The Münchhausen Trilemma

For a brief moment, my next novel, now called License to Ill, was going to be called The Obamacare Trilemma, and it was going to have the below inscription, both in German and English at the beginning. Even though I've changed the title, I'm going to keep the inscription because it's still very much apropos to the story and it sets the right tone because it's so funny (I think).

This may be the only place you can find the English translation of the Barron von Münchhausen bootstrapping story anywhere (see below), which is a little odd because the Münchhausen Trilemma is such an important philosophical issue.

For a more complete understanding of the concept, I invite you to click on the link and read, but for my purposes The MünchhausenTrilemma demonstrates that rationality (i.e. thinking) must have input from some source other than itself. Rationality is like a calculator in that it requires a finger from somewhere to press the buttons.

The input comes from consciousness. Rationality is but a tiny subset of our larger consciousness. Feelings bubble up into ideas (rationality) and those ideas become words for the very limited purposes of communication and the creation of labor-saving devices. Those feelings come from our connectedness to all that is, not from our own thinking.

That's why a so-called "rational" approach to life (as opposed to a consciousness-based approach to life) is considered bootstrapping. It does not allow for this input from all that is. It simply assumes that the thinking started up on its own. That the calculator pressed its own buttons.

[As always, you need not take my word for any of this. Go into your body and make your own determination as to the nature of reality.]
The world of Science (what I would call the Religion of Science) would have you ignore this point. As stated aptly on Rationalwiki.org:

The Münchhausen Trilemma is a problem in philosophy that all statements can be questioned and then need evidence. This problem has been well known in philosophy for thousands of years, but rarely gets addressed because it breaks the legs of philosophy, science, and any other possible approach to reality.

I would disagree, however, that the Münchhausen Trilemma breaks the legs of "philosophy" and "any other possible approach to reality." It only breaks the legs of rationality-based philosophies and approaches to reality. If so-called reality is an illusion, all falls into place. I would certainly agree, though, that the Münchhausen Trilemma breaks the legs of science.

The story behind the below quotation is interesting.

Connection Between Observation and the Material World

A friend of mine sent me the following video about an interesting new technology. Isn't it interesting that everything we look for . . . we find?

Perhaps there's more of a connection between the act of observation and our "discoveries" than we realize. Maybe we're actually creating the world, rather than discovering it. I talk about this in The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder.

Latest 5-Star Review of The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder

I'm listening to the Reds game while I write this. I just had to turn down the sound on another cancer commercial. Ask yourself what they're selling in those commercials and realize that healthcare providers, like all corporations, are actively about the business of expanding their markets. Think about that and you will turn down the sound on all such commercials too. That's the topic of my next book, the current working title of which is The Obamacare Experiments.

In the meantime, I have this other book out there called The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder, and my friend and colleague, Thomas Cothran, has been so kind as to post a review on Amazon. While Thomas gave the book five starts, in the review he also says of what you might call its philosophical argument:

"I'll let the reader make their own decision about the merits of this worldview. (The enemy of this metaphysics is Aristotle.) For my own part, I remain cheerfully Aristotelian.

In other words, The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder in essence lays the responsibility for all the woes of modern society squarely at the feet of Aristotle's rationalism, and young Thomas--who's favorite philosopher is Kierkegaard but doesn't recognize that Kierkegaard was anti-Aristotilian too--remains unconvinced.

Not to worry. I've challenged my good friend to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for himself, a challenge to which he has agreed. We shall see if he remains cheerfully Aristotelian after that.

I'll keep you posted. Thanks, Thomas!