meika loofs samorzewski

In Rob Kurzban’s recent How the Psychologist Got Confused Explanation is a word, but a word is not an explanation —we get an excellent diagram, a four pointer. Pointer as in to point, as in the arrow of whatever puny vector space our minds can handle at anyone time. Like most blog pieces that are engaging, like many one can learn…

Kockelman, Paul. 2024. ‘Ontologies and Worlds: The Price of Being Free’, Current Anthropology 65(5): 922–7. via journals.uchicago.edu Kockelman introduces his article as follows: Here is a link for the wikipedia entry on ‘ontological turn’. This is a play on the ‘linguistic turn’ describing philosophical fashions beginning a century ago. It passed me by. I basically cannot stand ontological approaches so…

I picked up Super Cooperators: Altruism, Evolution and Mathematics (or, Why We Need Each Other to Succeed) by Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield sometime in 2020… —three years on my to-read shelf. Even at a decade old, it is an excellent introduction or refresher on game theory and evolution, amidst some even more excellent stories about people around Martin Nowak’s mathematical life.

Originally posted in September 2023 on substack.com. Most notes and quotes from or for Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. ISBN 9780701139988 (No idea what that book is look at this Review article by Gillian Dooley). In mathematics classes they often want you to show your working. I once did a exam as part of…

No/true! — it's not nothing all the way down either. (I started my reading journey with From selfing in worlding to sovereignty. This is my finished up reader’s report.) reading plato in a martian chasm Iris Murdoch was a British novelist and philosopher who read Plato with a post-Wittgenstein lens, holding a distrust of recent (post-)structuralist temple-smashing efforts. Though this…

Using use bing chat LLM circa 2023-08-29. Reposted from Substack.com Iris Murdoch and Ursula le Guin having breakfast while sitting under the net where the word for world is forest © 2023 meika loofs samorzewski Searching for: Ursula le Guin birth and death dates Searching for: Ursula le Guin birth and death dates Searching for: Iris Murdoch birth and death dates Searching for: Iris Murdoch…

Skin in the game & Agent Nassim Nicholas Taleb's journey in the new world [Originally posted at Substack.com in March 2024] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life mentions that in ‘teh’ west we have trained ourselves to contrast the individual and the collective, so much so, we miss out noticing the grey tiers in…

I’ve been reading someone else’s copy of Iris Murdochs’ Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. ISBN 9780701139988 (article) over the last few weeks. By “someone else’s copy” I mean it has pencilled marginalia like Astute Observation and as I have met the previous owner, these words read themselves aloud in his voice. It’s been slow going, not…

Wikipedia says The Shepherd of Hermas, or the Good Shepherd, 3rd century, Catacombs of Rome. But the devotee bringing a lamb to sacrifice is common across many local “pagan” practices in the Mediterranean. A couple of posts ago (Inappropriation) I introduced the work that led to an awkward conversation. This post is just to add that I’ve finished Jörg Rüpke’s On Roman Religion: Lived Religion…

Originally posted on substack.com in August 2023. Evidence for global cultural diffusion post at Vectors of Mind spurs the raising of the question in the comments by Little Kenny, “[…] I am trying to imagine what might have been some of the more fundamental worldview changes and social practices triggered by recursion. Maybe they're now so embedded into our behavioral norms and unrecognized priors that we…

Narcissism is regarded as a personality disorder, but what if we regard it as a worlding disorder, an inability to world, or world-build among others doing the same. or some time in Hobart, Tasmania, a small Buddhist group has been given the benefit of the doubt. This last week some survivor stories are making their appearance in news reports— Devotees…

I've been cataloguing many many sex education works, from the explicitly clinical to the psychologically instructive, and beyond into messed-up socio-econo-polio-anthro-opinio… —culture wars are not new. The period ranges from the 1920s and earlier, but peak in the 1970s, with titles like Naked Yoga, with not a yoga mat in sight, mind you. The horror. One of so many books…

A reaction to: John Collier and Michael Stingl. “Evolutionary Moral Realism.” Biological Theory (Forthcoming 2013). Accessed September 3, 2024. [via academia.edu] I’ve already looked at a more recent paper by these authors (so this will be a bit cursory. I’ll ignore the LLMs this time): REACTION Collier, John and Stingl, Michael. “Evolutionary Naturalism and the Objectivity of Morality.” Biology and…

I often use the term ‘to police’ in regard to our responsibilities in negotiating narcissists in our midst. So here I will attempt to define ‘to police’ in that context. For the longest time policing has been seen as a force, much like the sovereign’s military forces, but directed along interior lines that stratify or grid us, rather than the…

A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at the linkpost Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. Today we have: Berkman, John R. “The Evolution of Moral Wisdom: What Some Ethicists Might Learn from Some Evolutionary Anthropologists.” from Evolution of Wisdom: Major and Minor Keys. Notre Dame, Indiana: Center for Theology, Science, and Human…

Part 1: The lawyer and the doctor When I was a younger adult I was very briefly on a team sports club committee. In a mixed gender competition of a sport with a low profile in Australia. The committee were all of a similar age and contained some early career tradcore professionals. Being mixed it was low contact gameplay. Officially…

In the negative gist I riffed on the context for page 212, of the 2017 biography of Mary Douglas, which lists the misunderstandings people have of her work. So here I will try to put down a positve version, if not a definition. It will be based on my reading of her work, which is by no means complete. When…

Part 1 is here. (Or substack) I decided to start here with saying what Mary Douglas’ framework is not, i.e. write a negative gist. There is a helpful page 212 which lists the misunderstandings in Perri 6 and Paul Richards’ 2017 intellectual biography Mary Douglas: Understanding Social Thought and Conflict. This is 4 pages from the end of the book,…

Writers on culture, society, and other outcomes of thw worlding urge

Mary Douglas – reading over three decades (substack) Mary Douglas: a negative gist (substack) Mary Douglas : a positive spin (substack) The lawyer and the doctor Risk, training, habit & inclination. Mary Douglas and narcissism. Not in that order. (substack)

In my late twenties my reading moved to include more non-fiction. By my forties there was very little fiction, even if this is still more than most people read… I read a lot. So before my third decade I would wander the State Library of Tasmania’s reference section and browse and sit and read. Soon I would be expecting babies…

confusing the forest for the trees, the word for the tree and the phrase for the forest © 2024 meika loofs samorzewski In a lump of the world we call taxonomy people are split into lumpers and splitters. A "lumper" is a person who assigns examples broadly, judging that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" makes…

