Setzer's "laws" and aphorisms

1. With a computer it is possible to produce badly made things (programs, systems) which work.
   Comparison: Try using a power lathe in the same way.
   
   
2. The development of a well-designed and well-documented system takes 10 times longer and costs 10 times more.
   Corolary: If a software company honestly participates in a disputation for the development of a system and proposes to develop a well-designed and well-documented system, it's going to lose the disputation.
   
   
3. The origin of the problems of a program that does not function properly is that it was programmed.
   Corolary: Only use program/application generators.
   
   
4. In developing a computer system, the more you plan, the less you program.
   
   
5. In data processing, whenever you re-invent the wheel, it will come out squared.
   Classical examples: The old IBM /360, /370, etc. OSs; MS DOS, Windows; the C language, UML (as far as data modeling is concerned).
   
   
6. Only idiots need a definition of intelligence.
   Corolary: Computers are idiots.
   
   
7. In data processing, if the market likes a product it certainly could be much better at the present state of the art.
   
   
8. A program which simulates some human behaviour is a demonstration that humans do not "function" that way.
   
   
9. A computer (or any other type of machine) should only replace some human work when this work degrades the worker, and should not replace the work that elevates the human being.
   Restriction: The aforementioned work should only be replaced if the person who is being substituted can exercise some less degrading work.
   Problem: How to correctly characterize "degrading" and "elevating" a human.
   Citation: "Education is the activity which mostly elevates the human being" (Ruy Barbosa).
   Corolary: computers should not replace teachers and professors, not even partially.
   
   
10. To make a computer attractive, everything must be presented by it as a show or as an electronic game.
    (Inspired by "TV has transformed everything in a show" – Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death)
    
    
11. Computers induce lack of discipline.
    Comment: It's the worst kind of lack of discipline, the mental one.
    Examples: In general, the way computer programmers work (this can be seen in almost all programs, because they have almost no documentation, or inadequate or obsolete documentation), or as texts are typed into a computer using a text editor (compare with the enormous inner discipline required to write a text by hand without making corrections).
12. Artistic activity is the best antidote against "computational thinking".
    Corolary: Every programmer or a person who unfortunately is forced to work with a computer many hours in a row, every day, should practice some artistic activity (see my essay "An antidote against computer thinking").
    
    
13. Chess is a stupid game, because even computers play it well.
    Comment: Attention, chess players, this is a joke!
    
    
14. (Autoparaphrase of a similar quote in the Education section) Medicine is so bad, but so bad, that even a computer makes better diagnosis and prescriptions.
    Comment. This is another step in the loss of intuition, individuality and individual action

1. A TV viewer or a compulsive internet user is a person who knows less and less about more and more, until s/he knows nothing about everything.
   Comment: inspired by "A specialist is a person who knows more and more about less and less, until s/he knows everything about nothing", attributed to G.B. Shaw.
   
   
2. TV anesthesized boredom.
   Comment: Inspired by Chekhov's Uncle Vania
   
   
3. Anyone who is in favor of using electronic media by children and adolescents simply does not know the scientific literature that shows their enormous negative effects, especially at those ages.
   Comment 1. See, for example, my paper "The negative effects of electronic media on children, adolescents and adults" (in Portuguese), where there are citations of more than 100 scientific papers. This paper has been superseded by Michel Desmurget's La fabrique du crétin digitale. See also my paper "Electronic media and education, at home and at school: a synthesis of problems and recommendations" (in Portuguese). This article has been superseded by Michel Desmurget's La fabrique du crétin digitale.
   Comment 2: I have the impression that the negative effects of electronic media, at any age, but especially for children and adolescents, infinitely outweigh the few benefits they can bring.
   Example. In a lecture on electronic media (almost a hundred already given on this topic), a person asked to speak and said: "My nephew (a Brazilian) learned English by playing violent video games." The reader should imagine what my answer was (I leave some blank lines next):
   
   

"Isn't there a healthier way to learn English?"

