Aesthetic Materialism

  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...

  But let's try to focus a little more precisely here. What do we mean by "big" government?  What do we mean by government "growing"?  And what do we mean by "limit"? I want to clarify that, although I insist that there is no way to stop government from growing, nonetheless, in a manner of speaking, there are indeed "limits" to government.  As I've already mentioned, ideology matters - not so much in terms of determining the size of government, but in helping to shape what that government does.  Even more than ideology, something that limits - or at least guides - what a government does is a sense of honor. This is particularly true in times of war - which is almost all of the time, when governments exist.  Unlimited war is very rare.  Limited war is the rule, not the exception.  Almost all wars are profoundly limited. Just because government always gets bigger does not mean that it gets more powerful, or more effective.  Quite the opposi...

    Preserve all languages.  Especially those like Bella Coola/Nuxalk, Kutenai, and Chinook Wawa, which are in danger of disappearing.  There are 238 endangered Native North American languages alone. Preserve all species of animals.  Especially the endangered animals. Preserve all species of plants.  Especially the endangered species. Preserve all fungi.  Especially the endangered species. Preserve all religions.  Especially the endangered religions. Preserve all cultures.  Especially the endangered cultures. Preserve all skills.  Especially the endangered skills. Preserve humanity in all of its dimensions, as ASI approaches.