27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus

 Nietzsche is the Opposite of Humanism

If one wanted to single out a thinker who represented the opposite of humanism (indeed, of pretty much every argument in this book), one couldn’t do better than the German philologist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).109 Earlier in the chapter I fretted about how humanistic morality could deal with a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Nietzsche argued that it’s good to be a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Not good for everyone, of course, but that doesn’t matter:...
  1  notes
 
27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus

 Human Progress Confounds -isms

It should not be surprising that the facts of human progress confound the major -isms. The ideologies are more than two centuries old and are based on mile-high visions such as whether humans are tragically flawed or infinitely malleable, and whether society is an organic whole or a collection of individuals.43 A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings, each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting the well-being of others in complex netw...
  1  notes
 
25 OCT 2017 by ideonexus

 American and French Revolutions Led to Different Results

...the structure of a network determines its virality. As recent work by the social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler has shown, the contagiousness of a disease or an idea depends as much on a social network’s structure as on the inherent properties of the virus or meme. The history of the late eighteenth century illustrates that point well. The ideas that inspired both the American Revolution and the French Revolution were essentially the same, and both were transmitted throu...
Folksonomies: history enlightenment
Folksonomies: history enlightenment
  1  notes
10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus

 Argonauts: Magna Cortica

THE MAGNA CORTICA ORIGINAL TENETS (DATE UNKNOWN BUT BEFORE BF 80) I. Self knowledge. Sapient beings have the right to know whether they’ve been mentally modified. II. Self-modification. Sapient beings have the right to pursue self-modification. III. Refusing modification. They also have the right to refuse it. IV. Modification (or not) of progeny. Sapient beings have the right to modify—or not—their own progeny. V. Knowledge of who has been modified or selfupgraded. Polities and ...
Folksonomies: science futurism
Folksonomies: science futurism
  1  notes
 
10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus

 Stapleton's Use of Religious Terms

At the risk of raising thunder both on the Left and on the Right, I have occasionally used certain ideas and words derived from religion, and I have tried to interpret them in relation to modern needs. The valuable, though much damaged words "spiritual" and "worship," which have become almost as obscene to the Left as the good old sexual words are to the Right, are here intended to suggest an experience which the Right is apt to pervert and the Left to misconceive. This experience, I should s...
Folksonomies: language religiosity
Folksonomies: language religiosity
  1  notes
 
09 JAN 2017 by ideonexus

 Distopian View Praising Second-Hand Knowledge

The first of these was the abolition of respirator. Advanced thinkers, like Vashti, had always held it foolish to visit the surface of the earth. Air-ships might be necessary, but what was the good of going out for mere curiosity and crawling along for a mile or two in a terrestrial motor? The habit was vulgar and perhaps faintly improper: it was unproductive of ideas, and had no connection with the habits that really mattered. So respirators were abolished, and with them, of course, the ter...
  1  notes
 
03 JAN 2017 by ideonexus

 The Game of Wonderful Islands

In this game the floor is the sea. Half—rather the larger half because of some instinctive right of primogeniture—is assigned to the elder of my two sons (he is, as it were, its Olympian), and the other half goes to his brother. We distribute our boards about the sea in an archipelagic manner. We then dress our islands, objecting strongly to too close a scrutiny of our proceedings until we have done. Here, in the illustration, is such an archipelago ready for its explorers, or rather on t...
Folksonomies: play gaming
Folksonomies: play gaming
  1  notes