1. Statistics is for science as surgery is for medicine.
   Comment: One declares the other bankrupt: if you cannot explain individual causes and effects, use statistics
   
   
2. Darwinism induces the view that human beings are animals; Artificial Intelligence, that human beings are machines.
   Comment 1. It is linguistically incorrect to say that human beings are machines, since all machines were designed and built by human beings, eventually with the help of other machines; no human being was designed and built by another human being. The correct expression is "the human being is a purely physical system" (see the CDCS below and my paper on Artificial Intelligence)
   Commentary 2. A human being is a human being, an animal is an animal. It is not because there are certain structures and functions in common between them that they should be identified. This identificationis degrades the view of the humans, and elevates that of animals. After all, no one calls animals "mobile plants" (they have much in common: organic cells and tissues, internal growth, tissue regenerations, reproduction, life, etc,), why should human beings be called "rational animals"?
   Comment 3. Human beings have structures and capabilities that no animal has. For example, spine with a double S that allows upright posture for long periods, non-flat foot, curved palate that allows articulation of speech sounds, slow growth in relation to the total life span, lack of fur, leather, feathers or scales, opposition of the thumb (grasping with the fingers), speaking, thinking, consultable memory, self-awareness, creativity.
   
   
3. Chance is a physical illusion.
   Comment 1: Carefully Observing physical phenomena and their physical and/or nonphysical causes, chance disappears.
   Comment 2: It is possible to observe objectively non-physical phenomena by means of latent supersensible organs of perception present in all human beings.
   Examples: thinking, feeling, willing, memory, sleep, dreams, consciousness, growth in living beings, organic forms and symmetries, and many others, are not physical phenomena, but which have physical consequences. Intuition is a perception of something not physical. Concepts are not physical. Thought is an organ of perception of concepts (cf. Rudolf Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom).
   Comment 3: One of the excuses used to justify the hypothesis of the existence of chance is the inability to detect all physical causes and effects due to the complexity of physical systems, i.e, the number of variables or factors involved and the interactions among them.
   
   
4. Examining physically the causes of any physical phenomenon, the causes of these causes, and so on, one always reaches a dead end, that is, something for which there is no explanation.
   Example: That's absolutely clear concerning any internal phenomenon of a living being. E.g., move an arm, and try to look up the sequence of physical causes that led to this movement.
   Corolary: Every physical theory is incomplete.
   
   
5. The human experience of time is for the time of physics just as the human experience of matter is for the elementary matter of physics: one has nothing to do with the other.
   Justification. 1. We have the precise experience of the present moment, which makes no sense to physics. On the other hand, for latter, the "time arrow" only has some meaning in terms of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, that of increasing entropy (nobody has ever seen spilled milk return to the bottle); however, our experience of the past and foreseeing the future makes an absolute distinction between them. 2. The "elementary particles" of physics are totally incomprehensible. Examples: the electron is not a tiny ball and does not revolve around the nucleus, and the spin of atomic particles cannot be understood, as it has no classical limit, which is the level of matter we experience.
   
   
6. Regarding matter, physics destroyed the obvious.
   Justification. We have an absolutely concrete experience of what matter is: any solid, liquid, or visible gas (such as clouds or smoke). However, with its method physics cannot explain what matter is. For example, it is not known where the mass of protons comes from; the electron is punctual (has no dimension) but has mass and electric charge (in fact, it does not revolve around the nucleus!); calculations indicate that 95% of the mass in the universe is unknown, composed 70% of dark energy (which gives rise to the accelerated expansion of the universe) and 25% of dark matter (which prevents high-speed revolving galaxy stars from going astray). We also don't know what the brain is, because we don't know what memory is, what thoughts, sensations, feelings and will impulses are. Nevertheless, we have their absolutely concrete experience: no one doubts that s/he has a memory, think, feel and have impulses of will. However, inner activities are hidden from the outside; for example, no one can feel what someone else is feeling, e.g. when feeling the taste of some food.
   
   
7. Materialist or physicalist is a person who lives and works in a building that does not have the ground floor.
   Comment. This is consequence of what was exposed in the previous "law", that is, from the point of view of physics it is not known what matter is.
   
