Meanings of life / death / social & moral stuff
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Voting for artichokes
For some reason there’s been a lot of talk about voting. My understanding of voting is (predictably) rather instrumentalist and flat-footed: since there is no more rational way of deciding things, we make our preferences known (show of hands, cast ballots, computer clicks, etc), and let the question be decided by whatever side gets more Continue reading
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Achieving Star Trek
Culture is an engine that transforms food into ideas. Individual bodies are responsible for turning food into energy, but it takes a mind to create ideas, and a mind is possible only in a community. Just as a body requires some sort of ecosystem to provide it with air, warmth, water, fuel, etc., a mind Continue reading
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Under the right conditions, ideas matter; but far less than we commonly suppose
In the big picture, ideas don’t matter as much as people like me try to pretend. Obviously, in some broad sense, some ideas matter very much to some people, sometimes. But even in those cases where ideas matter in big ways, the practical, material circumstances have to be just right, and it is what’s done Continue reading
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Energy, culture, and Civilization
I only recently came across the ideas of Leslie White (1900-1975). White was an American anthropologist who developed a mathematical model for civilization. Civilization, or Culture, according to White, is a product of Energy and Technology (C = E x T). His thought was that every human culture begins with a certain amount of energy Continue reading
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Delusions and politics
Last night, in discussion with friends, I found myself defending my own skepticism. The topic was whether there is an objective human good, or even a genuine human nature that determines how humans should live if they want to have happy lives. I’m willing to admit that, as a matter of empirical fact, a great Continue reading
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Defining the divine
Here is a big question: Is anything divine? It’s easiest simply to assume (for now) that there is a natural world, and that this world is pretty much what it appears to be (with corrections supplied through scientific inquiry, of course). The question then is whether that assumption will be sufficient for our knowledge and Continue reading
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Haig Khatchadourian (1925-2016)
I learned yesterday through Facebook that one of my teachers, Haig Khatchadourian, has passed away. He was a warm and generous man, and a philosopher with such broad knowledge and penetrating intellect as to both intimidate and inspire those of us lucky enough to be in his classroom. I remember the blue exam books he Continue reading
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Natural and agreeable fools
Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escaped shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances. Continue reading
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The Cyborg of Practical Wisdom
The biggest struggle my fellow modern-day cyborgs and I face is to create a virtual reality that connects more wholesomely with the human part of our nature. The artificial reality we currently plug into is a Terry Gilliam nightmare. Too many characters within it are armed, dangerous, and barbaric. The bright spots within it – Continue reading
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A philosophical interpretation of recent campus protests
For many of us college folk separated by thousands of miles from the east coast, the recent protests at Yale and Princeton initially seem both frivolous and ridiculous: here is a bunch of students and faculty at fancy schools getting all worked up over “trigger warnings” and Halloween costumes. First-world problems on steroids! How nice Continue reading
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More on meaninglessness
I’m glad that my “everything is meaningless” essay generated so much discussion over at 3QD. But the discussion has made it clear to me that I could have been much more explicit in what I was trying to say. First off, let’s agree that there are many different meanings of “meaningfulness.” I was focusing on Continue reading
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Everything is meaningless – but that’s okay
What would it be for life to have a “meaning”? What does it mean when people say life is meaningful? I’m not sure, so let’s start with smaller, more obviously meaningful things. Better yet, let’s start with some meaningless things. When Bob sits down to polish the steel junk he’s about to haul to the scrap Continue reading
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Museums of religion
“What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?” – Nietzsche, The Gay Science Along with a few others, I have often balked at the New Atheists’ triumphalism. My worry has been that, yes, even though God is dead, we should worry a bit about what comes Continue reading
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Worlds of Terry Gilliam and M. C. Escher
I recently had the chance to watch Terry Gilliam’s film, The Zero Theorem. I gather that some have called it the final piece of the Brazil trilogy (following Twelve Monkeys), and that makes some sense: in all three films, we find the same harrowing mix of Kafka with Orwell, the same conflicts among imagination, reason, Continue reading
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How not to be afraid of death
Set aside any belief in an afterlife, even the vaguely hopeful “I’ll return to the energy of the universe” sort of view. The realization that your run of life is finite is troubling. At first, when we begin to think about the full extent of our lives, we tend to think of that extent as Continue reading
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On Birthdays
“A genius is a god under whose protection each person lives from the moment of his birth.” This is the opinion of Censorinus, a Roman rhetorician of the third century CE. Censorinus tells us that our birthday celebrations are not really about us. Instead, they are banquets of gratitude for our spiritual guardians, or the Continue reading
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On killing virtual dogs
(an excerpt from How You Play the Game): I have killed three dogs in Minecraft. The way to get a dog is to find a wolf, and then feed bones to the wolf until red Valentine’s hearts blossom forth from the wolf, and then it is your dog. It will do its best to follow Continue reading
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From cynicism to spheres: a review of Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophy
(For several months I have lost myself in the thoughts of Peter Sloterdijk, a contemporary German philosopher. I need to continue to read and absorb his works, but the following is a “status report” on what I have found so far.) UPDATE (09 May 2017): I now have had the chance to study volume 3: Foams, and re-read Continue reading
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What to do with my dead body
As I’m closer to death than birth, I think from time to time about what to do with my dead body. Of course, in the main I don’t really care. I’ll be done with it, and it will be nothing other than Other People’s Problem, in the deepest existential sense of those words. But sometimes Continue reading
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Divine natures: Spinoza, Emerson, and Nietzsche
Our Fall 2014 semester just wrapped up. I asked the students in my seminar to write a longer paper on our three philosophers – and then joined in the fun and wrote one myself. Divine natures: a tale of three brothers It would be said rightly that the rumors of the death of God are Continue reading
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A personal ethics of clicking
Now that every click we make is watched, archived, and meta-data-fied, it is time to start thinking seriously about a personal ethics of internet consumption. This goes beyond mere paranoia and worry over what others might think of what you’re taking interest in. Each click is in fact a tiny vote, proclaiming to content providers Continue reading
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Thoughts on a quote from Burton Dreben
Burton Dreben (1927-1999) was a Harvard professor whose influence upon academic philosophers has been great, despite a paucity of publications. Indeed, his influence has been so strong that some people refer to his students as being “Drebenized”, or molded in the form of the master. His main area of interest was logic, and the thought Continue reading
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In defense of armchairs
Generally, in any conflict between long-held, seemingly obvious beliefs and new research challenging those beliefs, defenders of the old beliefs will find themselves charged with sitting in armchairs. It never is a rocking chair, park bench, hammock, or divan. It is an armchair, the sort of chair one finds in venerable, wood-paneled clubs where stodgy Continue reading
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On solitary confinement and social media
Last month (April 19, 2014), 3QD’s Robin Varghese linked to an article by philosopher Lisa Guenther on the effects of solitary confinement on the mind. (The original article was published in the online magazine Aeon.) Guenther’s essay is fascinating, as it provides a vivid account of how our perception of the world depends heavily on the Continue reading
Huenemanniac 