Saturday, August 23, 2008

The Eternal Questions

I've had a text file by this name sitting on my desktop for a while. It's a big list. Here's an excerpt:

  • love and hate. how do you explain them? what inspires them?
  • humility and selflessness, and evil, sin, and pride
  • knowledge, and wisdom
  • what is god? christianity, spinoza/buddhism, hiduism, taoism and pantheism
  • faith as something reassuring
  • free will and determinism
  • redemption and salvation
  • suffering and misunderstanding
  • epistemology: what is the foundation of logic? does every epistemology making a negative claim contradict itself? what axioms do we start with? do we take in everything, or a subset?
  • desire
  • can we overcome confirmation bias?
  • what can we do? for the starving? the hurt? the egotistical?
  • interdependence and independence: is one an illusion?
  • do we have an essensce? why do we feel like we do?
  • morality/shoulds/"supposed to". origins and humanism
  • the nature of time. cosmological origins and the present (is time an illusion?)
  • evolution
  • the brain and consciousness
  • government and anarchy
  • originality and newness
  • naivete and optimism
  • sincerity
  • do people change? what causes people to change?

Sunday, August 17, 2008

One Rule

You may
grow
barter
buy
inherit
anything
except
time.