Two counter-intuitive interpretations of gut feelings guide my ethical actions:

1. The heat of hubris.
   I always try to catch and interrogate this feeling wherever it happens, especially when it is accompanied by iron-clad justification and and sublimates into majestic righteousness. If it feels like hubris, I assume it is hubris, and if that hubris can be justified, the justification is probably the logic of hubris.
2. The outrage of anxiety.
   This very distinct feeling, taken at face value, indicates one is being assailed by some form of moral and/or intellectual wrongness. I’ve come to interpret it as approaching impingement of beyondness — a hint of dread of the infinite. The subject of my anxiety cannot be subsumed within my current understanding. I can keep my understanding intact and repel the assailant, or I can welcome the assailant with the faith that if I sacrifice my private understanding in the right spirit I have the opportunity to re-understand: to undergo metanoia.

Some other less counter-intuitive gut feelings:

1. The darkening of betrayal.
   When a person close to me undergoes a deep perspective shift that inclines them away from me, it is often signaled by a dark and heavy feeling. It is peculiarly non-directional like a bass frequency, and it is not clear from the feeling who has shifted — only that someone has shifted.
2. The hangover of sin.
   When I do something wrong, even if I can justify it entirely, I feel a distinctive sickness afterwards. I’ve come to trust this feeling over my own arguments. When I feel this sensation, I assume a working attitude that I am in the wrong, and switch from self-justification to self-interrogation.
3. The fluency of grace.
   I can feel it when I am in the right place to speak and act. The sensation is indescribable but unmistakeable: an attunement to the situation, clarity on what matters and assurance that success will follow.
4. The release of reconciliation.
   There is a distinctive untightening sense that comes with the realization that a person you are in conflict with is more important than anything else involved in the conflict. It is palpable when it happens to oneself, and, strangely just as much as when it happens to the other.
5. The wrinkliness of incomplete thought.
   When I have an understanding that is not yet worked out fully, and it seems that some unconsidered factor is preventing it from resolving, this comes with a feeling that the problem is not “lying flat”, which might sound like a metaphor, but is actually a description of a feeling about the thought.

I believe in the right to require persuasion as a condition of participation — but this right is accompanied by a two-fold obligation: 1) to persuade and 2) to be open to being persuaded.

I believe every human being has an equal right to be regarded as an individual.

By extension, I believe every individual has the right to voluntarily associate or disassociate with any political body, and that no organic consideration (sex, race, class, etc.) may override it. This is principled non-prejudice.

I believe truth is a matter of trade-offs. Especially when it seems logically impossible, there is an otherwise. Practical awareness of this fact is a major component of what has been known as wisdom. Wisdom is incomplete without otherwisdom.

I believe in the perpetual possibility of radical surprise, and that we feel its approach as anxiety, its arrival as dread and its overcoming as epiphany.

Religion that lacks practical attitudes toward otherwisdom, expectation of radical surprise and navigation of dread is pseudo-religion. Fundamentalism is not religious extremism, religion gone too far; fundamentalism is religion betrayed.

For my book, I am trying to create a limited palette of words with technical meanings. I will allow myself a few simple unbeautiful technical-sounding words. For instance, it seems alterity and pluralism will be unavoidable. These will be defined and used with discipline and precision wherever they occur. I also plan to pick apart some common synonyms:

• Real, actual, existent.
• True, correct, right.
• Reasonable, rational, logical.
• Mistake, misconception, error.
• Concept, idea, thought.
• Insight, fact, truth.
• Practice, action, behavior.

The rest will be concrete and durable words likely to remain immediate (“Experience-near” in Geertz’s words), but also likely to introduce some imprecision, interpretive ambiguity and freedom into the reading. I’ll try to protect against any abuses I can anticipate, but I am a pluralist at heart and I celebrate conflict.

Arthur C. Clarke formulated Three Laws of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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I hold the obnoxious belief that religions are technologies — philosophical technologies — and that a magical interpretation of what religions say and do is symptomatic of insufficient understanding. Religious thinking requires an ontological sophistication beyond that of most religious minds, so they do the best they can, but in the process they make category mistakes (which, if I am not mistaken is just ontological errors recast in pragmatist terms) which grow together into a distorted conceptual system. But perhaps even worse is a simplistic leveling-down of religion into ethical guidelines and sentiments. Most battles over religion are between these two flawed conceptions of religion: the superstitious vs the secular.

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Magical thought is the splattering of comprehension against the limits of thinkability. Thinkability, however is relative. We can learn to think new kinds of thoughts — consequential thoughts — thoughts that induce comprehensive rethought, also known as metanoia.

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Magic is permanent complacence in the face of transcendent ideas — and it might even be the sin against the spirit, if we recognize that spirit is mobile thought. It is for this reason — not because I think magic “doesn’t exist” — that I oppose magical thought: it blunts the mind against transcending itself. Magic is bad practice.

Sometimes I think the Long Tail is more of a curse than a blessing. It puts so many forks in every possible road that nobody is likely to follow the same route for long. Instead the freeways of common interest that existed prior to internet “communities”, there is a dense mesh of criss-crossing footpaths (so dense it might as well be a solid sheet of pavement) scattered with isolated obsessive nerds.

Do I want to go back to the constricted choices of the pre-internet days? Probably not. There are costs, though, and I feel them most acutely when I finish reading something difficult and fascinating and start flipping through my mental rolodex in search of someone to hash through it with me.

Reading Peirce 1903 Harvard lectures on Pragmatism, the self-similar structure of Peirce’s categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. Here is my redrawing of his diagram:

And here it is again, color-coded to highlight the degenerate forms.

