Victor Senchenko will be your waiter this evening. Would you like word salad with your spam?

Six days ago, I received an email with the subject “Bruce, a Press Release for: The Thinkers’ Podium“. Normally, people release press releases on their own websites, so you can imagine my surprise that an unfamiliar book from an unfamiliar author on an ambiguous topic, had a press release for my blog.

It started off with a somewhat benign explanation of why I was picked out.

“Greetings Bruce,

Looking over your website, you seem to present yourself as a rational thinker with liberal, humanist views. It is for this reason that the following Press Release may be of interest to you.”

Okay. Fair enough, I am a small-l liberal (social liberal specifically), with humanist views and reason is a priori for me. What’s in it that would interest me?

“And yet, for all the widespread literacy, numeracy, and vast range of intellectual application advances in all forms of industries and fields of research, a simple but irrefutable fact remains: that humans, as a species, are no more humanely civilized today than they were thousands of years ago.”

Valuing corrigibility over dogmatism, I couldn’t possibly consider this irrefutable and indeed, as a “rational thinker” with an interest in human nature, it’s the kind of claim I’d want critically analysed, not simply asserted and accepted! Everything that makes me liberal and humanist is at odds with both the claim, and moreover the way it is simply asserted!

Indeed, how could this claim be known? One would have to possess knowledge of the entire history of humanity to make comparisons. Wouldn’t you know, the author has such knowledge!

“Still, an obvious question arises: how could an ordinary human know all that the, so-called, greatest of all human thinkers in all of human existence never knew? The only method by which this query can be resolved – so as to be perfectly understandable – is by reading the Revelations of a Human Space Navigator. In this book there are all the answers to means by which this knowledge had been obtained by Victor Senchenko.”

(Victor Senchenko, 2008 )

Want to know if the book is worth reading? Just buy the book and it will tell you!

You know what? I think I’d want a bit more in a press release, or in advertising pap, or in the blurb than self-referential endorsement by the book itself. I’d want to know that the book was worth reading before I spent a single cent.

The pre-emptive evasion of scrutiny or critical analysis, as evidenced throughout Senchenko’s self-promation isn’t a good sign. Claiming fairly questionable assumptions as irrefutable and engaging circular reasoning are never good in debate, and are usually tactics employed by people who don’t want a genuine, intelligent discussion.

Often it’s simply ego defence, other times more cynical; they may have wealth or political power resting on the acceptance of indefensible concepts. Sometimes it’s all three and more. Religious apologetics, especially of the popularist variety from the Bible Belt of the US, is rife with this. But the religious don’t have a monopoly of course.

You can prop up any theme with this kind of gainsay and sophistry.

Now, in all fairness, I was going to contact Victor Senchenko and ask him to explain his terms. I’ve already written about one unsolicited email as a part of a book promotion, assuming that it was purely spam, and had that blow up in my face some what. I don’t want to have that happen again!

However, someone has already beaten me to the punch. I wanted to question Senchenko on his claim that there is no such thing as time, specifically about his proposed experiment which seemed in blissful ignorance of the concepts he was criticising.

Another blogger got there first though, and I have to say, did a good job. Indeed, everything that I was going to ask has been asked, and everything I suspected about Senchenko has been revealed; he doesn’t like his ideas being critically analysed and goes quite ballistic in response to sincere and fair lines of questioning. Before telling you to go read the book of course.

So, it is with some degree of appreciation that I direct you towards Skeptico: Victor Senchenko – Time Does Not Exist. Be sure to pay attention to the meltdown part and the entirely fair line of questioning that provoked it. I’ll be adding Skeptico to my blog roll as well.

Skeptico, you’ve saved me a job and the wrath of another in a line of angry people who don’t appreciate critical thinking. Thankyou!

~ Bruce