Wittgenstein and many others. But it does not properly imply either that one should not, or that one cannot, be satisfied (intellectually, not merely emotionally) with the correctness of his presupposition (or worldview) in the face of skepticism or a competing system. That one does not verify or prove his presupposition in any ordinary manner (i.e., the like hypotheses to be experimentally and logically tested-which would be deceptively circular since the presuppositions themselves set the standards and starting point for verification) does not mean that some cannot be seen to be wrong and others right; it simply indicates that philosophical argumentation here must take a different, yet legitimate, track-namely, examining which presuppositions provide the necessary preconditions for any intelligent reasoning and which presuppositions scuttle man's epistemic endeavors. Wittgenstein (and others) may not have satisfied himself about the correctness of his presuppositions precisely because they were not correct. In that case, he could avoid reforming his thinking and admitting error by placing everyone in the same (sinking) ship of presuppositional arbitrariness, that is, by teaching that one's certainties were not a matter of truth and intellectual grounding but sociological conditioning.

The circular wind is life,' the elder said. 'What was yesterday comes again tomorrow. It runs from place to place and returns. But in the midst of disorder is reason. And if you can hold to reason, you shall be safe.

I think paranoia is an unavoidable moment in the discovery of truth for a variety of reasons. First, you could say that paranoia is the structure of 'knowledge' as a chain of signifiers: S1 --> S2 --> S3, etc. That is, just as knowledge works by perpetually adding new signifiers, so paranoia is characterised by the endless work of adding new connections. In McCarthyism, we discover that x is friends with y who has a business in z which has been the recipient of Soviet bloc investment. Or that a is a supporter of the Palestinian cause which often also gets the support of b who is friendly with c who has said antisemitic things. That's the logic of paranoia. And it's why you might find it difficult to argue with conspiracy theorists however absurd their claims are because, as soon as you knock down one part of their argument, they can invoke dozens of other supports which don't have to hang coherently together. Second, perhaps you could say that paranoia is a moment in the discovery of truth in the Cartesian/Augustinian sense: to arrive at certainty, you have to suppose that everything you perceive is the result of deception by an evil demon (of which the contemporary equivalent is the Matrix, or better yet the Truman Show). Or, at a stretch, in the sense Hegel discusses in the Phenomology: there is a moment when the object appears to have a deeper 'essence' that is not accessible in its appearance. In a manner of speaking, you feel the object is deceiving you, until you press forward and discover the the indecipherable 'essence' is actually in the form of the object's appearance. But this suggests that the "labour of the negative", as Hegel calls it, necessitates a moment of solipsistic despair, panic, the sense of being at the centre of an entirely simulated reality that is motivated by some nefarious Other's bad libido. [...] So, [in society today] paranoia might be unavoidable. But obviously it's a very, very bad place to get stuck. Politically, the logic is most often turned against the Left by its opponents, and within the Left usually appears as a disintegrative moment, when it starts operating as a circular firing-squad, and you get practices of snitch-jacketing or ill-founded 'calling out'. But more fundamentally, it's bad hermeneutics. Being stuck in paranoia means fortifying oneself against doubt, so that all evidence essentially becomes evidence for a delusional structure of certitude. It means that we lose the capacity for critical thinking, for the labour of the negative through which any lucid totalisation might be possible. The reparative moment comes when we stop making 'connections', and instead introduce the cut, the disconnect. That's when we say, "look, this argument might often be used for bad purposes, or it might be wrong in its current articulation, but there are ways to think with it to make a better argument." Or, "x might be friends with y, but that doesn't mean x approves of or was complicit in anything wicked that y has done, and actually everything we know about x makes such complicity racingly unlikely." And so on. The cut is reparative because it militates against the tendency toward social decomposition. The cut is the starting point for a critical procedure that takes all of the reasons for paranoia into account, fully acknowledges their force, but then integrates them into a strategy for repairing the social link.

In general, a true science is open to change and counter-examples, is intent on discovering new ideas even if they contradict currently accepted ones, is open to and encourages criticism and alternative explanations, focuses on replication of results, is humble in its findings and generalizations, and utilizes objective measurement. Conversely, a pseudoscience or faith-based ideology relies on fixed ideas and marginalization of opposition, selectively attends to favorable “discoveries” while ignoring alternative explanations, suppresses criticism and relies on personal attacks and claims of conspiracy, amasses non-verifiable or replicable results, exaggerates claims, and relies on subjective measurements and tautological (circular) reasoning. The mental health field certainly has no shortage of problems concerning conflicts of interest, suppression of dissent, lack of replication, and exaggerated claims.

