Philosophy

Anything from stone tools to microchips seams to have to be covered by a definition of technology, and there are weird edge cases. Gene editing might have too much to do with biology and nature. Money seams to have too much to do with law and administration. Yet both gene editing and money seem rather technological. Engineering processes are clearly related to technology but they’re a lot more like rituals in that they have so much to do with defining roles and interfaces between people. ...

Power is conventionally thought of as a quantity. The more you have, the more you can do. While not inaccurate, it is a partial view that misses the essential dynamics of agency. Strategic State Space The way I conceptualize power has to do with this idea which I’m borrowing from the field of artificial intelligence. The “state space approach” is a strategy for solving complex problems. You encode the state of your game or problem and define vectors by which the state can change. Applying a change to the current state results in a new state. Doing this repeatedly results in a network of connected states also referred to as a state space. If you hypothetically explored all the possible permutations of vectors of change you would have spanned the entire space of possible states. Often this is computationally infeasible due to combinatorial explosion. ...

Physicalism is the great ontological pillar of the modern world. It is the prerequisite and cohesive paradigm of reality for all science. Those who think differently, esoterically, or who hold a traditional view, are forced to account for this intrusive and powerful worldview, to describe their positions in terms relative to physicalism. Ontological Precedence Physicalism is a structure of layers where everything and anything is a thing made of things made of things. When Richard Feynman was asked how magnets work he said he couldn’t explain it because anything featured in an analogy or metaphor ought really to be explained in terms of magnetism or presumably some other fundamental force of nature. Explaining the thing which ultimately explains the terms used in the explanation is basically futile. He alluded to the order of precedence in physicalism. Physics comes first. It is the thing which explains. ...

Despite being one of the most important ideas in civilization it’s so often misunderstood. Secularity is spectacularly subtle and I’m astounded people ever even came up with it in the first place. Pseudo-Secularism I’ve had to do some deliberation as to what I should call the prevailing idea of secularity which I’m critizing. “Secular” doesn’t work because there is a true, subtle, and vital concept of secularity which I’m arguing we ought to preserve. Atheism misses the mark because that isn’t what I’m objecting to. Physicalism and scientism are very important to the view I’m describing but are again merely tangential to the issue. In the prevailing dichotomy between the secular and religion, secularity roughly has to do with reason, evidence, and neutrality, while religion has to do with faith, dogma, and idiosyncrasy. This position I’m arguing against is a pseudo-secularism which inadvertently and inevitably falls into exactly those patterns of thinking which it would purport to supersede. ...