Enjoying the view from Limbo
In a recent essay, “The Ultimate Labor-Saving Device,” I recounted my response to a student’s questions about artificial intelligence, related to my previous piece, “The Intellectual Welfare State.” A central theme of that earlier discussion was the likely, or perhaps inevitable, retarding effects of increasing AI dependency on human intellectual development. This time, prodded by the same thoughtful student’s subsequent correspondence, we cut...
I have not written much on this website recently. As I scan the internet these days, and come to terms with the extent to which everything that is ever written, has ever been written, will ever be written, and can ever be stolen and regurgitated in plagiarized form by a property-obliterating computer technology that short-sighted people today are all imagining will be both...
The purpose of higher education, as originally founded in the solid ground of the classical philosophic life, was to foster the civilized notions that there is no real safety in numbers; that truth is not amenable to popular opinion; that the adage “knowledge is power” is not reversible; that detached, quiet reflection is the only antidote to the intellectual poison of the public...
Any two objects seen from a great enough distance will look fundamentally similar. The closer we get, the more differences we will begin to discern. The same is true with mental distance. The unfamiliar tends to group itself together in our minds, naturally. As we get to know individual instances within the group, they separate themselves from this new generality in our minds, and we see….
Everyone knows that a greedy man will never reach the limits of his desire for more, for it is the essence of greed to acknowledge no natural limit to its ambition. Everyone knows totalitarians are intrinsically, definitively, obsessed with totality with respect to control, and that an obsession with totality admits of no inherent restraint or misgivings, for totalism in the quest for...
Fear’s Paradox.— The man obsessed with the fear of losing his life will be the one with the least life to lose. The same formula, in fact, is true for any good you might insert in the place of “life” here, as long as possession is understood to indicate not the mere material presence of a thing, but rather its practical availability for...
We all know less than we think we know — and more than we are willing to admit to ourselves.
There is no other known species with the ability to recast its weakness as strength and its defeat as swagger. Humans are uniquely resourceful at enslaving themselves and calling it freedom….
Failed rhetoric.— “Everyone knows that” is merely a rhetorically aggressive way of saying “Everyone believes that” — for there is literally nothing that everyone knows. And nothing could be more certain than this: Anything that “everyone believes” is likely false, since most people are completely ignorant of all but the most quotidian facts. Hence, when a person insists on a point of argument...
There is more life and sincere exertion of real power in a random blade of grass than is exhibited by any statesman today. There is more discovery in the way a morning breeze can draw the discrete perceptions of many days into a unified experience in the mind than in all the public school textbooks being ground into the immobilized souls occupying today’s...
The specialist’s mind.— The problem with specialists, as Socrates reasoned with perfect clarity, and as modernity exhibits ubiquitously, is that the specialist knows about one thing, but through a combination of the pride of competence and the disproportion of exclusive focus, gradually comes to imagine that the one thing he knows is the lynchpin of all reality, such that he mistakes his extremely...
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