Aesthetic Materialism

The foundation of what I believe about things is:  Humans are dumb.  Humans are stupid.  Humans are ignorant.  Humans don't know very much. I'm not saying, "Some people are stupid," or "A lot of people are stupid," or even "Everyone except for me is stupid" - I'm very much including myself.  I'm very dumb.  I don't know very much at all.  I'm not looking down on anyone when I say that humans are dumb.  On the contrary, I see myself as super-dumb. Of course, it's a matter of degree.  Some people are stupider than others.  But everyone is stupid.  Even the smartest, most intelligent, most knowledgeable - the greatest geniuses that ever lived - are vastly ignorant. You might ask: compared to what? Good question. Humans are the smartest, most knowledgeable things in the universe that we know about.  But that just goes to show that we don't know very much. As far as we know, we're the only things out there. Even if it turns o...

Math is an exploration, a way to search for truth. In general,   You start with an idea. Then you try to modify that idea in two ways (two directions, you might say) - or maybe 3: 1. You try to make that idea more precise, and 2. You try to make that idea more general. (3.) You see what follows from the ideas that are produced by 1 and 2.  More specifically, it can work like this: You start with a truth. 1. Then you try to make that truth more precise, and 2. More general.  3. Then you see what follows from the truths that follow from 1 and 2.

  Reading Freud - especially his clinical work - one gets the strong sense that he was fascinated, intrigued, entertained, delighted in the rich, complex, convoluted web of, as he calls them "rationalizations" that his patients constructed in order to maintain their own psyche.  I prefer the term "apologetics," rather than "rationalizations," to describe the incredibly creative work that people do to maintain their own beliefs, but I, too, love them .   We are, in a sense, made out of these apologetics, these rationalizations.  My ego is formed, at least partly, out of them, and every person's apologetics are slightly different, like a fingerprint.  They make us distinctive, unique. Probably the principle difference between Freud and Nietzsche: for Freud, what underlay all these rationalizations was the id.  Nietzsche recognized the id as well, but rather than putting it at the foundation of his philosophy, as he saw it, under these exertions of the wi...

Insanity is alone-ness. To keep functioning as a mind, you have to bounce your ideas off of other people. But audiences can be self-selecting.  If you only bounce your ideas off of people who already agree with you, that's almost as bad as being totally isolated - you can fall victim to audience capture. (As I like to put it, excommunication is bad for the church.)  You want to communicate not only with minds, but with other minds, with different minds, with people who believe different things from you, who think differently, who live differently, who have different forms of consciousness. This is why I value religions - because they have the power to make minds different.   I value you for your difference.  (For this reason, I especially love new religions.  Creative ways of making minds different.) 

      Paradise Lost   In the final episode of "Lost," we find out that, in fact, all of the passengers and crew of Flight 815 died in the crash, instantly.  They are all, already dead.  So this "island," upon which most of the action of the show has been taken place, never existed in reality - it was a kind of illusion, or dream.  Or, better yet, the island does exist, but in a reality that is, in a sense, more real than our reality.  You see, "Lost" was a religious allegory, or perhaps not an allegory, but a very explicitly religious story, and the stories it tells are stories of an afterlife - with the possibility of something like the traditional concepts of salvation or damnation. Within this illusion, dream, alternate reality, or what have you (movie? television show?), some of the passengers of of Flight 815 died instantly, whereas others died in the subsequent days and months.  Why is that?  Because many of the people who died i...

Austrian economists - and others, with a similarly simplistic understanding of markets - operate under the unthought assumption that humans are rational maximizers, and if given the opportunity to negotiate deals, will inevitably choose to do that which is in their own best interest. But humans are not always rational, and human institutions are not always rational.  This is not only due to quirks of our neurological make-up: even theoretically perfectly rational agents may behave in ways that are ultimately contrary to their own interests, thus, in a sense, irrational.  This is one of the key insights of game theory. One famous example is the " prisoner's dilemma ," which shows that even when people are rationally doing that which is in their own best interest, nonetheless, this can inevitably produce a result that is in no one's best interest.  Then there's Newcomb's problem - after considering it for a while, many people come to the conclusion that there m...