   
8. The limits of the physical universe make no physical sense.
   Comment 1. In fact, what would exist after these limits, nothingness? How far does nothingness go?
   Comment 2. Until Newton's theory of gravitation, the Catholic Church used Aristotle's model, that there were several physical spheres were the planets, the Sun, and finally one where the stars were, that is, it was admitted that the universe was finite. Then Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), who considered the universe to be infinite, formulated a mental experiment, more or less like this: "If I shoot an arrow at the edge of the universe out of it, what happens? Does the universe expand or does the arrow go to nothing?" Because of this, he was burned by the Inquisition, and is considered the first martyr of science.
   
   
9. Physics is not in the business of explaining nature. Its business is to deduce models, mathematical formulas involving variables that assume physical quantities measured by instruments. From these models, the other part of its business is about foreseeing the future.
   Comment: These variables and their values are not nature itself; They represent a tiny shadow of the latter.
   Trivial example: Newton's formula for the gravitational force of attraction between two bodies f = g*(m₁ x m₂)/d² involves measures of the masses m₁ and m₂, the distance between the centers of gravity of the two bodies d and the acceleration of gravity g. It absolutely does not explain anything about the origin of gravitation, it does not explain why the bodies attract themselves. Nevertheless, it is useful: it explains why the orbits of the planets are approximately ellipses, it makes it possible to design rockets and satellites etc.
   
   
10. Mistrust any simple explanation of a natural phenomenon.
    Comment: Even a stone is of an infinite complexity; imagine the millions of years and processes that were needed to form it.
    Counter-examples: 1. The theory that the blood circulates in the body because it is pushed by the heart as a pump. Just image the power required by this pump to make a viscous fluid as the blood flow through thousands of kilometers of blood vases, taking into consideration that most of them are capilary. There is no explanation for the blood circulation. 2. The idea that the atom is a planetary system (Rutherford's model of 1911: the electron is not a tiny ball and does not revolve around the atom nucleous. 3. Tides are just due to the gravitational attraction of moon and sun. They are due to an enourmously complex system of forces and movements which interact with the ocean basin, leading to a resonance effect. Tides rotate around a point in the ocean without tide (amphidromic point or tidal node). 4. The Neodarwinian theory of evolution (random gene mutations plus random encounters leading to natural selection). Scietific evidences are appearing showing that mutations leading to new, viable anatomic forms are fantastically improbable. For instance, according to recent calculations, just a pair of mutations in hominids producing a viable functional change should occur in the average only about every 200 million years.
    
    
11. Machines will never have feelings.
    Justification: Every machine is universal; this is absolutely clear with programmable digital machines: anyone may simulate any other one, given enough capacity (Turing Machines are aabstract universal machines). All analog machines (as, for instance, refrigerators) are also universal, because their design and construction is the same for the same series of similar ones. On the other hand, feelings are absolutely individual: nobody can feel someone's else's feelings (but may think the same thoughts; this is clear, e.g., in the case of mathematical concepts). See details on my paper on Artificial Intelligence.
    
    
12. Machines will never think as humans do.
    Justification: Everyone may make the mental observation that s/he is able to determine her/his next thought. For this, it suffices, for example, to think on two different numbers which do not evoke any memory and then concentrate the thought on only one of them. This choice and the following mental concentration is a self-determination; machines are either deterministic or random, thus they have no self-determination. In other words, anyone may observe, through one's own thinking, that s/he may exercise free will (the decision of thinking on one or the other number). This means that thinking transcends matter, because the latter is inexorably subjected to the physical "laws" and conditions. Obviously, a coherent materialist will say that free will is an illusion. Fortunately, few materialists are coherent, because without freedom there is no human responsibility, dignity, and there is only egotism, which is naturally destructive (see my paper "Consequences of materialism"). I consider materialism to be the conception that there are only matter, and material and physical processes in the universe.
    