A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at the linkpost Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. This reaction looks at the following piece: Cartwright, John. “Naturalising Ethics: The Implications of Darwinism for the Study of Moral Philosophy.” Science & Education Vol. 19 (2009): 407–443. via academia.edu [DOI 10.1007/s11191-009-9205-7] [https://www.academia.edu/94896217/Naturalising_Ethics_The_Implications_of_Darwinism_for_the_Study_of_Moral_Philosophy] From the abstract: Standard…

This post has mainly been “prompted” by becoming aware of some “prior art” by Arthur Boyd, though one of the main stories was inspired by a conversation with Julie Gough. Reposted from substack July 2023. Arthur Boyd’s Jinker on a Sandbank, Shoalhaven (1976) oil on canvas. In Cormac Orthography, more or less, I introduced my position on punctuation, and in…

This was first posted as part 1 & 2 on substack. Ronald Cicurel, and Miguel A. L. Nicolelis, The Relativistic Brain: How It Works and Why It Cannot by Simulated by a Turing Machine (Natal: Kios Press, 2015 ISBN 9781511617024) Hat tip. Martin Ciupa of mindmaze.com At the time of writing in July 2023, there were some Douglas R. Hofstadter…

A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. Arvan, Marcus. “Morality as an Evolutionary Exaptation.” 2021. via academia.edu. Web. This is a preprint of a chapter published in Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz & (eds.), Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics, Springer – Synthese Library. The final…

Over a decade after it came out I finally have had a gander at Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind (2011). It’s a fine introduction. I tend to agree with what bits I read about empire. It tells a good story. What’s wrong with that…? Apparently all that co-operation we do, Harari says (from that wikipedia link) (and that…

Can you fix the world by typing better? The world is made in the same moment we are each born, and just as helpless. We are each already there, but not quite all there. This is part of the help and part of the helplessness. Baby and world are not the same thing, not even the same kind of thing,…

Pro tip: attack the psychopaths and their grandiose narcissism, and not the authoritarian outcomes of their injurious actions to our world. A recent article 4 reasons not teaching evolution in schools is immoral on the conversation gives these points as moral reasons: equality of opportunity, free inquiry, fairness and public reasoning, and intellectual honesty, within the context that authoritarian governments east and west are…

if we subsume meaning, morality, philosophy, culture, religion, art, polity into one category what would it be called? I keep dipping into Large Language models (LLMs) and being annoyed when not disappointed. Better than neural networks? Are data-painters better than balsa-wood ships in a bottle? LLMs just do not operate where I am operating. If I was schizoid I would…

This follows on from reaction 1 to Peter L. Berger : meaning is a lazy ritual. There's no introduction here and ends up way more anti-clerical than I had imagined. We start from about page 35 of: Cultural Analysis : the work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986) which…

Books I've ordered are arriving, and as is traditional, they arrive in order of least desperately wanted first. So, the first is a general introduction to four writers on culture, which came out when I was 21 years old. Back then I was reading Stirner and anarchist SF. Cultural Analysis : the work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel…

Once upon a time in the beginning was the word and everything was the text. A sublime mechanick whose logicks, predicated on magicks, preyed on our prayers. But… —if, as I have been saying, much of what we do and name, and seek cause for, are outcomes of an urge we do not name, but just live wordlessly, then when…

A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. Garvey, Brian. “The Evolution of Morality and Its Rollback.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40.2 (2018): via academia.edu. Web. 31 Aug. 2024. From the introduction: it is possible that humans do not possess as much internal machinery…

A list of reaction to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. Derya Sakin Hanoğlu The Ascent of Morality, from Non-Human to Human Animals: An Emotion-Based Account. Middle East Technical University, 2021. via academia.edu. Web. My reaction to her article “On the Evolutionary Origin of Morality”can be found here or on…

About twenty years ago Jamie Kirkpatrick wrote a book The ecologies of paradise: explaining the garden next door. (PDF) In the Australian blogosphere at the time (how to find those comments? on blogspot? (oh look searchblogspot.com but no) there was some dismissive commentary in regard to Jamie’s comments about 'leafy suburbs' (these being the posher suburbs in Australia), and specifically,…

My basic position which has arisen in these recent years of blogging If we can find a term or phrase that describes what we do without a focus on ‘its’ outcomes of : (religion/polity/art/morality-plex and its instantiations tribe/club/religion/) or even just practices (ritual/performance/sport/mindfulness) then we will be able to talk about 'it' sensibly and reasonably, or at least provide a pathway for us…

A list of reaction to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. Derya Sakin Hanoğlu. “On the Evolutionary Origin of Morality.” Beytülhikme An International Journal of Philosophy (2022): via academia.edu. Web. Abstract: In this study, I will approach morality from a naturalistic perspective and defend that morality is a product of…

I’ve been thinking more about Kurt Gödel and his incompleteness theorems, ① that attack on formalism with reference to his intuitive Platonism, and ② the observer around which many human efforts are now circling, or circulating. Recommended reading: Alexander T Englert. “Kurt Gödel, His Mother and the Argument for Life after Death.” Aeon. 2 January 2024. https://aeon.co/essays/kurt-godel-his-mother-and-the-argument-for-life-after-death If, as it…

Following a comment i made, that ‘meetings made us human’, in response to the following fable: I neologised this Greek monster: Κοσμοσωτηρία Transliterated this is kosmosōtēría which is ‘world-saving’. This is an attempt to meet the soteriological focus of the individual (with an eye on ataraxia) with saving the world, where ‘worlding’ is still a type of ‘selfing, and not…

Originally posted on substack in June 2023. one word prompt “Kludge” to nitro diffusion My use of “worldbuilding” is an attempt to language a notice that when/what various places and periods label: morality/spirit/culture/love/gods/Jesus/One/etc, or enlightenment (really) or whatever, is the unquestion of intention, regarding the question of intention or design and morality. ¿what is the ethical response to morality? I…

