On the philospher's stone...

"You are dreaming.
You are with some beings, somewhere.
You are about to be shown the Philosopher's Stone.

You are given a smooth stone slab, say, 10 by 12 inches, made of a pearly, shimmering material in which an infinity of patterns fluctuates.
A piece of paper is folded and cut, then unfolded, and you have a symetrical pattern of cut holes. Laying this paper over the stone slab, you see visual events in the slab confirming the pattern cut in the paper.
You cut a different pattern; the visuals in the slab seem to corroborate the new pattern of the viewholes.
It occurs to you that the paper pattern acts as a screen, selecting from the infinite field only patterns which correspond to the viewhole arrangement, bits of other patterns which may exist in the stone are seen, if at all, as noise, since their complete symmetricity is screened out.

You understand: this is the Philosopher's Stone.

It occurs to you that all our philosophies are like the cutout patterns you lay on the stone; That corroboration by symmetricity has been sufficient to establish the particular cutout screen as 'truthful'. It is clear though that one 'truthful' symmetry excludes others, by treating their components as noise.

You realize that this applies not only to philosophical systems, but to your daily life- that we screen and select patterns which we live in, and live by, and the rest is noise. This is fundamental to our continuity of consciousness.

It occurs to you that the more cutouts there are in the screen pattern (greater complexity), the more 'truthful' symmetries will be found. The upper limit being the infinite field which we first started out with, and to which we needed to apply patterns to perceive.

The most inclusive way of seeing the stone's infinite field is then with no screen at all.

How indeed do we do that?
It requires a self induced mutation of consciousness."

http://www.mkzdk.org/philosopherstone.html

The only ad hominem attack I made was on Jerome Corsi, and I think he's got a thick enough skin to handle it as he hands out that sort of stuff for a living (maybe JD as well but we trade comments occasionally and there is nothing malicious in it and he doesn't seem to be offended by it).

I wasn't trying to "label" anyone and I was using categorisations which most of the recipients would use themselves (except for the conspiracy theorist and fascist descriptions perhaps, but I still think they are accurate).

If you go over to Anthropik for example you'll find they weren't offended by my description (and it prompted a bit of introspection there) and that they refer to themselves as primitivists in their own writing.

Similarly, if you go over to Lew Rockwell you'll find they refer to themselves as Libertarians - I'm using their label, not creating one - and they'd propbably agree with my description of their interpretation of peak oil too.

So the "circular argument" is unfounded - its just a simple statement of facts from my point of view. I don't claim my words are profound but you really don't seem to have got my point.

In any case, the intent wasn't to criticise or say that anyone's beliefs are right or wrong - just to note that there is a fair amount of comfirmatory bias in a lot of people's observations and a lack of objectivity which tends to make assessing the reality of the situation pretty difficult.

And I'm certainly not trying to be a post-modernist interpreter of peak oil - it was just an idle late night rant...