My Evolving Position on Abortion

Although abortion has been much in the news lately, I have decided to stop making arguments about it, and to not argue further about whether a fetus is a human life, or whether abortion is murder, or whether a woman has the right to have an abortion, because I have reached the conclusion that both the pro-abortion and anti-abortion movements are motivated 100% by psychological and emotional factors, and 0% by reason and logic, such that reason and logic and argument have absolute zero ability to change anyone's minds on this issue. The anti-abortion people feel the emotional biological impulse, hard-wired by evolution into our animal brains, which is called "the maternal instinct" or "the paternal instinct," to protect the young from threats and dangers, and they feel this towards the fetuses in other women's wombs. Logic and reason would not change such people's minds, because their minds were never decided by logic or reason to begin with.

Then, among men, there is the psychology of men's insecurity in masculinity and challenges to their manhood and feelings of not being manly enough, and of men's hatred and resentment of sex and hatred of women for being the objects of men's lust, for men who blame their lust on women, for which men compensate by attacking women and seeking to rule women and subjugate women to assert the superiority of the masculine over the feminine, which includes ruling over women's bodies and trampling women's rights. Forcing women to bear unwanted pregnancies against their will is a convenient and easy way for men to assert their control over women's bodies. And such men are so stupid that they do not understand that, when a man feels lust for a woman, that lust is an attribute of the man who feels it, not of the woman for whom it is felt, so the man is to blame for the man's own lust, and, if it is a sin, it is the man who sins, not the woman, and it is the man for whom punishment would be deserved. Of course, I have written elsewhere, when analyzed by logic and reason, sex is not a sin, but most (stupid) men have the feeling and the emotion and the sense that it is dirty and wrong and disgusting, so they feel that it is, and they blame women for it, instead of blaming themselves. The men want to make the women feel bad about having had sex, to blame women for the men's sin of having sex with the women, by forcing them to have their babies instead of letting them escape from feeling bad about it by having an abortion so that it would be as though the sex never happened, and the woman would then not feel bad (ashamed, guilty) about it and the unwanted consequence of being stuck with a child to raise that it caused, which the man wants to hang around the woman's neck as a symbol of her sinfulness and wickedness for sex. Nothing symbolizes sex (when sex is between a cis man and a cis woman) better than pregnancy itself, in psychological symbolism and imagery and meaning.

Then, on the other side, the pro-abortion people, either emotionally identify with women, or feel something emotionally right and just and virtuous about freedom for women, or else they are people who emotionally connect with trashy and dirty behavior, and they want women to engage in as much dirty trashy sex as possible, and get pregnant, without consequences, so they see being pro-abortion as a way to promote dirt and trash in the face of the cleanliness which they feel, at an emotional level, is their enemy. They emotionally connect their own moral failures, to the unwanted pregnancies of other women, and believe that neither one should be held accountable or face consequences, so, for them, being pro-abortion is about removing responsibility from people's lives. And some pro-abortion activists know, or feel, that, if this was a man's issue, men would certainly be allowed to have abortions, but men want women to be limited to or defined by their role as mother and wife, so it is an issue of equality, and ties into the social justice and equality narrative that has become the meaning of these people's lives, so they would feel that their own lives are meaningless and worthless if they don't support the pro-abortion position. So it isn't about abortion, it is about their own self-esteem as social justice warriors.

It is pointless to make any arguments using reason or logic or proof or deduction here, despite the fact that I have the ability to make such arguments, because there is no one there to listen, everyone's mind is made up on the basis of emotions and psychology, no one is going to just listen to a rational debate and choose a position based on neutral, unbiased, emotionless reason and logic in this area. There is the Libertarian argument that a woman owns her body, because she makes her body, she keeps her body alive by her own effort of living her life, and so she has the right to an abortion under private property rights, because she owns her own womb and can do with it as she will, but no one will care about that argument, because it is a logical argument. There is the Libertarian argument, called "Evictionism," that a woman having an abortion is not murder, even if a fetus is a human life with full human rights, because it is no different than a landlord evicting a tenant, when that tenant is certain to become homeless and die on the street, or a hospital removing life support from a patient in a coma, who is then certain to die, and the landlord or the hospital would have the absolute right to do this, because the landlord owns the apartment and the hospital owns the equipment, even if they had invited the tenant, or the patient, in to begin with, even if the landlord had initially invited the tenant to rent the apartment, or even if the hospital had initially voluntarily offered free life support to the patient, so the fact that a woman chose to have sex, and even if she intentionally chose to become pregnant, would not be grounds to justify denying her the right to an abortion, because it is her body and she has the right to evict the fetus from it and let the fetus live or die on its own without her help or interference. This was always the logic of the position that abortion should only be legal before the fetus is viable outside the womb, but not after, that, prior to that point, terminating the fetus in the womb is the moral equivalent of evicting the fetus out of the womb, but afterwards, it is not the moral equivalent, because the fetus could survive outside the womb and is therefore not life-dependent upon the woman.