The first on a series of books I enjoyed reading long ago. A list of these will be found at Reading guilty pleasures. I read Elaine Morgan's 1972 Descent of Woman and then 1982 The Aquatic Ape in the mid to late 80s when “man the hunter’ was, well at least to me, moribund as an idea, and so that…

This page lists books that I have really enjoyed reading despite their contents being out of whack with the direction of consensus consideration. If not whacky. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while but discovering Robert Ardrey’s second science essay book The Territorial Impulse on my grandparents shelves reminded me that Elaine Morgan’s book The Aquatic Ape was…

In my opening of this series on reading Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative I mention his use of Jean-Jacques Petter's term of noyau as a label for a society of inward antgonism (page 168). In the second post Figuring out the grounds beneath the world: noyau, lek and home I explore the noyau in relation to other similar notions in…

The “extended phenotype” is a phrase I collected on reading the book of the same name by Richard Dawkins. It's where that word 'meme' as ideas in the mind-brain as parasitic replicate was born. At the time in the early 90s I thought we could move onto talking about 'rede's and interpretive viewpoints about epigenetics but the cybertroll bros have…

In the review of Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative I cover my discovery of his book on my shelves. Here I wish to explore the implications, by which I think I mean metaphysics, but in a good way, that is… —poetically, of Ardrey’s use of Petter’s term noyau. The discussion of noyau, or noyaux in the French plural, is a…

In reshelving books on their shelves recently, with the two bookshelves themselves only returned to their place in the living room after we replaced the flooring, my eye lingered on a book cover. I did not recognise it, but it was familiar in the way one's infancy can return feelings. The book is then both unknown and known at the…

① "not believing in X" is easily confused with ② “not believing” if you have no frame of practice in noticing 'world-building' is what you mean by meaning. We live in an age that follows the rise and fall of many empires. Empires are a collection of kingdoms and cities. Empires are a derivative of the practices of those states.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM--QQAKlfY Helen Pluckrose seems fine. This broad orgins podcast is a great way to start. Helen is [successfully] doing that which her targets have done first. Creating what I called in the 90s “a textmachine”, a discursive method and practice of which academia and scholarship are but a small part, with an authororial platform (I am jealous), (which nowadays we…

Reason ① versus Reason ② while currently reading Terry Eagleton's Culture and the Death of God Recently I’ve been circling like a vulture… I am a vulture… I am the… i am vulture thermalling above… — the gap. …looking for the signs of death below on the plains of rationality so I can feed my family in the nest, dear…

This first appeared on substack in June 2023. The etymology of the word thing is more interesting than one might think. Originally this usage meant "assembly", and this itself perhaps arose from a metonymic use when referring to the time appointed… —to decide or assemble. Later this happening then came to mean, again metonymically, a specific issue discussed at such…

D.M. Thomas’ Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in his Life. (1998, New York: St. Martin's Press.) When I was cataloguing this biography I was reminded of the copy of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago my mother had on the family bookcase at home. I eventually read it and went on to borrow from the state library in Launceston a hardcover of One Day in the Life…

“We are artifacts designed by natural selection,” Daniel Dennett wrote, to which Fodor said no. “Darwin’s idea is much deeper, much more beautiful, and appreciably scarier: We are artifacts designed by selection in exactly the sense in which the Rockies are artifacts designed by erosion; which is to say that we aren’t artifacts and nothing designed us. We are, and…

Reposted from substack from May 2023. This world we live is a practice, where we make up things together in order to organize ourselves. All the world is a child at play. Evolution cares not at all, or at least, not at the moment at all, not yet, how:- rational, or, reasonable, or, crazy, or, fantastic, or, believable, or, even,…

Wherein I try to define my terms (see chatgpt etymology for this term/terminus/terminology plex using my own contexts and examples (of themselves). The major context assumes an animal life’s logic, point of view (POV) and scale. The essay is also about those as limits to the understanding we have as animals when we are looking out and about as prey or…

We often try to impose the world on reality. (this is most marked in case of narcissistic ‘sweorlds’) However this imposition is impossible because the world does not exist, and reality does not and can not care. Still, many of us try, which is the first mistake we make which allows us to learn about reality, but repeated the same…

Imaginary conversation with a dumbfounded respondent as I try to get what I mean by 'worlding' across as a framework fo the self/world ratio or Janus dance. Look, is romance a risk? (yes) and when you move to take that risk, i mean, have you always rejected that risk? (no) so, when you take the risk on in a romance,…

To be a moral person requires empathy. It does not require a morality. Narcissists use moral principles to game their local system all the time. Why does being moral not require morality? Becasue reality does not care about reality. It has no bones to pick. It does not care what we do with reality, or don’t. Caring about reality is…

Reality, evolution and the world Terminology without bounds thingology recapitulating phylogeny Reality and the world If the world is a thing we have made, then all things are in the world. we are human because we have meetings things are meetings not object reality is a late discovery Reasons to be real what the late discovery means Reason is of…

(Some pointers on a non-relativistic position on worlding) Worlding (to world with a self, to self with a world) describes what we do as we live among others. Worlding/selfing arose in evolution, in a reality before we got here. But evolution does not care about what we produce with the worlding urge, just as it does not care about our…

Reaction to a review by David Copp of: Frans De Waal: Primates and philosophers: how morality evolved, edited by Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, 232pp. 9780691169163 I was excited to find this in my to-do reading list as I did not know that a 2016 revamped version of his 2003 Tanner Lectures on Human Values…

From the missoulacurrent.com by Laura Lundquist “This is such a special day, a day we envisioned many years ago. But it really wasn’t ready to happen until today,” Thompson said. “It happened because of hard work. Hours upon hours, days upon days, of trying to figure out not only how to do it, and where to do it and how…

Examples of people worlding in their words I’ll list under here examples of people drawing on the worlding urge more directly than usual. By more directly I mean that they are not using more derived frameworks to structure or form. They still use metaphor and simile, we are wordy worlders afterall, and it may be that they appear sacharin or…

A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. Joyce, Richard. “Evolution and Moral Naturalism.” The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism (Forthcoming). Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. via academia.edu. Web. ISBN9781118657607 [Chapter 26 pages 369-385] This reaction is really just riffing on ‘moral naturalism’ more than the positions described in Joyce’s chapter,…