People increasingly can no longer reach out to a friend, change their life, talk to a trusted individual, change their diets, rebel against industrialized and oppressive society, or question those in authority. Just like religion, the people in charge know something no one else can and the evil within us must be quelled. Rather than exorcism, Prozac or Abilify can finally cast out our demons. In addition to these widely discussed problems, so, too, does the mental health field resort to claims of conspiracy and personal attacks against those in disagreement with the status quo and relies heavily on subjective measurement and tautological reasoning. Again, using the example of depression, this subjectivity and circular reasoning becomes evident. If a person seeks help for feeling sad, lethargic, unmotivated, and experiencing changes in sleep, this person might receive a diagnosis of MDD, a purported brain disease requiring life-long treatment. How does one know that this person “has” MDD? Because they feel sad, lethargic, unmotivated, and has changes in sleep. If the person wants to be really sure, a validated measurement might be given to said person which asks, essentially, if the person is sad, lethargic, unmotivated, and has had changes in sleep patterns. This process is akin to saying “I have a headache”, to which a doctor responds “Ah, yes, you have Major Headache Disorder”. If asked “How do you know I have Major Headache Disorder?” the answer is “Because you have a headache”.

Flaws in forming and updating beliefs have the potential to snowball. Once a belief is lodged, it becomes difficult to dislodge. It takes on a life of its own, leading us to notice and seek out evidence confirming our belief, rarely challenge the validity of confirming evidence, and ignore or work hard to actively discredit information contradicting the belief. This irrational, circular information-processing pattern is called motivated reasoning. The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them. Those strengthened beliefs then drive how we process further information, and so on.

The family tolerated, even leaned into, the nonsense of the Court Circular for the same reason it accepted the ravages and depredations of the press—fear. Fear of the public. Fear of the future. Fear of the day the nation would say: OK, shut it down. So,

All reasoning is basically circular. Logic is a device we use to make the circles as large as possible.

All reasoning is basically circular. Logic is a device we use to make the circles as large as possible.

In addition to the confirmation bias and circular reasoning of the worldview-assumption filter, the Münchausen trilemma eliminates any natural way of reaching the truth. Every argument needs true premises, and those premises require an additional argument to prove them. The result is an infinite regression of unproven proofs.

circular logic is explicit in devotional biographies of religious leaders, whose biographers provide readers with various reasons for having the faith they already have in their leaders. Lives of the Saints is a Catholic example, while biographies published by Deseret Book and Bookcraft are Mormon examples.107 That is the circular logic of every world view.

This circular concept of time remains prevalent in the religion and philosophy of many indigenous and Eastern cultures. But in the West, our awareness of cycles has been overshadowed by a linear view of time, one that emphasizes beginnings and endings and strives for progress over repetition. Why did linear time come to dominate the Western way of thinking? Part of the reason is cultural, having to do with the way that Judeo-Christian thought describes the story of humanity not as a wheel but as a distinct trajectory through time. But equally important is that as we have come to see ourselves as separate from nature, we have built structures and systems that distance us from its circular rhythms. Electric light allows us to keep our own schedules, obscuring the phases of the moon and draining the sunrise and sunset of the meaning they once carried. Rather than matching our appetites to the harvests, we match the harvests to our desires. We have big watery strawberries all year round, forgetting that there was once a time when they were available only in June and tasted like sweet red fire. Our buildings heat and cool the air to a consistent temperature regardless of the weather outside. Our sound machines play any birdsong on demand, regardless of where those birds are in their migratory arc. Thus, disconnected from participation in these natural cycles, we have forgotten that time moves in loops as well as lines.

The Chinese for pay is pei, and the Farsi Iranian word for bad is bad. The Uzbek for chop is chop, and in the extinct Aboriginal language of Mbaram a dog was called a dog. The Mayan for hole is hole and the Korean for many is mani. When, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, an Afghan wants to show you something, he will use the word show; and the ancient Aztecs used the Nahuatl word huel to mean well. Any idiot can deduce from this that all the languages of the world are related. However, anyone of reasonable intelligence will realize that they are just a bunch of coincidences. There are a lot of words and a lot of languages, but there are a limited number of sounds. We're bound to coincide sometimes.

