Life on the curve

The Solipsist's Fallacy

Solipsism is the belief that you can never truly know if anyone else is real.

This is a common endpoint for philosophy, the reductio ad absurdum at the end of long chains of reasoning. It's what Descartes was trying to get around when he wrote "I think therefore I am", though that may in fact be the purest expression of solipsism ever.

The Skulls, Bones and The Power of Law

The Skulls is a fictitious movie based on Yale's notorious secret Skull and Bones society. It follows the path of a new initiate through the process of getting picked, going to clandestine meetings, engaging in rituals and tests of dedication, until finally being ushered into membership, complete with all its lucrative privileges.

Wisdom

I need wisdom.

More than anything in my life, I need to be able to see my way forward, to evaluate the choices ahead of me. I've always been a consumer of knowledge, someone who couldn't leave well enough alone, who had to tease apart the inner workings of things. That process leaves me with a huge gap - the gap between what is and what could be. And that gap requires wisdom.

The Vast Economy

Increasingly, I have come to believe that the world is best understood as a Vast Economy, an ecosystem encompassing all the small economies we know about and measure, utilizing our every choice, from the individual to the society at large, for its own ends and purposes. In this Economy, nothing is ever wasted, nothing is lost, and everything follows a brilliant and sinister logic.

New year's resolve: change

This year, my only resolution is to change.

I've made my share of resolutions, goals, and ambitions, and so my relationship with such things is firmly in the "it's complicated" category. I may talk more about that later, but for now, let's admit that change is what we can expect from the world, and trying to stay the same is what we can expect from ourselves.

Artists, Developers, and The Deep Structures of The New World

Software is swallowing the world.

This is nothing new. From the moment human consciousness sprang into being, it has been trying to remake the world in its image. Consciousness is, after all, fundamentally a virtual reality, a space that exists where no space really is, where echoes and phantoms of reality may live out entirely new existences.

The Most Powerful Being and the Simulation Argument

As a disclaimer, this is a thought experiment, not an attempt at a scientific argument.

Okay, so continuing my thoughts on the Simulation Argument, I'd like to throw in some possible additions to it.

The Simulation Argument, remixed

The other day I published my Introduction to the Simulation Argument, to some interesting reactions. Although it's a very simple argument, the mental contortions one has to jump through make it difficult for many people to grasp. So let me recap and generalize a little.

If there are intelligent beings
And if they create simulations
Then simulated worlds will outnumber non-simulated worlds.

Fairly simple so far, right? Okay, let's make it personal:

A decade of being vegetarian - and why I chose to stop

This is an excerpt from my email list - "me vs the world". Click the link to get more memos like this one.

I've been a vegetarian for just about a decade. The other day, I decided to stop.

An Introduction to the Simulation Argument

In 2003, Nick Bostrom published his Simulation Argument, and shook the landscape of philosophy.

The basic idea is easy to describe.

For the past few decades, we've been building simulations of the world around us. We created Simcity, and then the Sims, and then one after another, a barrage of increasingly realistic video games.

Life on the Curve