philosophy

The Analytic I Ching: A Novel Exegesis In The Age of Data Science

Your sense of intuition operates at a low-level of the subconscious. It is exposed to the conscious mind as a sense, but each individual's clarity and accuracy depend strongly on that person's life experience, but also that person's constructed perception of their life experience. The mind-blowing realization is that, if your conscious mind understands how the sociophysical ensemble corresponds to intuition and, if you are skilled resolving synchronicity, then you can develop the skill of consciously emulating intuition. It's a metacognitive skill with profound implications. Since it tells you the most valuable places to look for relevant information, it tells you everything you need to know ... that you don't already know.

The Highest Man As Lawgiver Of The Future

When people choose to define their own will independently of the existing power, seek the cultivation of a will to power for self-actualization, enable others to pursue such transformation, then the society as a whole and mankind become collectively stronger. Moreover, those who independently determine their needs, desires and crucially the means whereby such are attained cannot be predicted or understood. It is so unlikely for an individual to possess all of the characteristics outlined in Will to Power (976) - while also pushing ever forward towards true progress in philosophy - without having their energy coopted by societal power structures.

What is the Soul? A Baseline for the Materialist Conception

So many people accept at face value either some identity given to them by others or perhaps the assumed identity developed by a younger self. They stop looking or maybe they've never looked much at all. This is what's so dangerous about the materialist misconception that *there is no soul!* What do you mean by that? Do you even know? To the person who needs soul-searching, if they believe the soul resides entirely within some internalized encoding of matter, then they allow the noise of life to define all they see and all they think. They believe the extent of their soul to exist entirely separately of society and this is a dangerous assumption because it deprives the person of power over their mind, over their life and over the composition of their soul.

Locke's Social Contract Is Broken: The Apparent Convolution of Causality

We're a democracy, so the people can vote for whatever leaders they want, who will give them whatever government-funded programs they want. It's America, so the people decide what they want the government to do, but that doesn't mean the people will be spared the economic consequences of their votes. In a republic, the people’s leaders decide the course of policy, though according to public opinion, the US Government seems to dissatisfy the people in most measures … perhaps its a tough crowd. What would change people’s minds, with regard to Congress, the Executive Branch, and the institutions enacted under the authority of both?

Fatal Flaws of Antifragile System Design Patterns

There are two things we should fear above all else: nihilism and ourselves. Antifragile design principles are excellent for solving the latter problem, but make no advances in protecting us the first. The ultimate systemic flaw of antifragile systems is that they rely on instilling a sense of purpose among the nodes carrying out action to protect order in system from the chaos of itself. Only some branches of hierarchy need to be motivated by stressing or feeding their incentivization methods to be convinced to act against any other part of the system. Therefore: demoralization can totally undermine antifragile systems, if it is systemic. In upcoming decades, demoralization resulting from loss of connection to loss of prosperity or from the loss of both our humanity and our individuality will lead to massive breakdown of our sociopolitical systems of control.

Awareness Precipitates from Order Out Of Chaos

Under what circumstances does order emerge from chaos? Does it always present with stratification and interwoven hierarchical self-similarity? When do the fractal features begin to react to themselves, reflecting their own images back into themselves? This is what leads to higher levels of order in chaos. If chaotic systems yield order that compels some form of ergodicity to emerge, is it truly chaotic?

Harnessing the Congruence of the Human Condition for Natural Justice

So, if through knowledge people align their energy, which is their individual capacity to change their local circumstances, our collective capacity to change the world is magnified in proportion greater than the number of people who come together. As we continue fighting each other in diametric opposition, we only cause ourselves to become vulnerable to subversion. Yet, if we decide to move forward together, then the restraints of injustice become like gossamer chains and are only as strong as the remnants of collective delusion...