Once a non-adaptive preference arises, it may turn into an adaptive preference through one of two processes: Fisher’s runaway process and conversion into a fitness indicator. Fisher (1930) realized that a genetic positive-feedback loop could develop between aesthetic preferences and sexual ornaments. Suppose that peahens vary in the strength of their preference for long peacock tails, and peacocks vary in the length of their tails, and both of these traits are genetically heritable. The peahens that are choosiest about tail length will tend to mate with the longest-tailed males. Their offspring will tend to inherit both the genes for longer-tail preferences and the genes for longer tails. These two traits will become genetically correlated—appearing together more often than expected by chance, if random mating were happening. Now, if most peahens favor longer over shorter tails, the longer-tailed male offspring will attract more mates and sire more peachicks. These peachicks in turn will inherit their grandmother’s tail-length obsession. Thus, the genes for longer-tail preferences and the genes for longer tails will both spread through the population as consequence of their genetic correlation. (The reasoning here looks a bit circular, but then all positive-feedback processes look a bit circular). Population genetics models show that Fisher’s runaway process can drive aesthetic preferences and sexual ornaments to extreme forms (Pomiankowski, Iwasa, & Nee, 1991). Fisher’s runaway process resembles the spread of fads and fashions: advertising creates demand (like a sexual preference), manufacturing fulfills the demand (like a sexual ornament), and a frenzy of consumption ensues (like runaway evolution) until next season’s fashion tastes switch to a new preference.

Kotler believes that finding flow is the “source code” of motivation. When you find flow, you get “maybe the most potent dose of reward chemistry” your brain can give you—which is the reason he believes flow is the most addictive state on Earth. Once we start to feel flow in an experience, we are motivated to do what it takes to get more. But it’s a circular relationship—if you have motivation to accomplish a task but you have no flow, you will eventually burn out. Motivation and flow need to work together, and they must be coupled with a solid recovery protocol, like good sleep and nutrition.

In a sense, then, I am assuming the truth of a perfectly circular argument: it makes sense to believe in God if one believes in the real power of reason, because one is justified in believing in reason if one believes in God. Or, to phrase the matter in a less recursive form, it makes sense to believe in both reason and God, and it may make a kind of nonsensical sense to believe in neither, but it is ultimately contradictory to believe in one but not the other. An honest and self-aware atheism, therefore, should proudly recognize itself as the quintessential expression of heroic irrationalism: a purely and ecstatically absurd venture of faith, a triumphant trust in the absurdity of all things. But most of us already know this anyway. If there is no God, then of course the universe is ultimately absurd, in the very precise sense that it is irreducible to any more comprehensive “equation.” It is glorious, terrible, beautiful, horrifying—all of that—but in the end it is also quite, quite meaningless.

The reason why the Great Pyramid was latitudinally positioned about (and yet not exactly at) 30 degrees North, is due to the architectural function it served for the rotating barque around its base; the latter complies with the Foucault Pendulum's pace of operation where it completes annually two swings from one Solstice/Equinox to the other in reference to the sidereal day at the pyramid's latitude of 29.97 degrees. In six months there are 180 days, and the barque also travels on a pace of 12 hours per side completing thereby one full rotation in two days; five rotations in one Egyptian week; seven rotations in fourteen days when the time of the monthly Passover arrives as I have demonstrated on the circular zodiac of Dendera; fifteen rotations per month; and it culminates with 180 rotations per year. Another significant observation here is that the barque was called the boat of a million years, which renders the figure of 180 into a measure that equals to the Moon's radius multiplied with 33(pi).

Our culturally sanctioned notions of truth are meaningless concepts, idols of delusion. We’ve been chasing ghosts, mirages conceived and maintained entirely in the human intellect through circular reasoning and projections. This delusion pervades the way we relate to each other and the world. It underlies everything, from ethics to legislation, from trade to religious dogma, from our neuroses to street revolutions. In all these domains we scramble to find external references to ground the truth of the matter. A meaningless quest this is. We’ve become completely entranced by our own projections and lost ourselves in a hall of mirrors.

With its clotted jargon, circular reasoning, and smug, debunking cynicism, poststructuralism works only on narrative—on the longer genres of story and novel. It is helpless with lyric poems, where the individual word has enormous power and mystery and where the senses are played upon by rhythm, mood, and dreamlike metaphors.

The message of the previous three chapters is that commonsense explanations are often characterized by circular reasoning.