Ideas

As you get older you notice the surprising amount of bullshit everywhere. Ideas that are exciting to me are the ones that seem to have made an actual attempt to “carve nature at its joints” and get at what’s really up, and then follow the implications of those ideas. As an example, physics seems to be causally closed, so physicalism seems like a good candidate for something that actually gets at the heart of what’s up in the world, and you can follow physicalism to some wild implications.

Wyman’s overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes - Quine in On What There Is

• Physicalism

• Functionalism

• Quinean naturalized epistemology/philosophy of language

• Spinoza’s politics (assuming human societies are extremely limited and are always just beginning to understand all the possible ways of being)

• Open individualism (Parfit)

• Donna Haraway’s Cyborgism/Ironic myth-making

• Small-L liberalism as a response to value pluralism

• Positive-sum trade between value systems

• Naturalistic anti-Cartesianism

• Technological determinism

• Materialist history (especially Braudel)

• The weird weird fact of current economic growth

• Wild animal welfare

• Minds very different from ours

• (Good) evolutionary psychology (too much of it is lazy and somewhat reductionist).

• Our communication probably mostly evolved to signal tribal loyalty rather than access truth.

Some ideas I don’t like: