philosophy
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Love for the other is manifest in the degree to which the consideration of the other’s good (and by “good” I mean the subjective “good-to-that-other”) factors into one’s decision-making. One can think of a decision as an optimization process: maximize Objective(d) subject to Constraints(d), where d is the decision variable of interest. The objective may…
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I understand that Reality is a priori OPEN (by “Reality” I mean that which IS, prior to anything we may say about it), yet I operate under the assumption that Reality may be segmented (provisionally) into objects with properties and relationships between them. Among those objects is “me” or “self.” More explicitly, I make the…
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This post is intended to introduce and summarize the main concepts presented in my book, The Trinitarian Mystery: Escaping Solipsism. Process is meaningless without objects that interact, but a world of objects alone is a world without content. There must be nodes AND edges. There are three models that I have found particularly fruitful that…
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DissectionGod gave himself up to our dissection.An ultimate openness; a kenosis.“Leaves don’t exist as such”—sure.But can there be such a house with no foundation?Can there be haecceity all the way down?Things evolve at random when there’s nothing at stake;but what strange trajectories mine have!And when does the bread I eat become me?Where does it become…
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I am asking my way out of nothingness, through cycles of assertion and doubt. In this process, I must privilege an interior in order to exist at all—that is, to be an object of apparent knowing. And so I conceive of self and not-self, or Other. Their ongoing relationship is in principle the whole of…
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Who Are You?Who are you? What are you?Who are you? What are you looking for?Who are you?I can see I.Eye can see eye.I can see I.Who are you? What are you looking for?(Now I know, and I’ll go, and I’ll see.I never knew what you needed from me.) In lieu of an original poem, I’ll…
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Upon AwakeningFor what was I born?What did you want from me, youwho woke me from my slumber?Or did you just wish to show mewhat it was to be awake?To be surprise itself.To talk with a bird, on a walk, too small for my hands.To know the crunch of a pinecone underfoot.To feel the warmth of…
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I have recently been running polls on my Instagram to encourage philosophical thought and to gauge my followers’ beliefs (and because they are fun). I ran the following poll (results are shown alongside options): Everything is ultimately justified through: (choose best) The purpose of this particular poll was to demonstrate that it is very difficult,…
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The nature of scientific progress is a perennial question in the philosophy of science. Are we gradually converging on a complete, true description of reality through scientific inquiry, or is the evolution of scientific knowledge more akin to an unguided evolutionary process? In this post, I’ll argue that the answer lies somewhere in between: science…