Recently, I read a great run down on Nietzsche and the philology of his time informing his entire schtick. It came out on thw 19th September 2024. Alexander Prescott-Couch. “Nietzsche’s Ideas about Morality Were Shaped by Philology.” Aeon.co 19 September 2024. https://aeon.co/essays/nietzsches-ideas-about-morality-were-shaped-by-philology Yes go away and read that, and then come back here. It's so great, it's okay to forget…

Simone Weil and The Need for Roots as an example of the world-bulding urge, and its sub-urges to order order, when/as\how we should should Originally posted on substack in July 2023. There are many people whose names pass me by and for decades I nod and think, must read them one day. Recent chatbots have developed greater facility to 'read'…

This is a rebooted crosspost from substack written june 2023. See also: Worlding and the sentimental theory of value - part one and Etymology of Romance Terms Romance, romantic are words deriving from the ruination of the empire of the city of Rome. That is, after it empired or end-of-empired, and in those de-intensification of activity and power, its ruins forget their glorious…

A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and stuff can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality. Beginning with the abstract's opening. My stepping through my first reading of the abstract might be all I do today. We propose an objective and justifiable ethics that is contingent on the truth of evolutionary theory. Wow. A strong…

I used chatGPT4 to generate a bit of a timeline of the history and development of the words, and they were much more homonymic than I remembered, i.e. I thought more of them shared a etymological source than they do. The words ideals, idyll, idle, and idol all have different origins and meanings, and their usages have evolved over time.

When we blame the system what are we are crediting what exactly? Something going according to plan? Something orchestrated to end up in someone's favour at our cost? A cost to us all? We gain a soul at the cost of the world? A lesson learned, put it down to experience? If something is systemic is it just cancerous? An…

I used chatGPT4 to generate a bit of a timeline of the history and development of the word Romance and Romantic, it was quite good, especially on the time-saving front. https://chatgpt.com/share/66ece23d-37fc-800d-84e4-d5b8de959225? This conversation may reflect the link creator’s personalized data, which isn’t shared and can meaningfully change how the model responds. meika said: Outline the usages of the words romantic…

Other parts listed at Worlding and the sentimental theory of value - header Supplement on romance & romantic etymology is available here. Generated by chatGPT4 after I wrote the words below. This relates to my notice that when we throw something into the… —gap, we often do so out of an impulse, to world or to self, regardless of the in/consistency or in/coherence…

I'll also list resources used or suplemented along the way here. See also Worlding the love: romance, romantic and roman and Look, is romance a risk?

In part 1 or ‘Do it for the house' I discussed a narcissist who did really well out of a working bee or two, which he advertised as “doing it for the house". This improved the property before he sold the house, on the back of unpaid labour, other peoples' tools and skills. He just happened to own it when…

Reflective Equilibrium and Conceptual Naturalness can be found on my favourite read on the substack platform by J. N. Nielsen, but this is the way I discovered him, he has other sites on other platforms from earlier times. wordpress, tumblr, etc Anyways, he has been educated me on various [philosophy|history/\history|philosophy]&time issues as I read his essays. As I read Reflective Equilibrium…

So I was flicking through number 134 of Texte zur Kunst, an issue devoted to sculpture, and started with the article by Simon Baier 'A carrier bag theory of sculpture.' I was in a library moments before a meeting, so did not think much about it as I read what little I read of the article, so this is not…

There are works of art in which the primary reaction, at least on my part, is goodness how much effort went into this? Where did they find the time? Who paid for all this? Why did they bother? This is in contrast to people who wonder, “Where do they get their ideas from?” While the artistry may or may not…

In a recent reaction, I glossed over an incomplete thought I had in reading a mention of the expanding circle. I just nodded it away, yeah, Singer. But then as often happens, I woke up thinking about it the next morning, drove to work thinking about it. It festers and expands in my notice. In itself, it is a good…

Caso, Juan Manuel Rodríguez, and Ricardo Noguera Solano. “Biological and Cultural Evolution of Morality: The Delusion of Progress.” Revista de Filosofía Fundamental (2022): via academia.edu Web. 21 Aug. 2024. A reaction below to a paper that came my way. I am working my way through a to-do list of them. That opening “Life evolves; it does not progress.” “To evolve”…

part one -- Do it for the house. part two -- get rid of the sweorlfds part three -- art part four -- paranoia and cult In part 1 or ‘Do it for the house' I discussed a narcissist who did really well out of a working bee or two, which he advertised as “doing it for the house". This…

In part one I described a sweorlfd or narcissist and his world-parasitising methods of extracting labour from his new-agey targets or marks, by saying to the fools, I mean volunteers, “Do it for the house.” I restrained myself from quoting directly from Marx or a Marxist canon or any Marxian contributions on the labour theory of value, wanting to example…

We'll take the owner of a new age business as our model. He ran a crystal, candle and incense shop for a decade, but had a hankering to run his own… —special personality cult. He tried grandstanding over a men's group for about the same time, but decided he needed more him than them. So, he sells the shop and…

A reaction to a paper that came my way. I am working my way through a to-do list of them. Well let’s start with those two first sentences… I know this is an abstract but… So, not sure if you can leap from co-ordination, nor even from unnegotiated co-operation, to “a moral structure inevitably develops.” Chicken/egg? I’ll keep reading with…

A reaction to a paper that came my way. I am working my way through a to-do list of them. So this is from 1993. I was in my late twenties. Never read any of this stuff back then. This is before primatologists and paleo-anthropologists came up with the idea of the Egalitarian Revolution of the Paleolithic among Homo species.

Michael Vlerick's “Better Than Our Nature? Evolution and Moral Realism, Justification and Progress.” in Ruse, Michael, and Robert J. Richards, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 9781107132955. Cambridge Handbooks in Philosophy. [via academia.edu] Puts forward an “innate ‘moral compass’ ” or “ ‘moral sense’ ”as a way to allow an evolutionist to…

This is an organiser or to-do linkpost page for reading and reacting to the following books, papers, and ideas regarded morality-in-broad-terms in relation to evolution. It's a gap I am trying to fill. As reactions I won't dig too scholarly into to the intertextual background, and just say where I differ and why. When I get bored or repetitive I…

I read Overcoming Bias by Robin Hanson quite often because of that word ‘bias’ in the title. I like to keep up-to-date like a potato. I find choices very interesting as a topic to discuss, because of bias, regardless of being overcome or indulged. Power corrupts by indulging our biases: 'use your anger Luke'. So overcoming in the title is…

The importance of an exhibition as a event is all very well, but as Gilbert & George are often want to say, it is the postcards or the posters or even the catalogue that people take back to their homes, they argued that these takeaways have an important democratic character. I would add because they go out into the world.

Original posted in May 2023 on substack.com. The Go-Between (1971 film) Lexigraphically, in traditional English habit, when one worries about the meaning of words one takes a descriptive rather than prescriptive attitude, that one ought not should words. Thus large and important English dictionaries hoard examples of the use of a word or term. It’s a point of pride for…

Platform Arts occupies an old re-purposed court house in Geelong|djilong kulcha precinct. Worlding exhibition in July 2024 curated by Amber Smith, occupied the main exhibition space downstairs, and upstairs mezzanine and theatrette. I am here because of the word 'worlding', a project of my own. Part 1 is here. You can enter by the cafe and go up either side…

Or “beliefs that proposition 'p' ” versus the world Over at new work in philosophy substack I get exposed to current work from academic philosophers as the blog is used to re-publish, and thus highlight on a different platform, articles from more scholarly journals. So recently I read Preston Werner’s (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), "Toward a Perceptual Solution to Epistemological Objections…

My use of worldbuilding draws directly on its use in fiction, both in doing it in my failed attempts at SF/F novel writing, and in genre and literary criticism’s listing of examples. I cover that as an introduction in Worldbuilding 101. This building of worlds has been greatly commercialised in all movie 'franchises' since the 1970s. More recently in computer…

There is a type of social scientism which is called technocracy (and not sciencarchy I’m afraid, which is an attempt at a neologism, but I did not get there first, see references). Technocracy has been overshadowed in recent decades by the term technocrat which is a type of bureaucrat who uses some sort of mathematical based science to determine processes…

The Origins of Virtue came out 25 years ago when I was 32, and I have a dim memory of it. Dim and thin, compared to a memorable reading I had of Matt Ridley's The Red Queen, which I borrowed from the State Library of Tasmania’s Hobart shelves. I can visualise where it was on the shelf, on a bay…

I've been wary of 'the true self' for some time, maybe it is just a genX eyeroll at the boomers of my youth trying to 'find themselves' while also claiming to invent everything they had not learned about yet. But then they were the most modern generation, i.e. living as part of the biggest or widest demographic exploration of modernity…

First posted on substack 25 March 2023. As a librarian it is part of my calling to bring attention to readers books that they may not be aware of, but would be of interest or use to the reader. This is mostly done through the use of professional empathy, and especially allow books to find audiences who may not at…

First posted on substack in May 2023. I was ruminating about writing a post on throwing belief/s into the… —gap, and while readingWhy We Believe by Agustín Fuentes… —on the facebook group Pyrrhonism, a post came up on the book In Praise of Doubt by Peter Berger and Anton C. Zijderveld. For a moment I confused it with a title…

Unable to make the opening night of the exhibition at Platform Arts of Worlding in Gelong|djilong I delayed the trip to the mainland into the penultimate week of the show (ending 19 July 2024). This did give me time to print and bind a doctoral thesis, which Dr Amber Smith kindly emailed to me. Along with the information that Amber…

I'm comparing two frames ① the world or worlding and ② suffering in relation to artificial intelligence. I should note that I suspect that general intelligence does not exist in humans, so creating an artificial version of this would mean creating it for the first time. Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized Digital suffering: why it's a problem…

I read a physical copy of Realist magic : objects, ontology, causality by Timothy Morton and enjoyed reading it, both the writing and the physicality of it in my hands. Its text block is now grubby. But, within the discourse it is a part of, the technical use of ontology and thus object really annoyed me. Not as much as…

Things that annnoy (deprecate 'objects')

Last week in Atlas of non-landscape artists I said that a book had been purchased and subsequently delivered, after I had watched Sam Harris Still Hasn’t “Solved” Morality w/ ‪@lanceindependent in which the book had been mentioned by Lance, with particular reference to Stephen Stich and Edouard Machery. I still haven’t found time to watch the entire stream, but have…

The following paper finds a gap in the ‘science’, then has some handy theology (another outcome and its derivatives of the worlding urge) to through in the gap science has discovered. Seemingly unaware of the whole god of the gaps. From the abstract at philpapers.org: Well to be fair, not a deus ex machina, not quite a god's messenger a'leaping…

I'll take moral realism to describe all those positions which developed, whether in Christian, Islamic, Confucian or even Buddhist worldings, which feel the world would fall apart if people were not moral, that morality is somehow bound up in the substance of the world, and that one has direct access to this realm as a human (other animals not so…

Gapping OSB (or Plywood) sheathing by DavidPoz “Allowing the gap” is a building tip, and describes a practice that avoids an arrangement of elements that are too tight. By butting each end up tight against the next, in hopes of achieving some minimalist perfect surface that hides its parts and bits and bones under an ideal finish…. —but which does…

vowels space, flocks of birds, mapping plans, composing ourselves intently We see our bones as our both innermost and outlasting remains, rarely do we think of them as the fossils of our movements, except when they ache. We can feel our bones structure us like a building’s walls, but outside of that intent, we quake in life regardless. The difference…

Upon my algorithm a video from DigitalGnosis appeared streamingly with the title Sam Harris Still Hasn’t “Solved” Morality w/ ‪@lanceindependent‬, 2024. It’s a critique video reacting the one by Sam Harris (i.e. streaming in realtime while listening to it) . The pair is quite well-prepared so it is not a “I’m amazed” reaction video. This is the first I’ve seen…

When I was learning how to pour molten bronze into lost-wax hollows burnt out from slapped-over investments of plaster, in order to create Consorts to the Mountain Goddess, my teacher in metal Matt Carney would say to me, looking at… my dad-bods My dad-bod figures of Gog & Magog (from a series of Deloraine Adonides never poured) “Why don’t you…

the first gap is the future, it's child's play Mapping the gap, gaping at the void with/in-out — mapping the gap is not really about mapping the gap in itself, as there is nothing there. So then…. gaping at the void with/in-out… —or, at, not even nothing… at Nothing is the first thing we put into the gap, for it…

This is a rebooted version of all-logic-is-a-prior on substack.com. There is an interesting discussion involving game theory and learning models at Updatelessness doesn't solve most problems (in the unavoidable context of AI training). It’s written for the lay person. But it contains a lot of jargon, so it’s really for the lay person who knows what game theory is. The…

A year or so ago I started capturing thoughts on the… —gap (see link for list of those thoughts, and a sort of list, a list of sorts for the beginning of a taxonomy of gaps). At that time I was mostly intrigued by what people throw into the gap, and generally I focussed on those intuitions (including intuition itself)…

the gap-hunter must known the country,the gatherer of gaps knits them into the world This is the beginnings of a taxonomy of various gaps in knowing. At this stage an taphonomy of gaps is not expected, but it is possible that a phylogeny will arise out of it, an dit may reflect an epistemology, rather than an ontology, one way…

St Ciarán's Church overlooking the harbour Image: Colin Park via CC BY-SA 2.0 via eoceanic.com In Divining the…—gap I mentioned St Ciarán and the ruins of a stone church, making special with the dead, because sacrifice, amid the holy graves and their lovely bones. And in this sacred loss, a ruined wall with the gaps of a wooden structure in…

In Can we define the… —gap? I’ve begun my exploration of this near constant feature of our lives. There is, in philosophical border disputes between theology and science, a term created by theologians protecting the honour of their mono-god, and it is critical of other believers who use science up until some point where they cannot explain something, and who…

Incompleteness, lack, aporia, unknown unknowns and how we carry on regardless A concrete play by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash There are so many gaps one might ask, "is there only one gap?" One might then answer that the answer lies in the gap, perhaps, so there be no way to know. We urge ourselves on to know. On. You know…

Christopher Brennan calls the gaping issue an ‘annoying wobble between’. I like that, it is less pompous than my Janus dancing the two-faced ratios. My wife Mona went to ante-natal exercises called Pregnastics here in Hobart, and her classmate, an old friend, Anitra, said that it was ‘really just a wobble and a chat’. Our to-be-born child is now 21…

This starts with reading J. N. Nielsen's various posts on various platforms. I've been reading them mostly via substack. The readings have been leaking through and require acknowlegement. This particular post is in regard to the word world and it relation to time as mentioned in J. N. Nielsen's Al-Ghazali’s Spiritual Crisis (Philosophical Side Quests: Philosophers of the Islamic Golden…

These Worlds of Worlds posts wander through some uses of the word world. Each use can be a world of its own. But just as the world is home for all our homes, it is also the home for all worlds, even if these worlds-of-their-own, these ‘epistemic enclaves’ as J.N. Nielsen calls them, can see and or seek no others…

Less obtuse uses of marks and cuts: The mark as a symbol beyond judgement that creates it: I mean what have the symbols ever done for us?

These thoughts follow from reading Caleb Everett’s 2017 book Numbers and the making of us : counting and the course of human cultures. It argues our ability to use numbers, however useful, is a happenstance affair. A use that composes our body’s limbs & digits with some need in environments varied and varying. Counting does not depend on any innate…

In 2023, the novelist Cormac McCarthy died. His first published work came out the year I was born. He wrote what I would call mainstream westerns & apocalypses. I’ve only read The Road. At the time there were some interviews with him re-floated, in which his low use of punctuation is given some air time, and how he got there.

This is part two, so if you are beginning… —maybe start over at Slash-and-blur worldculture part 1 which introduces the slash, the blur and the contronym as the main tools in a good worlding culture. The slash lists things into a chunk, and in chunking, it blurs… —while our attention finds another focus: a distraction, an urgency, a pot on the…

A method to use or explore an intentional suspension of judgement or separating out. While this term of the blur was developed before my readings on neo-Pyrrhonism, it has parallels with Pyrrhonist suspension of judgment I hope to draw on. I do not see ataraxia as the only endpoint/utility/framework of this suspension of judgment, I see more potential for it…

The simplest things have the most names The simplest things have the most names, as they can arise in more frameworks and their jargons. The named names then develop their own worlds of influence. The strike or score, a slash or scratch is, almost, the simplest mark. A dot or spot or peck is simpler, but less clearly an intentional…

Art is a recent version of worlding. Why I no longer arts artifacts into artefactual fits and starts : religion/art/ritual/drama/routine Mary Beth Willard’s 'Why It’s Ok to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists' worlding exhibition in geelong|djilong worlding in Geelong July 2024 – very excited — part 1 Amber Smith's thesis. worlding in geelong July 2024 – arrival — part…

First written in March 2023 at substack. For discussions on my use of the slash "/" see Posts on punctuation and the mark. Aaron Wright’s ‘Why I No Longer Call It “Art” ’ (Archaeology Southwest, 2023-03-09) makes me leap over the planned but not yet written No. 1 post on the… —gap (& world & should) and jump into a…

I put Saturday morning aside to write on the world and moral philosophy from a framework based in evolution’s minimum viable product. It means most of the time I am pointing out that things are outcomes and not causes, or, worse, causal explanations of many things are not necessary for them to be done in the first place. Examples of…

In the self-help article How ‘Should’ Makes Us Stupid — And How to Get Smart Again by Jane Elliott (warning medium.com member only access, but you might get a freebie or two), we get a number of usages on how bad “should” is. This rap sheet lists the misdemeanours that we, as in you, you shouldy miscreant, commit when using…

In At home in the world I put down how I got to by thinking about ‘home’ and the relationship to/with 'world'. And in writing that decided to separate out the thoughts about home/world and it relationship, in my head at least, with country and country/city, and empire. I cover part of that at Worldbuilding 101. But here are the…

The other day — in a library — I briefly looked at a book. And thought, ‘another one I’ll not have time to read.’ But I gave it a quick peruse. John S. Allen’s Home: How Habitat Made Us Human is a science essay book which goes over common ground to reframe some assumptions or two that we have in…

A large part of my response to the question ¿what is the ethical response to morality? is that we have an moral urge, if not an instinct, to world-build, which in English we can also phrase as as why we should. The details do not matter so much, until we go off worldbuilding ourselves, as much as that we actually should should about something,…

In February 2024 in Writing good out of me worlds better than the old fool's selfie I left off with an enigmatic: And Julia Kristeva’s Lacanist worlding? I may leave that for another day with the cheap remark that it is not engrams all the way down. No, they lie only between the fool and the world. So finally I…

writing and reading densities, the proverb, the pun, the multitool and worlding a life This post is: While in the space of making a ‘three-parter’ on the…—gap, my daughter has mentioned that she has read a few posts (in 2023) on the substack version of why we should, if only because I mentioned her in one post, and she said,…

Like the post Sister Wendy on love as an obedient art, this is mostly about the preface. Purity and Danger was originally published in 1966, a year after I was born. In Categories versus practices: moral leadership & teenagers running amok I briefly rail against the methodology of using categories as resolution for a 'digital scanner' of social realities (in…

An interesting example of throwing one's favourite thing into the…—gap, in this case panpsychism, while offering it up, in the same action, as a moderating mediation. If not meliorating the pox in both their houses. On page 128 of Philip Goff's 2023 book Why? The Purpose of the Universe. I have to admit that I do not think of materialism that…

The sky pool The quote on Aldous Huxley at the end. this one links it to monotropism in hindsight Writing good out of me worlds better than the old fool's selfie Julia Kristeva, Robert Graves & Fyodor Dostoevsky Bookending worlds - Solzhenitsyn Religion, tanks, spirituality & yoga mats. Robert Ardrey Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative Figuring out the grounds beneath…

Julia Kristeva, Robert Graves and a cameo by Fyodor Dostoevsky In this post I’ll try to connect two writers on the subject of the alphabet. The key theme is how alphabets by their very mnenomic natures double-down in various lifelines, or directions, one of which is writing and so… —being a writer. Writing both allows communication and better ways to…

Steve Stewart-Williams, a reading of his The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve. (Cambridge University Press, 2018. #ISBN9781108425049 ) I pick this up because it covers some big history, from which general assumptions in my approach to morality and worldbuilding arise. It’s an academic book, as opposed to scholarly. It’s got a great innovation in…

Willard, Mary Beth. Why It’s Ok to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists. New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. ISBN 978-0-367-89864-9 I was hoping this book would easily generate a discussion piece for me, but no. The author has a blog aestheticsforbirds.com besides the day job as an academic, though I guess we could say teacher in Utah to make it…

In product development, defining or outlining a “Minimum viable product” (MVP) is a key part of the process used to develop a going concern in business. It's a tactic of specialisation, and is kin to core business as a strategy. Today I am using it as a type of Anthropic principle, where when we ask, say, “why is the sky…

I'll group that type of worlding which is more doctrinal or dogmatic, or focuses on bad outcomes of worlding under the term worldbuilding. I.E. it is a more intentional worlding, which is conscious of its ability to construct the world we live in, but does not see that urge to world, as anything other than something that must be controlled.

In today’s psyche.co essay, Adolescence is a ‘use it or lose it’ time for moral development I’ve learned about moral foundations theory, and as I read it, I felt like pointing out, or shouting, that using the word categories, for practices, might help with tick-a-box data collection, but can lead to boxed-in thinking. As a failed poet I always grumpily fume against the…

Reading Gilles Deleuze’s Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Zone Books. Cambridge, Mass: MIT. 2005. ISBN9781890951252 I’ve begun a project in which I tackle writing that I find difficult to read. This in order to write in a more understandable way. That is, to see if helps put me in their shoes. I found this book by Deleuze on a dear friend’s…

wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotropism Monotropism is a person's tendency to focus their attention on a small number of interests at any time, tending to miss things outside of this attention tunnel. This cognitive strategy has been posited as the central underlying feature of autism. The theory of monotropism was developed by Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson and Mike Lesser starting in the 1990s, and first published in 2005.[1] Lawson's further work on the theory…

(midjourney 2023: failed on Greek red-black vase style, failed on pear tree, failed on duck-rabbit on mushroom) prompt /imagine Ludwig Wittgenstein reading St Augustine of Hippo under a pear tree, greek red-black vase style, a rabbit-duck watches Ludwig from a low mushroom (stolen wrist-pears are not coloured?) Miles is well aware of the… —gap. I am reading his newly [re]-formed…

down to the sky, up to the pool… —and Colin Wilson I was cataloguing Colin Wilson’s memoir The Angry Years, and I thought, who is he again? Colin Wilson is one of those boomer generational figures who have had little impact on my on cohort of genXers. His books would have passed my gaze in second hand book shops, in…

Mapping Christian byways of worldbuilding by way of a flowchart. an aside The usage of terms like “worldbuilding” here is the reason this writing has been written, i.e. I hope I can more fully explore and explain what wworlding is, as a substitute for a lot of 'things' that are outcomes of the moral/worlding urge, but we treat as causal,…

The re-post below this introduction, was originally posted as The fable that is modern literature in 2021. It describes an experience from a decade before at Parables of Submission, Fables of Truth-Based Creativity. Reposted here because it relates to literature and thus to world-building, and thus worlding and morality more generally. Basically literature is always fantasy where it prefers non-flat…

There is this wonderful book written by Lorraine Daston called Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (The Lawrence Stone Lectures. Princeton ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022 ISBN 9780691156989). I say wonderful because it is one of those histories which illuminates by way of the taphonomy of etymology, of usage in their historical contexts, rather than, say, a list…

This last week I woke up at about 4am and actually got up out of bed, to write in my notebook, some questions that follow from Newtonian space-time metaphors. I mention this getting up to write down, because it was quite complex sleep thinking, and usually when I think at 4am I tend to remain asleep. My waking hours when…

Today I am having: Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach. Continuum, 2009 by Mark Dooley. 978-1-84706-013-6 In a first reading this book, it occurred to me, I might be becoming a gap-hunter, or, better, as in more accurate, I might become a hunter of what people throw in the gap. There is always a gap, so why hunt that?…

To world is a verb. I found this out writing why we should. Morality/religion/art all those things that should be blurred back together are outcomes of the urge to world, just as we compose our bodies from the sustenance of the terrain, in a landscape of care. These posts focus on more postive aspects. The more negative or doctrinal or…

A table of concerns, if not a table of contents. Most of the following are linkposts pages to organize the blogposts. The old substack version whyweshould.substack.com/ which is gradually being migrated here under the structure being developed above

