Category: Philosophy
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Derived from a draft written originally on February 2, 2011 There is so much absurdity in our world today that I simply can’t process. Numerous mindless amusements continue to propagate across all forms of media, and it seems to me that they only exist to distract us from making any meaningful foray into anything important. …
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Many creatives I’ve met and studied have outlined, sometimes well-practiced and even calculated, creative processes. My methods, or seeming lack thereof, are more like a bizarre brand of madness. The way my brain works, my creativity often latches onto a certain concept, then so much energy goes into analyzing that concept from a high-level philosophical…
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Why Do Our Minds Refuse to Pick Just One Rule of Reasoning? Most of the time, we don’t notice how we decide. We just do it. Whether it’s a restaurant menu, a job offer, or a fork in the road we’re pondering, our choice feels immediate; it’s like instinct. But underneath, our minds run little…
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Freud unmasks us as murderous angels—civilization’s hypocrisy hides our primitive psyche, where love and hate entwine, and even our gentlest virtues are born of cruelty. Sigmund Freud’s Reflections on War and Death from 1939 reads like a mirror polished just enough to show the rot beneath our civilization’s cosmetics. He argues that conscience isn’t some…
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“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” – Eleanor Roosevelt With its vast potential for possibility, the future holds within it the power to shape our lives in ways we can’t yet imagine. We all have dreams—some outrageously unattainable, yet alive within us. In order for dreams to come…
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When I stumbled upon an early draft of what I titled “Hierarchy of Ideas” I realized this was perfect Obscure Curiosities material. In just a few paragraphs, I had the bones of a schema that can sit alongside my CRAP framework as a kind of “compass” for orienting ideas. So, I decided to sketch this…
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Quasi-Rational Minds and the Myth of Perfect AI “Bygones are forever bygones,” Jevons once wrote. But human minds are not blank ledgers wiped clean at each decision. We’re accumulators — of sensations, biases, and half-baked rules of thumb — and we act on them whether or not they’re still relevant. In 1996, Louis Lévy-Garboua and…
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Here are my CRAP reflections on Chapter 15 of Longinus’ “On the Sublime.” Criticism Longinus begins this chapter by emphasizing the importance of phantasia, or visualization: “…dignity, grandeur, and urgency are to a very large degree derived from visualization (phantasia).” He distinguishes this from the mere production of images. Instead, phantasia is a vital mental…
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In Chapter 14 of “On the Sublime” Longinus lays out one of the most radical creative challenges in literary history: “We too… should carefully consider how perhaps Homer might have said this very thing, or how Plato, or Demosthenes, or (in history) Thucydides, might have given it sublimity.” Criticism Longinus doesn’t just ask writers to…
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Longinus, in Chapter 13 of On the Sublime, offers a compelling meditation on imitation and inspiration: “[T]here is another way that leads to sublimity… It is the imitation and emulation of the greater writers and poets of the past… For many authors are inspired by the spirit of others…” Criticism Longinus views sublimity not as…