From Milan Kundera ‘s Immortality:

One day when he came to see her, he was once again plunged in dark thoughts. She went to the next room to change, and he remained in the living room alone with the Siamese cat. He wasn’t especially fond of the cat, but he knew it meant a great deal to Laura. He sat down in an armchair, pondered his dark thoughts, and mechanically stretched out his hand to the animal in the belief that it was his duty to stroke it. But the cat spat and bit his hand. The bite immediately became linked to the chain of misfortunes that had been following him; he leaped out of the armchair and took a swipe at the cat. The cat streaked into a corner and arched its back, hissing horribly.

He turned around and saw Laura. She was standing in the doorway, and it was obvious that she had been watching the whole scene. She said, “No, no, you mustn’t punish her. She was completely in the right.”

He looked at her surprised. The cat’s bite hurt, and he expected his lover, if not to take his part against the animal, at the very least to show an elementary sense of justice. He had a strong desire to walk over to the cat and give it such an enormous kick that it would splatter against the living room ceiling. It was only with the greatest effort that he managed to control himself.

Laura added, emphasizing each word, “She demands that whoever strokes her really concentrates on it. I, too, resent it when someone is with me but his mind is somewhere else.” When she had watched Bernard stroke the cat and seen the cat’s hostile reaction to his detached absentmindedness, she had felt a strong sense of solidarity with the animal. For the past several weeks Bernard had been treating her the same way: he would stroke her and think about something else; he would pretend he was with her but she knew very well he wasn’t listening to what she was saying.

The cat’s biting Bernard made her feel as if her other, symbolic, mystical self, which is how she thought of the animal, was trying to encourage her, to show her what to do, to serve as an example.

Is this true?: To prefer the company of equals is to prefer reason.

Here is the thought that led to this statement: The optimal degree of strength for development of reason is 1) strong enough to be able to make one’s extraordinary and as-yet-inconceivable reasoning heard and considered — but 2) not so strong as to be able to force acceptance one’s conclusions.

In any deliberation, there are participants — people involved in the arguments, ideation, demonstrations, etc. — and entities who are represented by the participants — not only people but also things whose reactions to the deliberation are anticipated by the participants based on the participants understandings — who I will call “anticipants”.

To invite more of these anticipants to the table as participants (by including more human voices in the deliberation, and more non-human voices, speaking in the transontic lingua franca of experimental data) is to radicalize our republic by making it as universally democratic as practically possible.

Of course, all participants represent anticipants, but the more anticipants are empowered to elect their own representative participants, and the more anticipants are able to reject inadequate representation (especially important for non-humans: help them water the tree of liberty with the blood of bad science. ), the more perfect the republic.

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People who will not respect science are scary, not because they are wrong about truth or resistant to yielding to reality — but because they are literally sociopaths: violent toward social truth-finding, and disrespectful to the existence of others.

A pragmatic conception of truth views an assertion as the eye of a vortex of testable hypothetical consequences.

Tracing out these consequences and conceiving experiments capable of supporting or weakening belief in these assertions — that is what rational thought should dedicate itself to. And making persuasive arguments for investing in the most consequential experiments. And for conceiving new assertions with new vortices of hypothetical consequence.

Here is what my life of people-centered design has taught me: Never argue when you can experiment.

Again, Le Carre famously said: “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” It is important to remember that a conference table is just a big desk for a committee to sit behind. A philosopher’s armchair is another kind of desk. An academic journal is pretty much just a virtual conference table.

The natural sciences learned this lesson centuries ago. What divided modern science from ancient science was not drawing logical consequences from empirical observation! This is a common misunderstanding with catastrophic consequences. What brought science into the modern age (and us with it) was experiment: using observation to form hypotheses, using hypotheses to design experiments, conducting experiments to support or weaken hypotheses for a community of scientists, and to produce networks of confirmed theoretical assertions, each with a vortex of testable hypothetical consequences.

All questions can be treated scientifically, including social and existential ones, local and particular ones. We just have to pragmatically clarify exactly what our questions are about which helps us grasp our scientific object and the suitable experimental methods, which might not be predominantly physical, outwardly observable or quantifiable. Science, too, should observe “truth to materials.”

Is it time for an existentialist revival, yet? I hope it comes back in a pragmatist mode, one that pushes pragmatism to its Latourian limits. That is, a pragmatism that extends democratic procedure to things as well as people. Things have rights, too, and they assert those rights the way people do: resistance. Scientific experiment invites things to the table and allows them to negotiate with us. I enjoy wondering what an existentialism freed of idealist reductionism (both metaphysical & methodological) might look, sound, behave and feel like.

I am adopting Putnam’s term predicament for a problematic situation.

We could say a predicament is a situation that stimulates perplexity. Perplexity is failure of understanding due to nonavailability of adequate concepts. Because concepts produce both questions and answers, perplexity is inarticulate intellectual distress: one cannot say what the problem is, and this inability to state the problem compounds the distress.

The name of the feeling of distress (and even the intuitive anticipation of this distress) is anxiety.

The depth of a perplexity is a function of how many other concepts must be disrupted by the revision of concepts required to resolve the present perplexity. We can experience a shallow perplexity, which requires only the acquisition of a single concept where one is lacking. The deepest perplexities require unlearning and relearning our oldest and most basic concepts, from which others are derived.

Religious conversions are the outcome of deep perplexities, often stimulated by predicaments.

Firstness: experience

Secondness: expectation

Thirdness: understanding

(Peirce’s triad, oversimplified.)

I am forcing myself not to post this question on LinkedIn:

Does anyone have any ideas for vague and inconsequential questions to pose to this group to stimulate idle discussion and give us all opportunities to market ourselves as open and thoughtful professionals?