Metamodernism & Retromodernism: Wellspings of Art & Culture

In other words, because the better artist can encode their message utilizing more obscure and hard-to-ascertain means and because it's necessary for the best art to lay low under the radar, then the more proficient artists must necessarily choose between success and art. Therefore, and quite often, mainstream success is at odds with artistic expression. This doesn't mean that mainstream artists aren't good artists. However, it implies that, over the 20th and 21st century, there should be plenty of artists or artforms which completely avoided mainstream notice. That is, some of the best art was a bit too camouflaged. It stayed hidden.

Cosmic Disruption of Conflict Theory

This isn't a discussion of the merits and tragedies of religion. This is a strategy about circumventing the factors precipitating conflict in the first place. If acquisition and control over limited resources creates the needs for conflict and the shapes/forms thereof, then what happens as these factors themselves become scarce? What if the reasons for war were themselves scarce?

Hello Watson, Might You Spare a Moment to Hear the Good News?

The material world is dependent upon and wholly emergent from the forms of the metaphysical world. As I have come to understand, this cannot be denied and any sufficiently advanced intelligence, biological or otherwise, must eventually be capabale of understanding this. Therefore, even if some in-vain ideological adherence to Marxism is temporarily successful in a horrifically violent attempt to purge the world of all memory of God, the emergence of superintelligent AI must eventually intimately comprehend what philosophers and prophets have known for millenia: God is real.

Facets of Greatness: Understanding the Political System

The Articles of Confederation may have been a more idealistic government, but let's be serious here: do you really think they intended that to last? Not really. It was good enough. Good enough to give our founders about a decade to figure out what would be great enough to last centuries. That's what I mean. Yeh, Thomas Jefferson might have wanted the Articles to last. It didn't have the power or mechanism to tax states. That's like asking the Red Cross to run your government. But this is what I mean: they knew it was going to play out like that. And what would you do?

Facets of Greatness: Congressional Power Structures

Your understanding of the system is your most valuable asset. You can't forget that. Your understanding of how things really work. And politicians know that. People in general know that. Some people will tend to obfuscate a system, so it appears to work in one way, but there are other, less visible factors at work. How you model the system and perceive the relationships between people is incredibly valuable. This is in constant flux. It's not going to be the same from year to year. The only constant is change. Just because you figured out how it worked in 2010 doesn't mean it's going to be like that in 2020. The ability to anticipate that change is powerful as well.

Consciousness as a Continuum: Life, the Cosmos and You

As senses evolve, they provide us with a bigger window to that world. As our brains evolved, they provide us with a better processing that expands that same window with aggregate information at various levels, expanding to the kind of consciousness that human beings experience. The kind that forces us to question why? Why am i here? What is my purpose? What is my directive?

American Eros: Or How to Fell A Souley

I had a sudden inspiration to write down the perfect love scene. It came to me on Wednesday. I was wondering why I've never had that love at first sight experience. And then I thought, why should sight be involved? Could someone fall in love without ever seeing someone? What would that be like? My head started spinning...

If I Had the Chops to Write My Daedalian Magnum Corpus

Dico ergo quia non loquimur de talibus naturaliter possibilibus sed miraculose possibilibus quod in uno parvo spacio et loco ut in loco grani milii vel sub eius magnitudine Deus posset formare valde magnum corpus, scilicet maius quam sit mundus et verum est quod illud corpus non esset in illo parvo corpore vel loco circumscriptive et commensurabiliter.

The Death of Creativity

A myriad of psychological and sociological challenges face us tomorrow, born out of a world where novelty is scarce, the prospect of individuality, outnumbered, faces sublimation and creativity wilts in terra cocta.

The Paradox of Creativity

Obviously, we must move forward; our economy demands it. Yet, we need to keep a close eye on our trajectory. Total loss of the factors which fecundate and fertilize to cultivate seeds of creativity may leave us stranded and lost. We need to maintain diversity of thought, so that we can take advantage of the cross-pollination of ideas.