    
13. The computational code used by the brain wll never be discovered, because it does not exist.
    Comment 1. I am relying on personal evidence that we have free will in thinking (see the previous item), and therefore it cannot have a physical origin.
    Comment 2. The most that could be scientifically said is that the brain participates in mental processes. Stating that it generates these processes is not based on scientific facts, it is mere speculation.
    Comment 3. Virtually all neuroscience research today is based on a computational model of the brain, so it is in the wrong direction.
    Metaphor. This reminds the story of a drunkard who was looking for something at night, under a lamppost. An officer passes by and helps him in his search, but soon realizes that there is nothing in there, and asks: "– What did you lose?" "– My keys." "– But are you sure you lost them here?" "– No, I lost them there, farther down the street." "– But then why are you looking for them here?" "– Because it is dark in there and there is light in here!" That's how scientists work in general: they look for something where their theories apply and where their devices can measure something, not where they should look. And so they will never find the fundamental essence of things.
    
    
14. When technology is used without consciousness, it acquires autonomy and tends to dominate the human being.
    Examples. TV, as it normally decreases the viewer's awareness, due to the deluge of images - it is not possible to consciously think about each image seen and the mind tends to "turn off", to "relax", which has been proved by the decrease in brain activity. Smartphones and tablets using the Internet, as they have a high risk of causing addiction, impair the ability to concentrate (see my article "What the Internet is doing to our minds", in Portuguese) and break real social relationships, in addition to numerous other problems.
    
    
15. Animal research should aim to show how they differ from humans, and not their similarities
    Comment 1. Human beings are very different from animals, such as in bipedalism, in the double S column, in the opposing of the thumb (making tweezers with the thumb and index finger), the bare skin (without hair, leather, feathers, scales or armor), X-shaped legs, speech, creativity and, most importantly, conscious thinking.
    Comment 2. When I read Desmond Morris's book The Naked Ape, which he wrote to show the similarities between humans and monkeys, I was in each passage thinking: "I never thought the differences were so high!"
16. (New! 22/3/24) Ask a generative language system (like ChatGPT, Gemini etc.) something like "give something totally new about..." to see what happens.
    Comment 1: I asked Gemini, on 22/3/24, to give a new demonstration of the Pythagorean Theorem. The answer obviously wasn't new, and it was very blunt. I asked it to give the simplest purely geometric proof of this theorem (I know of one with just two rotations of triangles formed by a square inscribed in another), and the answer, also clumsy, had a lot of algebra.
    Comment 2. Asking for something new on a subject requires the system to know and analyze everything that has been written on the subject. And if something new appears, it will only be a combination of what has already been written. Human beings are creative; they can introduce something new into the world that is not simply a combination of what is already known.

1. Teaching is not a science, nor a technique, industry or commerce: it's an art.
   Comment: inspired by Waldorf Education.
   
   
2. A good teacher or professor is the one who is able to instill enthusiasm in his/her students for the subject matter being taught and, from that enthusiasm, provides for the adequate and necessary development of his students.
   Comment: Inspired bu Rudolf Steriner's words, as far as I remember them, "A teacher does not teach, s/he makes her/his students learn by themselves."
   
   
3. There are two basic attitudes of a good teacher or professor: loving and understanding his/her students. Moreover, s/he should know the subject matter.
   
   
4. Teaching is presently so bad, but so bad, that even computers or distance learning teach better.
   Justification. In Brazil, ask the multiplication table (for example, 5 x 7), for any public elementary or high school student. If s/he doesn't know, which in my experience will be the case for the vast majority, hold on your breath and ask for the addition table (5 + 7). If by a miracle the student knows the multiplication table, ask how much is 2% of 90. As of 2021, only 5% of public high school graduates had the minimum knowledge of mathematics.
   Comment 1. This is another step in the loss of individuality and individual action.
   Comment 2. Published in the printed version in the Readers' Forum of the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo (one of the most important in Brazil) of 20/4/2011, without the distance learning part.
   
   
5. The more education is technological, the less it is humane.
   Comment: What we need is a more humane education, and not a more technological one.
   
   
6. Learning is like swimming against the current: stopping means retreating.
   Comment. This is a paraphrase of the phrase by the Polish poet Stanislaw Jerzy Lec "He who wants to reach the source must swim against the current", in a free translation of the English version (accessed on 7/17/20).
   

