Philosophy

I realized I’ve been beating around the bush but haven’t got round to actually writing down my personal philosophy; what I believe to be beautiful and good and true. Writing down stuff is sometimes conducive to actually making sense, so here goes.

I am agnostic. I do not believe we can (currently?) know the principle that put the universe in motion, if any.

I consider myself a sort of secular Buddhist: I try to follow a modified Eightfold Path. I do not usually try to label myself, but I say I follow this Buddhist path to summarize: I agree with it to a great extent and it also gives a salient place to meditation, which I practice, but I do not restrict myself to the principles of Buddhism. I am interested in all philosophy as a vehicle for the pursuit of knowledge and the reduction of suffering; I admire classical culture, although unfortunately it was built upon oppression and slavery (we need to do better), and appreciate Stoic and Epicurean thought. I am an admirer of science and culture. I believe in the enlightenment.

I think the purpose of humanity should be to thrive in peace, advancing knowledge through science and technology and culture, and using said knowledge to reduce and eventually eliminate the suffering of all living beings, starting with fellow humans.

More concretely and to the point: I support the causes of feminism; wealth and power redistribution; and universal basic income. My default stance to open questions is liberality; I believe humanity is a robust distributed system and history has proven time and time again that humanity can gain a lot from trying new solutions to old problems.

Thus I intend to make the following my personal goal in life: to support worthy causes and seek ways to improve humanity within the means I’ve got, with honesty and sincerity, even if it means risking ridicule by making earnest mistakes in public. I believe if everybody did this we’d potentially end up in a better world; you can call it an utopia. You might know what I call my personal utopia by now.

I believe in civilized, fact-based debate and cordiality. If you disagree with any of my positions, I’d love to hear from you! I would like to change my mind or otherwise improve my positions wherever I’m wrong. I know I’m statistically certain to be wrong about many, many things, and I look forward to finding out which those are.

Thank you.