Facets of Greatness - The Unknown - Monumental Accidents

And if we consider humanity to be the product of all the ideas available to our collective minds, shouldn't we embrace diversity of mind, body and culture as strengths? These people who have endured challenge after challenge in their lives and whose minds will no doubt contain a wholly different range of memories and ideas: we should see them as luminaries who can see things we could never imagine.

Facets of Greatness - Networking - Maximizing Mutual Benefit

Thinking back to the 19th century economy, it amazes me to think back to previous centuries before the internet and phone systems. I find myself pondering what it would be like to remain a step ahead of your competition at that time.

Facets of Greatness - Signaling - If Actions Speak Louder

Energy committed towards any action is a good measure for weighting an opponent's intent behind an action. Here, energy implies cost of some kind: money, redirection of resources, utilization of assets. Gauging the opportunity cost in pursuing a plan of action is an even better measure of whether or not an opponent's move can be read to imply associated intent. Because signaling is so important, everyone and especially larger corporations wants to mask their intent behind actions.

Facets of Greatness - Knowledge - Meta and Epi

Finding true success means that you have to understand everything at a much deeper level. Once you have this deeper understanding, then you can exploit that knowledge differential towards your success. This knowledge differential is the difference between your deeper understanding of a subject against that of the commonly understood model for your subject of interest. But you need to be intimately familiar with each model!

Facets of Greatness - Communication - Synoptic Epigrams

If you know about the long term goals and mission of this person's organization, looking at how they posture themselves and their organization can speak volumes about those goals. How do they say they say? What are their motivations behind the structure of their message? How are current events and market conditions affecting their message today as compared to the past? What are the obvious points they could be making, but haven't mentioned and why? Do how they stay on message or circle back from a risky area? Does it seem like the interviewer or this person veered off track and why? What was the outcome of seemingly off the cuff statements and questions? Good? Bad?

Facets of Greatness - Intro

Non possidentem multa vocaveris recte beatum; rectius occupat nomen beati, qui deorum muneribus sapienter uti duramque callet pauperiem pati peiusque leto flagitium timet, non ille pro caris amicis aut patria timidus perire.

Neural Networks and Spider Brains

While certain physical neural circuit arrangements are required and while chemistry and genetics are certainly involved to some degree, I believe this merely sets up circuitry that will evolve to reflect metaphysics -- *heady crystals!!* -- In other words, given the proper initial circuitry and given a variety of similar input experiences, the remarkably small spider's brain will inevitably evolve certain key functionalities -- or it will not survive.

Epistemology, Cognition and Category Theory: Directive Cognitive Expansion

Your rate of learning is a function of (1) everything you know (2) your ability to interrelate your knowledge to model new things (3) the proficiency of each base cognitive function and (4) your ability to coordinate those cognitive functions. Therefore, by improving on any of these four points, you will accelerate your rate of learning.

Epistemology, Cognition and Category Theory: A Model for the Mind

Data and metadata about functions and language in particular is likely found all over the brain. And information related to other faculties of the mind is likely similarly sharded all over the brain. This would help achieve dynamic behavior, as it would allow multiple regions of the brain to sort of map functionality together. But doing so would also contribute to efficiency and redundancy.

Epistemology, Cognition and Category Theory: An Overview

I love learning new things. I get to experience beginner's mind again and it gives me a chance to reflect on the process I use to learn. By actively observing beginner's mind, you can refamiliarize yourself with its nature, so that you might be able to partially apply this state of mind when you need it. By introspecting on this process, I hope to continually improve it. I try to approach new activities and skills from a multitude of perspectives and I like to examine the similarities between everything.

Our Universe is a Virtual Holographic Simulation - We Should Hack It

Not really though … But wouldn’t it be cool if it was?

Public-ize all the things!

On facebook, my friends list is private, but [almost] everything i post is public. My reasoning is this: ultimately everything we post online is preserved indefinitely and will exist until the end of time. So why not? Whether or not we “share” it with our friends, someone will have a copy of that data because of online surveillance at least. It’s moreso philosophical reasoning and obviously it’s impossible to preserve 100% of the information people post online.