1. The reality of the misery produced by humans is beyond the most pessimistic imagination.
   Example: the war in the Ukraine.
   
   
2. There is no limit to the bottom of the pit that humanity can fall into.
   Comment. Inspired by a phrase by the late Dr. Walter Leser (former Health Secratary of the State of São Paulo), something like "A good characterization of the infinite is the limit of human imbecility".
   
   
3. Every competition is in general anti-social, because the winner becomes happy at the expense of the loser's frustration.
   Corolary 1: Sports should be practiced (ideally, each day) without competition.
   Examples: playing tennis without counting points, games and sets, playing soccer mixing the teams after every goal, practising individual sports, etc.
   Corolary 2: Competitive games shoud be banished from homes and schools, replaced by cooperative games.
   Comment: It is not necessary to teach a child or adolescent how to be competitive; adult life will teach her/him how to be competitive when (and unfortunately while) this will be needed. (Educating for competition is so much rooted in most countries that probably few of their people will understand these words...)
   
   
4. Advertising is the science, the technique and the art of influencing people to do what they would not do without such an influence.
   Corolary: Advertising attempts against freedom, that is, against humanity; subliminar advertising is criminal.
   Comment: what is correct is to promote ideas and products, that is, objectively showing their characteristics and eventual price.
   
   
5. Subliminal advertising is the one directed to the sub- or unconscious mind, that is, kept by them and not by the conscious mind.
   Corolary: Advertising is against humankind; subliminar advertising is criminal.
   Example: Adds exhibitedat the side of an web page; but this is just one of many cases of subliminal propaganda on the internet (another example: a "modern" page with lots of boxes with texts, figures and animation).
   Comment: I never read these adds, thus to me they work subliminarly What is their influence upon me?
   
   
6. One should not judge a person by his/her environment.
   Comment: Inspired by the Randi Crott and Lillian Crott Berthung's book Erzähl es niemandem! Die Liebesgeschichte meiner Eltern ("Don't tell anybody: the love story of my parents"), Köln: DuMont 2012. The book tells the saga of the second author, mother of the first author, who fell in love with a German soldier during the Nazi invasion of Norway and was mistreated by her countrymen. Her husband did not take active part in battles.
   
   
7. Humanity will never have taken a decisive step towards self-awareness as long as men wear ties.
   Comment. The tie is a purely cosmetic pendant, without absolutely no use. I find it absolutely ridiculous. Interestingly, I have had this conception since I was 14 years old. In response to my wife's requests, I used it at weddings and funerals. I stopped doing it a long time ago
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8. In a country where corruption reigns, politicians in general have no shame, they have pockets.
   Comment 1. Does anyone know of such a country? I know one, and very well...
   Comment 2. Published in the Readers' Forum of the printed version of the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo on Jan 8, 2022, p. A4. My "pocket" (which in Portuguese was "Bolso" – our then president's name was Bolsonaro) was changed to bolso, in italics.
   
   
9. There is only one way to fix Brazil: start all over again, in another manner.
   Exagerated justification: the whole country is wrong.

1. The denomination "human being" is not good, because every human being is in permanente transformation.
   Corolary: A better denomination could be "human becoming".
   
   
2. The human being incorporates his/her whole experiences.
   Comment 1: Even feelings and thoughts are memorized in this way.
   Comment 2: Most of them are memorized in the sub- or in the unconscious.
   Corolary. One should not think bad, ugly and negative thoughts.
   
   
3. Unconsciously making mistakes does not diminish the human being; what diminishes a human being is not recognizing a mistake or not correcting it and compensating it.
   
   
4. An activity that demands excellence and can only be done successfully by teenagers or young adults does not have deep human substance.
   Example: Sports competitions that require strength or dexterity.
   
   
5. Every human decision should be made taking into account the conditions of the present moment.
   Justification: The whole world and every person are in constant change.
   Corollary 1: Every planning should give way to some improvisation. Otherwise, one treats nature, humans and institutions as machines, and degrades them.
   Corollary 2: Every class should be partly improvised by the teacher.
   
   
6. Having consciousness of something means perceiving it and thinking about it, or feeling it, that is, focusing attention on the perception itself.
   Example 1: Saying "I'm conscious of this object in front of me" is the same as saying "I am perceiveing with my senses this object in front of me, and I'm thinking about it."
   Example 2. To say "I'm conscious of my toothache" is the same as saying "I'm perceiving my toothache, because I'm feeling it."
   Comment 1: We can only be aware of an organ that cannot be perceived with the senses, such as the liver, if it hurts. Having pain in an organ that we do not normally perceive, that is, we are not conscious of it, means that our consciousness has penetrated this organ (apud Rudolf Steiner).
   Comment 2: We can perceive unconsciously, for example seeing something without paying attention to the perception.
   
   
7. Having self-consciousness is to perceive that one is being conscious of something about oneself.
   Example 1: If I look at my hand, I'm conscious of it. I am being self-conscious. If I perceive that I'm feeling something, I'm being self-conscious. If I observe my thinking (with thinking!) I am being self-conscious.
   Comment: Thinking about thinking, in self-reflection, is the maximum of self-consciousness.
   Example 2: If I see an object, and I think about myself "now I'm seeing this object", I'm being self-conscious.
   
   
8. Acting unconsciously means acting without thinking about the consequences of one's action.
   Comment 1. An unconscious action may arise from an impulse of will due to asensation or feeling, such as anger and fear, or due to a state of unconsciousness due to drugs, alcohol, lack of sleep, exhaustion, unconscious perception etc.
   Comment 2. Animals always act instantly (due to instinct or conditioning), as animals do not think (believing that animals think is a consequence of a faulty observation). Who have been introducing novelties in the world? Not animals, but human beings (unfortunately, for worse and not better).
   
   
9. Time is for space as the melody is for sound
   Comment. We have the perception of space, but we do not have the perception of time, which must be experienced. Rudolf Steiner made an interesting observation: we experience time externally when we see a change in space, such as the movement of the sun in the sky or of the hands of a clock. I add: we have an inner experience of time when we pay attention to our pulse or breathing.
   Comment. We don't hear a melody, we hear the isolated sounds that make it up. The melody is created inwardly, by what could be called the "soul".
   
   
10. We feel ourselves as individuals because we have a memory and we can consciously consult it.
    
    
11. Forgetting history, we stop feeling ourselves as part of the evolution of humanity.
    Comment: motivated by the news from the Simon Wiesenthal Center of 4/13/18: A new study released on Yom Hashoah ["Holocaust Day"] found that 22% of millenials said they haven't heard of the Holocaust and that two-thirds didn't know what Auschwitz was.
12. (New! 22/3/24) A person who stops learning is waiting for his death.
    Commentary. The human being should be in permanent transformation. Perhaps the most important one is permanent learning.

1. The worse kind of materialism is the one that disguises itself as spirituality.
   Example 1: The ancient Catholic Church, in the Inquisition and the Destruction of "Herectic" Christian sects, such as the Manicheans, the Cathars, the Albigenses and the Bogomils.
   Example 2: Several recent religions, in which clearly the main objective is to enrich their priests. But I recognize that some can do well to certain people, who seek religious feelings and not the understanding of religiosity; I know the case of an alcoholic who cured himself by attending one of those. (Highly current in Brazil! 8/22/22)
   Example 3: The fact that in this country several religions are politically oriented. As the late UK Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sachs said in a lecture that I heard in person, when asked about the solution of two states in Israel: "Religion should not get into politics, and politics should not get into religion." He was applauded.
   
   
2. Who does not recognize the unique spiritual essence of the human individuality, tends to unduly anthropomorphize.
   Examples: Considering that cells or animals "negotiate", calling "memory" the central storage unit of a computer, machine "learinng" (we don't know how humans learn), saying that "a thermostat has beliefs" (John McCarthy), and the worst of all, "Artificial Intelligence" (expression coined also by McCarthy – see my paper about it).
   
   
3. The fundamental hypothesis of any religion or religiosity should be that human life has some meaning.
   Corolary 1: Birth and death, the most decisive moments in each life, must have a meaning (that is, they do not happen by chance).
   Corolary 2: All life, earth and the universe must have a meaning.
   Comment: From the point of view of materialism, none of this makes sense.
   