But no one will care about such arguments, despite their strong logic. Abortion has to do with pregnancy, which has to do with sex, which has to do with gender, which has to do with men and women, and sex and gender and being a man or being a woman are areas that the human brain gets so emotional and psychological about, that no room for reason and logic exists. And people have debates, and make arguments, but those are merely for people looking for a pretext and justification for positions they have already chosen to believe in.

Bertrand Russell's Paradox, and Set Theory

In my book "Everything is Something," I set about to accomplish many things, one of which was to refute Bertrand Russell's Paradox. After finishing the book, and publishing it, I realize that I could have phrased my account of his paradox differently, and more accurately. In the book, I describe his paradox as "a set that is not a member of itself." In retrospect, it would have been more accurate for me to have described it as "the set of all sets that are not members of themselves." His logic actually makes far more sense in the second description, than in the first, which I had said. However, in "Everything is Something," I prove, and demonstrate using logic, that every set is a member of itself. A set is the set of all of its members, therefore the set is equal to the set of all of its members, therefore the set is equal to all of its members, and all of its members are within the set, therefore the set is within the set, therefore the set is a member of itself, and this is true of all sets, because it is true of a set as such, of the essential set, because of the essence of a set, and is deduced without reference to any specifics that might differentiate this set from any possible set, which is the methodology of essential logic. The fact that every set is a member of itself refutes both formulations of Bertrand Russell's Paradox, so my error was only in my statement of his paradox, there was no error in my statement of my proof of my refutation of his paradox. The only set which is not a member of itself is the set with no members, which is the null set, the empty set, but, because it has no members, the null set does not exist, it is equal to zero, because it contains zero members, it contains nothing. It can be thought about and conceptualized, but it does not, and can never, exist, in the sense of being a real thing, in reality.

More broadly, regarding set theory, which I discuss at length in "Everything is Something," I later realized this, also: Bertrand Russell (and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein) sought to derive math from set theory, and to prove math using set theory. But math is set theory, math and set theory are identical, so their effort, their quest, their work, was doomed to failure from the very beginning. For example, what is the difference between "a set of ten things," as such, and "the number ten," as such? What is the difference between "a set of one thing," "a thing," and "the number one"? In my opinion, there is no difference. So, the attempt to derive math from set theory, and to prove math using set theory, reduces to the attempt to derive math from math, and to prove math using math, which adds nothing substantive to math itself, as an academic discipline. Philosophy can say how we gain knowledge of math, and what role math plays in the world, and what math is useful for, but math is math, and philosophy does not, fundamentally, add anything to the statement "math is math," for one does math by doing math, not by analyzing math by means of philosophy, although philosophy can add to the understanding of math, to our wisdom with respect to math, so to speak, for example by saying whether numbers exist in the physical world or exist in a separate spiritual or intellectual world or do not really exist at all, which is within the province of philosophy.

And I argue that numbers do physically exist, and there is no need to refer to or rely upon another dimension or an intellectual or spiritual world where numbers exist, and it is also obviously not true to say that numbers do not exist or they are merely our way of speaking about things but they themselves are not real, because we can see that numbers are real, if we look out the window and see a flock of ten robins then we can see with our own eyes, and know beyond doubt, that the number ten is real, because a thing is a set of properties, and an essence is one property or set of properties isolated out of a thing or things and then analyzed using logic, and a number is the essence of a group of things as being a certain particular number or amount or quantity of things, so, if groups physically exist, if, for example, there is a group of ten squirrels living in my back yard, and they are real, then the number ten physically exists, because the group of ten squirrels is a thing that has a property of being the number ten, and a property of being a group of squirrels, and a property of being in my back yard, and the property of being alive today, and so on, for example, and "the number ten" simply uses essential logic to isolate the property of being ten, from a real physical group of ten things, or from many such groups, which is abstraction and induction, and then uses the number ten in math to prove things in math, which is deduction and logic. For another example, if there are three boxes on my shelf, those boxes are the number three, plus many other properties such as being boxes and being on my shelf, and the number three physically exists as those three boxes, because that real thing has the property of being three. And there is no difference between that number ten, as a group of ten things, and that number three, as a group of three things, on the one hand, and the numbers ten and three of abstract theoretical mathematics, in intellectual math, on the other hand.

Our knowledge of math does come from the physical world, and this is why math, and math used in science, can describe the physical world, and is useful for technology in physical reality. As I have also written elsewhere, I believe that math works in science, and math describes the physical world, because I do not believe that there is any real difference between the theoretical abstract space and time of math, on the one hand, and our actual real physical space-time, on the other hand, the only difference is that the first space-time is thought about in some mathematician's mind, and the second space-time is one which exists objectively, outside of our minds, and which we experience as the physical world, but the actual math is exactly the same for both. So, when mathematicians think of an intellectual or spiritual world where math is real, it is actually our own physical reality that they are thinking about. Science, and the scientific world, is essentially the manifestation of the abstract mathematics of space-time into the concrete experiences that you have as a person observing and experiencing the little slice of space-time in reality that your point of view is privileged to experience. Science is really just how all the math fits together to form reality, and to form our experience of reality.