Category: Ideas and Reflections
The thinking life.– What else is modern academic scholarship, as it has been practiced since at least the German universities of the early nineteenth century, but a non-digital precursor to today’s computer-based “artificial intelligence”? Analog AI, if you will. Vast human-designed but meticulously dehumanized data centers of universal thought-collection (called “disciplines”), with hundreds of thousands of nodes (called “professors”) incapable of truly comprehending,...
The fatal flaw of all democratic arrangements: The only person who ought to be granted power over other people is one who is temperamentally averse to possessing practical power over others, who sees none of the personal material advantages of power as desirable in the least, and who has pressing concerns and abiding enthusiasms which would make the commitments and duties of political...
Every age’s defining desires and corresponding fears are revealed by the gods it worships. For example, an age that worships money and technology — or, if you will, Business and Applied Science, this age’s iterations of Zeus and Hera — reveals its defining desires as material comfort and practical ease (i.e., the absence of desire), its defining sources of fear as personal insecurity...
Recently, a student who got started on the philosophic path a little later than is ideal, and who, in spite of her endless enthusiasm and inquisitiveness, is still occasionally beset — as indeed we all are at times — with belittling self-doubts in the face of the vastness of all there is to know, and the undeniably daunting wisdom of the men who...
Social existence is being surrounded by a hundred relentless and incorrigible replicas of everything you have ever disliked and tried to correct in yourself. Social existence is tolerating what you told yourself you would never tolerate, accepting standards you swore you would never lower yourself to accepting, and pretending you are satisfied with conditions you despise. Social existence is living and working alongside...
“Artificial Intelligence” is the purest of lies, with each of the words of which the phrase is comprised denoting a falsehood as complete as is the phrase taken as a whole. For what it euphemizes as artifice is merely theft; and what it aggrandizes as a form of intelligence is simply an extremely efficient consensus-generating algorithm, one made possible only, and entirely, by...
Political thought which begins from the premise that the primary purpose of government is to restrict freedom for the good of society has chosen to reduce adults to children, hence effectively equating the universal good with safety and comfort, and thus setting the stage for an inevitable rebellion in the name of liberty. Political thought which begins from the premise that the purpose...
Scientific method.– Not judging a book by its cover should not entail denying the existence of covers. Covers are the given. They are experience. To ignore them, let alone to deny them outright, is to confuse sophisticated illusions with depth. Diminishing returns.– If you want to depress yourself, reflect first on the number of people who start out in youth full of energy...
I had the following exchange the other day with a thoughtful student who is currently in the process of working out how to orient her life in ways that involve the least spiritual compromise. I reproduce it here with only minor cosmetic editing. Do you like money? I like it as much as I don’t like living on a park bench. But I...
The Trump administration has spent much time and energy in recent months desperately trying to prop up Viktor Orbán in Hungary, in yet another obvious self-revelation of the truth of what Trump likes to call “The Russia Hoax.” Hungary was occupied and decimated for decades by a brutal, expansionist Russian dictatorship which supported a series of Hungarian puppet regimes to oppress the people...