   
4. A meaning for life cannot follow from matter, nor does human free will, dignity, self-consciousness, higher individuality and responsibility.
   
   
5. Who fears death does ot understand the meaning of life.
   
   
6. From a physical point of view, nature is a miracle.
   Comment: Inspired by the view of a mushroom about 30 cm high with an unopened corolla.
   Comment: The highest physical miracle is the human body.
   Comment: As science does not explain several processes that occur in human beings, such as thinking, feeling, willomg, growth (for example, the fact that hands retain their symmetry during growth) and tissue regeneration keeping shape, sleep and dream, the human being must be considered a physical miracle. One of my hypotheses is that with its current paradigm science will never explain these phenomena.
   
   
7. Unselfish love does not make sense from a materialistic point of view.
   Justification: Altruistic love, that which does not seek any benefit for the person exercising it, can only be practiced in total freedom, that is, with full consciousness and without any inner or outer imposition (for example, blindly following a law, a social duty, an instinct or a feeling). But from a materialist point of view, the human being does not have free will, as has already been seen.
   Corollary: Materialism leads to selfishness.
   Comment: Selfish actions always aim to give satisfaction or advantage to those who practice them. Selfishness is the opposite of unselfish love. Since materialism cannot recognize the existence of altruistic love, it always leads to selfishness.
   
   
8. A coherent person who thinks that genetics decisively determines the human personality, must necessarily be selfish.
   
   
9. Selfishness always ends up being destructive; altruistic love, always constructive.
   Corollary: It is necessary to sublimate selfishness. This is the true human progress.
   Comment: Every plant and every animal is selfish, acting towards the survival of itself and its species; when an animal does not act selfishly, it acts on instinct. Only the human being is capable of making that sublimation.
   
   
10. There will only be real progress for humanity when selfless love will overcome selfishness.
    Comment: The miseries caused by the human being are the fruit of selfishness.
    Example: The invasion of the Ukraine by Russia.
    
    
11. It is natural for human beings to be selfish, but human beings are not purely natural beings.
    Comment. Nature makes us selfish, but we transcend nature, that is, we have something that is not physical in our constitution (the evidence for this is very strong). That is why we can have free will (which does not make sense from a material or physical point of view) and, from it, act with altruistic love, which is the opposite of selfishness.
    Comment. Materialism, if coherent, must necessarily lead to selfishness, which is always destructive (see how we are destroying the matter of the Earth!).
    
    
12. Only a human being can act out of unselfish love.
    Justification: No animal has free will.
    Comment: I am aware of Darwin's explanation for altruism – an altruistic person is more welcome to society and therefore more likely to leave descendants. Curiously, in this conception selfishness leads to altruism.
    
    
13. The greatest prejudice in the world is that there are only material (physical) substances and processes.
    Comment: This is the Central Dogma of Contemporary Science (CDCS).
    
    
14. Most religious people are in fact materialists.
    Examples: Visiting Auschwitz, a religious leader said: "Where was God to permit those horrors to be commited here?" Another religious leader gave a partial, albeit adequate answer: "God was where He should have been: waiting for humans to take some attitude." The latter did not justify why God entrusted responsibility to humans and, even in this case, why He did not interfere. Both showed that they were not understanding what is the divinity's role nowadays – or both have a materialistic view of it.
    
    
15. Almost every scientist is a materialist.
    

Corolaries to the three last "laws":

16. The biggest sources of prejudices are the academic, scientific and religious worlds.
    
    
17. The majority of universities, research institutions and worship centers are in general museums of prejudices.
    Comment 1: Universities and colleges generally receive their students, show them during some years a bunch of rusted specialized abstract theories and practices, and believe that they have thus given them a real education whereas, in fact, from a holistic point of view, what happened was a mis-education (highly appreciated by our degenerated societies).
    Comment 2: If a person knows several religions and is a convinced adept at a particular one, s/he must necessarily think it is the best of all, otherwise s/he would have changed to another, better one.