Over the last week I have been reading Jörg Rüpke’s On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome. books.google.com/ngrams/ It’s a whole world of pain. For more discussion on Appropriation (art) and Reappropriation see Mary Beth Willard’s 'Why It’s Ok to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists' So, at dinner the other night I was at the second stage of…

metaphor analogies you by way of the world like the way coins are words You might argue that ‘the cell as a factory’ is only a metaphor. You could say that scientific metaphors should be judged based on how useful they are, and no metaphor is perfect. The ‘cell as a factory’ metaphor has undoubtedly been useful in guiding the trajectory of…

Krebs cycle is another pivot, or hinge, the threshold where Janus dances, the gate is a dance surfing a flow of protons. Consciousness re-iterates this in/by/through/up/out/ involutions, some meta, some complexified, some hindsighted into logic, like the way a bear eats berries to pile on fat for winter. There is a routine there that rites iterate, same same but different, hymns to…

Or, not what I had planned, which involved a matrix of ratios on self/world:reality This is a planned post on proportions of the Janus ratio. But not the planned post. Planning got me nowhere. I ended up somewhere else, but at least I am not lost. ‘Planned’ means that I had an idea, and began mulling it over, thinking about…

In a few comments elsewhere I have started using the term Janus ratio, to describe our threshold of attention, the gate on which it pivots is the urge to live. I’ll try to make sense of it, by some attempts at definition of this neologism, below. Janus ratio of self and world © 2023 meika loofs samorzewski The Janus ratio describes the proportions…

I've used the term the "Janus ratio" to indicate our relations to the… —gap. There are many gaps. One gap is our view in-out. In self, out there world. Here the Janus ratio indicates where our attention allocates it self in world. The point is unobtainable, thus the dancing, and hand waving. The ritual and the dead certainty. The hope…

Julian B. Barbour The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time. First edition. New York: Basic Books, 2020. ISBN 9780465095469 Given my interest in Janus the two faced god of the threshold and gates, and my use of it in a metaphor to describe our gap dancing abilities (and difficulties), I bought Julian Barbour’s book on physics, and, well, cosmology,…

Sister Wendy was a Carmelite nun who gained famed as an interpreter of art, especially on free-to-air television in the 1990s, and whose passion for this vocation was irrepressible. All images of text and quotes are grabs from Sister Wendy Beckett's The Mystery of Love: Saints in Art through the Centuries (London: HarperCollins, 1996) #ISBN0551030121 The Carmelites are a Catholic…

This post follows on from discovering that belief in belief, or believing in believing, or having faith in faith— is a heresy in the biggest Christian Churches, because obedience. I covered this in : I was at work when first writing those posts, and while cataloguing books into a library system I discovered the following from Arnold Lunn’s The Revolt…

Post that mention narcissists or psychopaths Casewell’s Jaspers, but meika’s Deleuzian Bergsonism. Posts that are about narcissists or psychopaths Series of posts on Worlding and the labour theory of value (but really about narcissists and our need to police them). to police to care On the appearance of a living buddha in Hobart, Tasmania Worlds of difference: Esther Vilar’s The…

About the gap in more consideration or detail Can we define the… —gap? Mapping the gap: The night sky is full of constellations rickrolling unicorns for fun and profit. Why don’t you use more definition? Mapping the gap… —within Divining the…—gap (Nick Lane, St Ciarán, Lyn Margulis, Roger Penrose) Footnote to 'Divining the… —gap' : Structure/bones & taphonomy of life…

To build a better world, we should destroy the Catholic Church Fideism & Obedience : the extra bit about St Augustine of Hippo Sister Wendy on love as an obedient art The Catholic Church is a technocracy Fideism, reason and… —the gap that is always there Inappropriation (Jörg Rüpke’s On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome) Faith as…

Belief in belief is regarded as a heresy called Fideism by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian Churches. To me this appears… —odd. Why would a church or religion not belief in belief, not have faith in faith? Surely this is prior to belief in somepiece of dogma. But for most established Christianities, not only is it unrequired, it is…

To face tomorrow is to world today, expecting… a child hopefully fears its innocence and naives a plan and so mishaps the world, any… —all, does not exist. But is where we are headed, never to arrive we adult into our worsts, see, and the world lies before us in a moment of care that says fare well. The World—“Pam-A”…

MEIKA LOOFS SAMORZEWSKI MARCH 2024 one might argue, you might cook, we might eat, we might talk metaphor analogies you by way of the world like the way coins are words metaphor me a ratio just like you a halting problem I've been thinking about for three decades Analogy shots general intelligence and the inner stochastic parrot Me third go…

Early in 2023 a Cardinal of the Catholic Church was buried in Sydney, Australia, amid tearful protest and weepy hagiography. I leave the description of George Pell’s life to others. The key I wish to turn here is the context for the choices that determines conscience: George Pell flew higher than any Australian priest, but he chose career over the safety of children…

Why we should discusses what is broadly called moral philosophy. It does so on the assumption that evolution is key. The first essay which sets this out is (from 2019): Why we should : an introduction by memoir into the implications of the Egalitarian Revolution of the Paleolithic, or, Anyone for cake? RSS feeds feed.xml or feed.json If you wish…

Self-care as salvation-- all authenticity but no responsibility Deborah Casewell in her aeon.co essay raises some notice on Karl Jaspers’ existentialist angst-mongering, how it has been mis-categorized (by Sartre) such that Jaspers as an inventor of the word existentialism he gave it away after losing control of the branding in the marketplace of ideas, but, Casewell reminds us, the “focus on the individual, the importance…

(not mentioning Paul Blooms' against empathy today) I am refering to a recent article by Lucinda Holdforth “The Problem with Authenticity (and Other 21st Century Virtues).” (The Guardian, August 2, 2023, sec. Books. ) It’s an edited extract from 21st Century Virtues: How They Are Failing Our Democracy , published 1 August as part of Monash University Publishing’s In the National Interest…

History-telling is the ability not to recall what somewhat said, though story-telling is important, but the ability to read the traces in their contexts, and the recursivity of this process amidst those contexts of telling that layer us between the lines of our lifes as we track to and fro. If interupted. Or even if interrupted by extinction and steel.